Warming up Victorian homes

Our homes can be very chilly - they leak heat thanks to poor insulation, gappy sash windows and old age - but there is a cure. Come and hear TV's Penney Poyzer talk at 1.15pm about tackling your home at our CLIMATE CHANGE AND ME free family festival on Saturday 11 October. Or better still join Antony Melville's workshop (at 12 and again at 2.45pm) on brilliant ways to make your Victorian terrace house warmer without making your carbon footprint soar.

Energy use in our homes is responsible for more than quarter of the country’s carbon emissions (another 26% coming from our food and our travel). In the home, we have on the one hand electrical gadgets and stuff, and on the other, comfort provided by space heating, hot water and cooking (from gas for most of us in London); and lighting.

Given that burning gas and generating electricity (unless it’s from renewables) generate greenhouse gases, in order to head off the risk of runaway global warming (that “tipping” word) all this energy use has to be reduced, so we produce 80 per cent less carbon emissions as soon as possible. (The government target is 2050, but it’s more urgent than that).

The old houses many people live in around Highbury were built with open fires - a system which did a very good job of drawing cold air into the house and sending the heat up the chimney, while leaving a small, hot area to huddle round.

Even the most basic central heating system is massively more efficient than that, but thre's a big hitch. At least £1 of every £3 we spend on gas is simply thrown away, because without insulation heat is lost through the roof, walls, windows, floor and outside doors. But recently it has been shown that Victorian homes can be retrofitted with insulation in the roof, on the walls, and under the floors, and with either secondary glazing or double glazed windows, with good draught-proofing, thus achieving reductions in energy use of 65 per cent or more. So your £3 bill comes down to £1, and the wastage to 33p.

The nearest example of such a retrofit is Sarah Harrison’s house in a conservation area in Tufnell Park, a 3-bed semi-detached house built in 1870. In the last couple of years she insulated the walls and floors with 10cm of wood fibre and double glazed the windows (with new wooden frames at the back of the house), and achieved a 75 per cent reduction in energy use.

In Highbury fields the architect Robin Nicholson lined the walls of his Georgian house (then in a state of dilapidation, and before the building was listed) with fibreglass insulation 4ins deep 30 years ago. Insulating inside the walls is a challenge for highly ornamented (and mostly listed) houses where part of the cornice would need to be re-made, and other elements such as dadoes replaced, but a thinner insulation called Spacetherm C is available (at a price) which would be little thicker than the plaster it replaces.

I believe we can develop a low-carbon plan for each terrace in Highbury. We can make a plan for one house that sets out the measures needed to achieve 80 per cent emissions reductions and use that as a basis for the rest of the terrace, which were after all built as repeats of the same plan. This work will become essential for maintaining the value of our houses in the low carbon age, which is approaching fast.

I am seeking 50 homeowners to join together and apply to the government at the end of this year to be a Green Neighbourhood, which means we could get a bit of grant money for insulating older houses. I am calling this the VICTERI project – that’s a misspelt acronym for the Victorian Terrace Energy Reduction Initiative, exploring ways of making Victorian streets into low carbon communities. I don’t wish to exclude Georgian houses, but there’s an awful lot more Victorian housing than Georgian.

If we start in Highbury we can then go Islington-wide, and then London-wide – we could make ourselves a “tipping point” for low carbon living in old housing stock.

If you’d like to be one of the 50 to make a Green Neighbourhood in Highbury, please contact me at antonymelville@dsl.pipex.com or (020) 7607 1540, and I’ll come round and talk about what you need to do for your house. Or come to my workshop at the CLIMATE CHANGE & ME festival and hear some more about what could happen to transform the street you live in.