The First Noel
Following decades of proposals being put forward and then abandoned, the iconic Trent Basin estate in Nottingham was conceived as an exemplary eco friendly housing estate, focusing especially on energy efficiency. The development was intended to make best use of the site next to the River Trent, and to regenerate and bring modern design to a neglected and deprived area of the city. Although there were considerable problems along the way, the estate is now the most important part of the new Waterside neighbourhood, which has thousands of new houses and flats as well as community and commercial uses, all of which are well-integrated into the city and continue to demonstrate innovation in sustainability. For example, it has low car use with many community initiatives to encourage healthy and sustainable behaviours. It has been hugely successful in influencing the design of new housing across the country.
(Imaginary review of Trent Basin in 2045)
This somewhat flattering description is my idea of how TB might be seen in 20 years time. I do think it will be successful despite the teething pains that I often go on about in my blog. But could the estate be improved? Of course it could, and I’m interested in whether real history can help understand how.
In some ways Trent Basin is quite like a Victorian (or maybe Georgian) neighbourhood. There are terraces, with no or small front gardens and generally three storeys high. Usually no driveways or garages (but parking is provided at the back of the houses and on street). The layout is of course to comply with planning requirements, particularly on density, which have become more stringent in an attempt to make new housing more sustainable. It’s all about cars really – in the second half of the last century huge efforts were made to make sure that new houses had room to park a car or two (or more), resulting in car-dominated developments.
Nowadays that tends to be frowned upon – although ‘adequate parking’ is still provided in the vast majority of new developments in this country. As an exemplary sustainable development, TB has relatively few parking places – one per house plus a few for visitors. Of course this lack of parking did not stop TB from becoming quite car dependent as, I have argued (for example, here), public and active transport have not yet been brought up to a level that provides real alternatives.
In London the opposite happened – new Victorian housing was predicated on the availability of relatively cheap fares on newly constructed railway lines. So the houses were built around the new railway stations and special ‘workers’ fares’ allowed cheap commuting. Later buses, Underground, then rented or hire cars and bikes, created transport choice. There is very little privately controlled space for car parking. But all this hasn’t stopped residents from buying cars, and most streets are lined with parked cars most of the time. You couldn’t really say that we’re all car dependent though, there are so many other options.
Traditional Victorian houses are still very much in demand. They were generally built on a similar layout, two/three up, two down plus a kitchen or scullery back addition to meet 19th century daylight and drainage requirements, with a toilet out the back. Bathrooms were added later usually replacing the bedroom above the kitchen. Some are slightly more grand with a wider frontage, deeper front garden, bigger windows and a corridor through to the kitchen. Others, like ours, are quite basic really but presumably were considered a step up by the working families moving in at the turn of the 20th century. There are smaller and more basic ones still, such as those with the front door opening straight into the living room, central staircases and no space for bathrooms upstairs. However, they did provide ‘suitable’ housing for an influx of working class people into Tottenham – which had been, until the late 19th century, a genteel middle class village.
Close to us is the Noel Park Estate in Wood Green, much of which was built in the late 19th/early 20th century as a model estate for workers. It was built by the Artisans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company, basically a housing developer, and was named after Ernest Noel MP who was Chairman of the Company. It had five classes of houses, with subtle differences in size and design, ranging from those intended for the established respectable working classes to those they thought were less worthy (or less able to pay the rent). They all had toilets accessed from back yards, and I’m guessing the scullery doubled up as a bathroom. Parks, a school, churches, community hall and later shops were also built – though no pubs, which were considered too tempting for the workers. It was located in Wood Green because of the excellent transport links in the form of the adjacent Green Lanes station on the new railway from Seven Sisters to Palace Gates (now defunct, but is a project in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy to be rebuilt underground as part of Thameslink 2).
The estate has had a chequered history. The Company suffered all sorts of financial problems, and Noel Park wasn’t completed until the 1930s, got seriously bombed in WW2, and was passed to the local council in 1966. It had become quite run down by the time that ‘Right to Buy’ started to have an effect in the 1980s. Today its attractive, well built houses in tree-lined streets are quite desirable, and it has the usual mix of owner occupiers, private and public sector tenants. I don’t think anyone really knows which class of house they live in now (probably except estate agents…).
While today developers would be affronted by the idea of different classes of houses, in fact the price mechanism works in the same way, and developers are very careful to build houses that look aspirational, even if in reality they are small and not that well constructed. New developments can easily get a bad reputation, which is one of the reasons that developers usually don’t want to do anything different. It’s safer to stick with a tried and tested model. But the Artizans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company did everything new at Noel Park – a planned suburb, building houses not flats (which had already been pioneered by the Peabody Trust), in an untested area of London, and including social ideals in their project. OK, they did have considerable financial difficulties, but they survived for almost 100 years, and the model Noel Park estate definitely influenced other local builders (our house resembles a Third Class one).
Similarly, Blueprint at TB have really started something different, a sustainable style of estate housing that is practical to build, pioneering a public/private partnership development model and developing a long-abandoned brown field site as the centre of a new neighbourhood. It is all intended to change the mindset that encourages developers and housebuyers to want detached ‘executive’ mansions that are car dominated and waste space and energy.
The lessons to be learned from Noel Park are obvious I think – build at a relatively high density near accessible, affordable transport, ensure there are amenities alongside the houses (not some unspecified time later), and don’t let your preconceived ideas about social class and user preference influence the houses you build!
Wildlife (nature) update – my legacy in Tottenham will be the tree I got under the ‘Trees for Streets’ scheme. It’s now been planted outside our house and I have to remember to water it in the dry weather. Needless to say, I haven’t had to water it yet.
