Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 3: Fire

It's a wet, miserable day, and I'm just getting the fire going.

Fire seems so intrinsic to human existence that we always feel more alive, somehow, when we are in the presence of fire. I've no idea how different this feels for people who have experienced the unpleasant side of fire, but for me the need to respect it, as well as to be enlivened by it, is all part of the magic.

An old house cannot really be true to itself without fire. The Victorian house, to my mind, is designed around a few fairly simple principles:

1. Shelter from the weather - in its original form the Victorian house is not especially good at this, prone as it is to draughty windows, leaky roof/wall connections and damp cellars, but nevertheless it fulfils the basic human need for shelter;

2. Front - generally the Victorians provided you with a grand front door and entrance way and a prestigious front reception room, even if the rest of the house was thrown together from bits of old rubble and driftwood held together with sand and horsehair - so it's relatively easy to show off;

3. Fresh air - the Victorians were obsessed with fresh air, despite the fact that outside air was usually anything but clean, and inside buildings this reflected itself in the high ceilings and sliding sash windows, which enabled fumes and soot from gas lighting and wheezing children to rise to the tops of rooms and be whisked out thanks to bracing draughts;

4. Fire - chimneys form the structural buttressing of the Victorian house, most rooms had open fires for warmth, and coal was delivered via a chute in the cellar, burned at will in vastly inefficient dog grates, and ornate chimney pots celebrated the affluent disposal of dirty exhaust gases into the city air;

5. Servants - if you could afford servants, they'd do your cooking and laundry in a miniscule corner of your house, and sleep in the draughty attic. If you couldn't afford servants, you'd soon learn to live like them, discovering how small a space it was possible to cook and clean your own stuff in.

Modern needs may have forced us to rebel against the tiny kitchens and sculleries, but the other principles seem to hold true to what we enjoy about living in old houses. However, the challenge of heating these big, tall rooms has taken us through the 20th century's era of big, clunky central heating systems, style-free gas fires, electric panel heaters, and "living flame effects" and has now rekindled our love of fire, but in the cleaner, more controlled guise of enclosed stoves with recirculating combustion chambers that minimise smoke emissions and create much more efficient heating than open fires.

In this, our first - and mercifully mild - winter in this house, we've survived almost exclusively on our Morso woodfuel stove. It has worked flat out while there is no other heating in the house, and because we're only living on one floor, it has coped OK. But the really interesting thing has been the way that lighting and feeding the stove has defined the rhythm of our day-to-day lives now for almost five months, in a way that we hadn't anticipated. It takes planning to make sure the wood supply is adequate, time to clean and prepare the stove, and practice and experience to work out how best to set the fire and work it up from cold into a proper inferno, and keep it going until bedtime. You learn to look at a scrap of wood, or a bit of log, and gauge how well and for how long it will burn. You look at junk mail in a new light - "Look darling, someone's sent us some more firelighters!" And often it is much more fun to sit and watch the fire than to see what's on TV.

The question of how "green" a woodstove is is a difficult one - really it must depend on the management of the source of the wood. Burning bits of old floorboarding and stud walling is kind of using up embodied energy in the building, and that can only go on for so long - but it has helped us through our first winter. However, it is hard to imagine a house like this without a real fire in it. One of the most intriguing things, though, is seeing how many bits of wood it takes to keep you warm for an evening, and completely re-evaluating the unthinking act of turning a thermostat up or down on a modern heating system, or putting the washing machine on. Suddenly each turn of that dial becomes directly related to the idea that somewhere, a few miles away, an extraordinarily big and fearfully hot fire is burning to supply domestic energy. Being closer to the fire brings you face to face with the basic issue of how to keep warm, and I don't want to forget that when the central heating is back.

Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 2

A bit like watching a TV series on the internet, I need to cram some of these blog posts to catch up.

Episode 2 is a technical one, all about energy efficiency. Just as I started writing this I learned that the Government has decided to scrap its proposals to tie in compulsory energy efficiency measures to home improvements through Green Deal finance. The plan had been that if you extend your house - increasing the space that needs heating and/or cooling, you would have to install measures so that your net energy consumption was at least no bigger.

The energy efficiency imperative in old housing stock is unbelievably enormous. It accounts for almost half of the UK's carbon emissions, and because so much existing stock will still be with us in 50 or more years' time, it puts the whole national carbon reduction strategy into the realms of farce, unless powerful measures for retrofitting are introduced. Sure, it's not fair to force people to stump up for this out of their own pockets, and the Green Deal is one way to spare their pain, by using their energy bills in effect as a loan scheme to cover upfront costs. But surely, compelling people to take action on their energy consumption when undertaking home improvements they'd decided to do - and pay for - anyway, need not be controversial. It just needs to be well-managed.

