Today there are thousands upon thousands of houses lying empty – nearly three quarters of a million in England alone, where at the same time there are so many families who are in need of homes. In the Midlands, North East and North West, there are streets of derelict Victorian terraces; boarded up, their roofs stripped of lead, the elements slowly doing their destructive work. In the past few years, 16,000 period terraces have been bulldozed to the ground and only 3,000 new homes have been rebuilt to replace them.
Saving Terraced Houses
This problem is being looked at Save Britain's Heritage. They have asked the architects Mark Hines to find a solutions to make these houses desirable and suitable for today's modern lifestyle.
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| Mark Hines Saving Terraced Houses Project |
The changes involve the additional of extra roof and floor insulation, LED lighting and a new boiler. These will become low-energy low-bill homes and will cost considerably less than building a new house.
He says the beauty of this solution is that because streets of period terraces – some several hundred houses long – are all identical, it would be simple and cost-effective to refurbish entire streets en masse.
The extensions are made from timber frames filled with a lime and hemp mixture. Hemp has a high thermal mass, so is an excellent eco-building material and grows extremely fast, sucking up carbon dioxide as it grows. Its potential as a low-cost green building material has led to hemp making a comeback to British agricultural land, with more than 3,000 acres, mostly in East Anglia, now under cultivation.
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