The Big Smoke versus eco housing estate
Posted on by ecohousepioneer
London certainly isn’t the Big Smoke now – no smog for years! I moved to London with my partner 18 months ago, and I’m really enjoying experiencing what a big city has to offer. The most obvious difference from living in Trent Basin, a new eco housing estate in Nottingham, where we previously lived, is the density of development and population, so everything you need is available nearby, and of course the transport. Many of my blogs about Trent Basin focused on the perception, if not the reality, of its isolated position, with barriers to movement caused by the location in an industrial area, the River Trent, the railway and main roads. Here there are no such barriers, and as I am old enough and lucky enough to get a Freedom Pass, I can travel across London for free on virtually all forms of public transport. I try to make the most of this!
I also moved from a brand new house on a brand new estate (we were the first people to move in) to a Victorian terraced house in an established residential area. The Trent Basin house was low energy, with high levels of insulation, and had the benefit of several community energy initiatives – though perhaps this was not so much of a benefit in reality. I realise this is subjective, but to me new houses lack character, whatever that is. The London house is old and draughty, expensive to run and needs repairs every 5 minutes, but I can’t help but like it anyway. It’s that inexplicable character thing. One of the blog subjects I will try to do is a comparison between the energy costs of the two houses, although this has been made more difficult by the huge rise in energy prices in the last couple of years.
While TB is a completely new neighbourhood, here the houses are mainly Victorian, Edwardian or Thirties, although there are a few modern infills. However, there is a lot of redevelopment under way and the whole area is teetering on the edge of being regenerated (or gentrified, depending on your point of view). It’s been like that for some years, and you find trendy new bars and coffee houses side by side with old Tottenham betting shops, Turkish barbers and international grocery stores. There is a big range of shops and services, the choice is huge. This contrasts starkly with TB, which has few shops and services within a 15 minute walk.
Neighbours in both Trent Basin and in Tottenham have been and are very friendly. Given the stereotype that the North and Midlands are inherently friendly places and London is not, this was a bit of a surprise. In both places, almost as soon as we moved in, neighbours introduced themselves, chatted in the street and gave us hints and tips about living in the area. Both places have a diverse community in terms of age and nationality, though I suspect there are higher levels of deprivation here.
We live close to two great parks, both with children’s playgrounds, outdoor gyms, cafes, and sports areas. One has a lake, the other an Italian rose garden. The parks are always busy, especially on sunny days, even in winter. They are both well within 10 minutes walk from our house. Trent Basin lacks usable local open space, though it does now have a riverside walk to a fantastic and beautiful country park at Colwick, which was, and probably still is, underused except in summer. I think this shows that it’s great to have a lovely park that is 20 minutes walk away, but what you really need are smaller open spaces that you can walk to in 5 minutes. Residents at TB have created a community garden which has proved invaluable as a green oasis with many events held there. But it needs more. As with many things at TB, more open space is promised in future phases of development.
While the parks around here seem to be relatively well-maintained, much of it by volunteers, the streets are terrible. Litter and fly-tipping are huge problems, and while the council picks up waste and litter as soon as they are made aware of it, the litterers and fly-tippers just come back and do it again. They even dump stuff next to a sign that says ‘Warning: £100 fine for fly-tipping’. While there were problems at TB, it was nothing like this, and it’s likely the offenders are locals. The council seems to be quite efficient at collecting our waste bins but they only do it once a fortnight – maybe it’s partly because of that.
Because of its isolation, we were rather car dependent living at TB. We still have the car, and remain car dependent for a few purposes, but I cycle a lot more, and because we live in a Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN – which I strongly support) the streets around are quiet, and people can walk along the street without worrying about traffic. Kids can even play in the street. But the pavements here are just as badly maintained as they are around TB, and the lack of dropped kerbs is shocking. People in wheelchairs or mobility scooters have to travel much further than they should just looking for somewhere to cross the road. This has been tackled within TB, with footpaths at the same level as roads (but it does create another problem – cars being parked on walkways). The LTN comes up for review this spring so this may be another subject for the blog!
We are relatively far from Tube stations (Turnpike Lane on the Piccadilly Line and Seven Sisters on the Victoria Line) and the new Weaver Overground Line, but there is a local bus that goes to all the stations if you can’t face the 15-20 minute walk. Other buses go to nearby shopping and leisure areas like Wood Green, Crouch End and Walthamstow, as well as into Central London, if you want to sit on a bus for an hour or more – London buses go everywhere but are really slow! This is a massive range of options compared to TB, where there is only one bus route serving the area. When I left this was at a 30 minute frequency with no buses in the evenings or Sundays – I think it has improved since then, I certainly hope so!
In future blogs I plan to focus in on topics like energy, LTNs or walking and cycling routes, and do a few comparisons, with the aim of highlighting ideas to improve both new and existing housing and local areas. Obviously it’s just my personal opinion, though I will research specific topics when possible. I’ll try to be fair to both places, as both have their pluses and minuses, but I’m hoping there’ll be some interesting and useful ideas emerging. Please let me know in the comments what you think, and also if you have any other proposals for topics I could investigate and write about – based on the new development/traditional housing area themes I’ve tried to outline here.
Wildlife update – we now have a cat called Reggie and he counts as wildlife because he was a stray living in a friend’s garden. He seems to have settled in well to being a house cat and now runs the place, including bossing it over the local foxes, squirrels, magpies, pigeons and other cats – as well as us.
Ex Eco House Pioneer 