Want to make your housing stock greener, but you're stuck with a load of 1960s tower blocks? Fear not – they could fit perfectly into your sustainability agenda. Katie Puckett reports on how three towers spruced up their act
Tower blocks are not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the phrase "sustainable homes". The UK's 4000 residential towers have become a byword for all the housing failures of the past 50 years, in security and maintenance, allocations and poor-quality factory building. But in many cases, tenants have resisted council or housing association attempts to level their high-rise homes. They have proven that, with a little care and attention, they can have a lot more going for them than just the view.

As more and more troubled towers are transferred to associations, there's a pressing need to find creative solutions to their problems instead of knocking them down and starting again. The Housing Corporation is also putting on pressure to get to grips with these awkward giants. Its sustainable development strategy, released in June, warned that associations' sustainability record across the whole of their stock would be taken into account when allocating development grant.

In fact, high rises fulfil many of the aims of sustainability, broadly defined as balancing current social, environmental and economic needs with those of the future. They have a small footprint and their high densities can cut journey times and build communities.

But there are caveats to the multistorey comeback. Since the Sustainable Tower Blocks Initiative – a group of voluntary environmental organisations – published its first report in 2000, author Chris Church has watched the movement take hold. Although he is a great believer in the possibilities of tower blocks, he is under no illusions about the challenges: "If you want to green a tower block, you have to have the allocations policy right, the basic services right, the security right. If you haven't got a tower block that people want to live in, there's not a lot of point."

Ecohomes in the sky

Brompton House, which overlooks Liverpool’s Sefton Park, became the first high-rise refurbishment to be awarded a “pass” EcoHomes rating in June 2002, following a £3m refit. The block also received eight out of 10 in a National Home Energy Rating, which assesses how much heat is needed to keep a building warm and how much carbon dioxide it produces. Securing the EcoHomes standard, awarded by research body BRE, is challenging enough for new-build schemes, but making this 1960s tower block environment-friendly required even more ingenuity. Liverpool Housing Action Trust took on 67 towers in the area in 1993, but Brompton House is one of only 12 that will be left standing. Richard Tomkinson, the trust’s senior development programme manager, says: “There were considerable social and physical problems in some of the blocks, but this wasn’t the case in Sefton Park. There’s a fairly elderly tenant population and we wanted to keep the community together.” There is also little extra land for building near the park, and decontaminating brownfield sites in the city is, of course, expensive. So Liverpool Housing Action Trust decided to upgrade the five towers in Sefton Park, starting with Brompton House. The refit included injecting foam between the external and internal envelopes to secure and insulate the structure, installing double glazing and enclosing balconies and common landings. Bob Marais, block representative for Brompton House, says his fuel bills have dropped by a quarter since the refit. “I haven’t had my heating on since March. In winter, you’d have it on for half an hour and the rooms would stay warm for four or five hours.”

The garden centre

As caretaker of 16-storey Appletree Court in Salford, Greater Manchester, Betty Burton’s workroom looked out onto a wasteland of concrete and patchy grass. Now, she’s chair of the tenant management organisation, the grounds include a vegetable garden, wildlife garden, ponds, a lawn and a greenhouse – and that workroom is the kitchen of a cafe serving homegrown vegetables to residents and visitors. Since tenants took over the management of the block in 1996, empty flats have been replaced by a waiting list and enthusiastic tenant gardeners. There are even plans to start a business making garden ornaments, hanging baskets and window boxes. “My dream was just to make this a beautiful place to live,” says Burton. “But the younger people say, ‘Now we’ve got this, we can make money out of it’.” The tenant management organisation had to campaign for the right to use the land at the front of the tower, as it was earmarked by the council for new low-rise housing. After approaching what was then the Department of the Environment, tenants won the right to use two-fifths of it. Most of the initial funding – a £25,000 grant from the Department of the Environment – was spent replacing the poor soil. Now, though, the project has just been awarded a £10,000 grant from conservation charity BTCV to replace the decking in its Japanese garden. The cafe, staffed by New Deal workers, houses a National-Lottery-funded centre where residents can socialise or drop in for advice or training. In fact, Salford’s housing department uses the cafe as a venue for meetings. “It’s very cheap,” says Burton. “We’re not out to rip people off, we just want the place to be used.”

Sink estate rises again

A decade ago, the Holly Street estate in north London was synonymous with inner-city deprivation and poor housing management. But although the medium-rise “snake blocks” have been replaced with suburban-style family housing, Grange Court, the 20-storey tower block, is still standing tall with smart new cladding and enclosed balconies. It was saved partly to retain housing density and partly thanks to the fierce tenant loyalty. Hackney council spent £9.8m on the refurbishment, and the tenant management organisation has sorted out the security, maintenance and allocation problems that have earned tower blocks their poor reputation. Only people aged over 50 and their carers are housed there, there’s a 24-hour concierge and a new cleaning contractor has been brought in. “The cleaning was very poor,” says Ken Gilmour, chair of the tenant management organisation. “Now the pavement outside is washed down and the windows sparkle.” Unpopular narrow lifts have been converted to hotel-style versions with mirrors and a camera, and public areas have been carpeted; residents vacuum the corridor in between weekly visits by cleaners. There’s also a room on the ground floor where the block’s 300 residents can watch television or chat, bolstering the sense of community. “The idea is that nobody ever needs to feel lonely in this building,” says Gilmour. He loves the view from his west-facing 16th-floor flat, which takes in the London Eye and the City. The spacious flats in the tower were another reason why Grange Court’s residents wanted to stay. “Tower blocks don’t need to be pulled down provided they’re given the right treatment and the right communities are living there,” says Gilmour.

Source

Housing Today