But no - the weedy Government has backed down again. However, one thing you can be sure of is that people with big, old, draughty, single-glazed houses with minimal insulation and ancient heating systems will be getting on the energy-saving case themselves and, I suspect, in their droves. The simple push for this is rising energy costs: big old houses are just getting too expensive to heat - and gradually it will make them unaffordable to live in. So people like me, whether or not they care about sustainability, really have little choice now but to start doing it for themselves.

A friend quoted to me a few months ago a mantra that there are 3 steps to doing this properly: insulate [the house]; a-rate [the appliances]; generate [your own energy]. In that order. That's why it's been a bit frustrating that there was a clamour last year for solar PV generation on roofs, whilst it's still weirdly possible to buy new appliances that aren't at least A-rated, and schemes to get serious about insulation are not getting much attention. There are some good insulation schemes, but these mainly apply to cavity walls - which pre 1930s houses don't have - and lofts - which you may also not have if you instead have an attic room or loft conversion. So older houses fall into the category of "hard-to-treat" and get left behind by the incentive schemes. My insulation needs to go inside my rooms, swallowing architectural features like lava pouring through quaint villages at the foot of a volcano.

But there is a big plus-side to this! I'm refurbishing anyway, and because I'm not eligible for an incentive scheme I can work out how to do it in a way that I think is architecturally appropriate, I can test out different methodologies and I don't have to let in a stampede of quick-fit installers who've just moved over from fitting hatchet-job replacement windows to cash in on the latest incentive scheme. I should also be able to measure the energy improvements in terms of their effectiveness and cost.

For my house, I have a kind of energy-saving shopping list, and it's really designed to make the house as liveable as possible. These are the main measures I want to install.

Insulate:

convert all windows from single-glazing to low-E double-glazing;

internally insulate all internal walls and roof;

insulate the ground floors (one suspended timber floor and three cellars);

thermally separate the cellar to give a cold room (to reduce refrigeration energy) and a hot room (to provide a drying room and reduce laundry energy);

provide some acoustic insulation against the party wall to improve privacy.

A-rate:

fit a new central heating system with condensing boiler feeding underfloor heating to all floors;

ensure all appliances are as energy-efficient as possible;

(hopefully) install a water meter and smart-metering of gas and electricity;

design room layouts, materials etc to optimise control and comfort at lower ambient temperatures;

use a high-efficiency woodfuel stove for supplementary heat on ground floor.

Generate:

install mechanical heat recovery ventilation from warm, wet rooms;

consider solar water heating.

I'll go into more detail on some or all of these measures as the project progresses. Tune in next time...

AW.

Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 1

Well, it has been several months already since my wife and I bought a very delapidated, neglected Victorian house and started to resuscitate it, and this is the first time I've blogged about it. This is partly because I've been too busy, but also because I wanted to get a sense of how I really felt about it before I started writing anything down.

As often happens, it was quite an unexpected trigger that inspired me to start writing about the house. I was listening to a back episode of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, and one guest was the poet Paul Farley, who has been illuminating the mundane, suburban life of Northern towns. In the programme the discussion touched on one of his poems in which the cellar of a particular house is a living character who listens in, observes and comments on the goings on in the rest of the house.

This idea crystallised for me the reason why "doing up" an old house is such a personal adventure and one that can so easily be messed up. When you first take on an old place, it is a husk of the life that, until moments before you collect the keys, was being lived in it. If, as was the case with our house, the previous occupant had long since lost heart in the place, rarely bothering even to clean it, let alone tend to its underlying needs, you open the door on your first day to a sad, yellowed hangover. And your first instinct is just to rip it all out and start again.

The trouble is, ripping it all out is actually something you have to do quite carefully. It's a bit like using leaches to eat the diseased flesh from wounds, and making sure they don't start on the healthy stuff. An old house has usually been badly abused as well as neglected - previous shoddy workmanship is often more damaging than simple neglect. On top of that, there is now an urgent need to make old buildings like this much more energy efficient. This puts a lot of the architectural charm of sliding sash windows, high ceilings, plaster mouldings and fireplaces under real pressure - often to the extent that you have to destroy or bury those features and then make decisions about whether, and how, to replicate them.

But I think the biggest responsibility is to create a home that is beautiful, relevant and fully-functioning in the modern age, without either clinging nostalgically to everything that charms us about the Victorians, or becoming all "boutique hotel" about the place and having over-priced, overblown and under-usable details straight out of a lifestyle magazine. This is where a bit of time to reflect, and a sense of what Paul Farley was getting at with his cellar imagery, comes in. Because what we really need to do is to listen to the stories our house is telling us, and then to develop the next chapter. We need a way to discern which architectural features are fundamental to the house's character, and which can be altered in a spirit of progress. We need to prove that a house needn't be cold and draughty just because that's how it's always been, but that walls and floors needn't be completely straight and true either. And we need helpers, engineers and tradespeople who are also willing to listen to the house, and treat is part of our family, rather than just taking the "this is how it is done, so this is how we'll do it" school.

People often comment on how new-build houses lack character, compared to old ones. There are some technical reasons for this, to do with street layouts and the regulation, automation and standardisation of constructional details. You could argue that character comes from the element of educated guesswork that went into earlier generations of building. However, in much larger part I'm coming to learn that houses acquire character by telling the story of how they have lived, and of the previous lives that have been lived in them. So it's actually the adaptability of an old house that enables it to acquire character.

The first thing we did when we bought this house was to rip out the worst of the havoc that the previous occupant had left behind. This was not as cathartic as I had hoped. But the second thing we did was to have a drinks party for friends and neighbours; and suddenly we began to sense that this place was going to become home, and that it would be good.

The following day, we started the demolition.....

AW.

What the Dickens is Sustainability?

It would be remiss of me to let the bicentennial of Charles Dickens pass without a mention as one of history's great progressive voices. When I say progressive, I mean one who sees the role of public policy as being to tackle the needs of the have-nots, rather than to protect the privileges of the haves. It's also significant, in our evidence-obsessed age, that he made his point through the medium of fiction, full of caricatures and dramatic licence, rather than through a dry, factual presentation of the dismal, unfair and unhealthy society he saw around him.

At the "How to Plan for Nature" workshop in Hamburg recently, I was describing the move from a "conservative" approach to a "restorative" approach in nature policy. The conservative approach involves preserving the best of our natural assets, which is fine insofar as it goes, but results in those best bits becoming isolated and fragmented, and eventually declining, and any less-valued assets are allowed to decline anyway. The restorative approach attempts to reverse decline by enabling valued assets to grow, and also tackling deficit in other areas so that, over time, the net worth of our natural environment increases and degraded environments are renewed and nurtured.

It seems both inevitable and desirable that this paradigm shift takes place: it has been a long time coming, but is now increasingly enshrined in international policy on nature. Perhaps the terms "nature conservation" and "conservationist" will gradually be replaced in the lexicon by "restoration" and "restorationist", clunky though they may sound at present. Or perhaps, to we should try out the word "progressive"? Should we push the language of "progressive" environmental policies, in the sense of promoting the needs of degraded environments as a higher priority than protecting what is already well-protected?

Against this backdrop I was intriged to hear several discussions in the media this week about "Conservatism" in the sense of the ideological context of Conservative politics. I admit to a patchy historical knowledge here, but the underlying principle is that "not all change is good, and so some things should be conserved". A particularly interesting take on this came in Start the Week, where the outspoken writer Peter Hitchens identified Margaret Thatcher as distinctly non-Conservative and more extreme-liberal, and took the view that the UK's Conservative Party is no longer anything of the sort. Deregulation of the market certain seems liberal, or even neo-liberal, in that it simply favours those who can make money and sell things, regardless of their social class, education or connections.

What really interests me here is not the machinations of the UK Conservative Party, but what "conservatism" means in a bigger sense. If Thatcherism was not Conservative, but liberal, then are Liberals liberal, or progressive? Someone said, "If you want to see who has the power in a society, look who has the tallest buildings". The truth in this is self-evident and pithy: before the 19th century it was invariably churches that dominated city skylines, then these were dwarfed by the tall chimneys of factories, and more recently by skyscrapers consecrated to the banking gods. As an aside, in many UK cities the tallest buildings of the moment are hotels and apartment blocks, suggesting that sleeping is about the most powerful thing we've done since 1990. But more to the point, if "Conservatism" means conserving power in society for those who currently have it (the breaking of which is the driving force behind the Labour movement), then Thatcherism was about moving power away from left-wing trade unions. In Sheffield the former (empty) headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers may not be especially tall but it is certainly domineering. Thatcherism didn't really have a view on whom power would move towards, and to give the Iron Lady some credit she may have intended to move it towards 'liberals' like herself - but that's not how it turned out, because the free market took over. One way of looking at it is that the market saw a power vacuum and jumped in, and then established a new status quo that "conservatism" was all too ready and willing to protect.

So here are some challenging questions:

If economic downturn results in no tall buildings being built, does this mean there is also a power vacuum inherent in downturn?

If so, why does downturn seem to be a catalyst for "radical overhauls" rather than "improving things, but not throwing out the baby with the bathwater"?

Is a period of economic gloom therefore actually the perfect time to be articulating and pursuing environmentally progressive policy and not, as many would have us believe, a time when environment takes a back seat?

AW.