Eco Bollocks Award: The Living Wall

Back in June when I visited the BRE Onsite exhibition, I saw not one, but three examples of Green or Living Walls on display. Having never seen one before anywhere, I was immediately suspicious. Here are some of the photos I took.

For those remaining in blissful ignorance, a living wall is an upmarket version of a trellis with clematis or honeysuckle growing over it. Instead of a few slats of timber, you have to create a stainless steel grid screwed or bolted onto the façade. And instead of a bit of judicious watering of an evening during dry spells, these living walls come supplied with their own self-irrigating systems.

OK, it’s not exactly designed for the domestic market, but it does sort of strike you as an invention the world really doesn’t need.

But I didn’t think anything more about it until alerted this morning to this story which appeared in the Evening Standard about a living wall in Islington that’s gone kaput and is now a dead wall. Because the irrigation system didn’t work. How surprising is that?

So I thought it would be a good time to offer it an Eco Bollocks Award. Haven’t done one for a while and this seems to me to be a pearl.

Should Barratt be rescued?

Rumours in the City have it that Barratt will soon be coming cap in hand with a rights issue. It wants to be baled out of its debt mountain. If it happens, then expect a flurry of activity from the other quoted housebuilders who, with the notable exception of Berkeley, all seem to be sinking in debt that they can’t service. They are all waiting on an upturn in the housing market to enable them to get back to business as usual, get building and start raking in the profits once more.

If Barratt was a single householder, it would have been repossessed by now. “Behind on the mortgage payments, are we? Well, you’ve got two weeks to get out.”

But of course the UK housebuilders are collectively too large to be repossessed, so the banks don’t dare pull the plug. For a start, there would be almost no one around to snap up all the land which would be sold off, and this would put further downward pressure on prices, which the banks fear as much as anyone.

But what if the fabled upturn fails to materialise? What if the way things are now is how it’s going to be from now on? Maybe this is what a stable housing market looks and feels like? Instead of forever looking for signs of whether house prices are going up or down, just accepting the fact that they really don’t change that much from year-to-year and learning to live with the consequences.

One of which would be that we wouldn’t need cash-hungry housebuilders anymore.

New Homes Too Small

News that CABE has found that new homes are too small will come as a surprise to no one at all. We’ve long known that the UK builds the smallest new homes in Europe. As there are no minimum space standards set out in the building regs or the planning conditions, why on Earth would we expect anything else?

And unlike the terraced homes that the Victorians built (which were also too small), there is no obvious way of improving the new homes we are now building.

The really uncomfortable question isn’t being asked here by CABE. Which is: were these small homes being built to satisfy a genuine need or were they a credit-fuelled gamble on rising house prices?

Or to put it another way, it didn’t matter that the bottom rung of the housing ladder was so small that you couldn’t actually get your foot on it, just so long as it was there.

Prince Charles v Whitehall

I watched Prince Charles’s Dimbleby lecture last Thursday. In it, he argued that economic growth had hit the buffers and that the future lay in sustainable development. Nothing new there; it’s standard green thinking.

However, it seems to have hit a raw nerve in the rest of the Establishment. Yesterday, the Times carried reports from “senior Whitehall sources” saying basically that the Prince was misguided and that his vision was fatuous. The question is, why should a senior Whitehall source be minded to offer up this stuff to the Times?

The Whitehall growth monkey has some very strange observations to make.

“Within its core, represented strongly in organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, environmentalism still has an ideological greenness that does not like the way we live and does not believe this is what creates fundamentally decent society. That continues to infect the way they think about the changes that we need, so in that sense it is fundamentally wrong.”

Look at the way he uses the word “infect?” Is he worried, or what?

He goes on: “We are aiming to cut emissions by a third in the next 10 years and then by 80% in the next four decades. These things are not happening because the population has had a green psychological transformation,” he said.

“If that were true, we’d never get anywhere, we’d never have got rid of slavery or brought in seatbelts or abolished hanging. No social change is force-driven by mass psychological change. It is about government leading and people changing accordingly.”

Is he right? Reading between the lines I think he’s hinting that the Metropolitan Elite fashion and the proles are then corralled into changing their behaviour. He could have mentioned the ban on smoking in public places as a more recent example. But what if the Metropolitan Elite decides that we can’t go on pursuing endless economic growth because it’s fucking up the environment? What would the Whitehall mandarins do then? Or do the Whitehall mandarins somehow control the Metropolitan Elite, and hence the government?

Everybody knows that green living involves a bit of hair-shirting, but then so does having a recession every ten or twenty years. The reason the green arguments have such resonance at the moment is that the orthodoxy of economic-growth-at-all-costs has imploded and is failing to deliver the promised goods.

And I think the reason Whitehall is worried this time is because the government finances are in such a mess that a return to economic growth is the only way they can be baled out, and even then it will take 20 years or more. But what if economic growth refuses to come back? What if we have hit the buffers this time?

Crystallising Planning Permission

One of the more intriguing questions I got asked at the Sandown Park Homebuilding & Renovating show last weekend was “How do we go about ensuring our planning permission doesn’t run out.”

The couple asking me were from nearby Sutton and they seemed fairly knowledgeable about the topic and had heard that:
• planning permission doesn’t last forever
• unless you make a start on the building works, in which case the planning permission is crystallised for all time.

I’m not actually sure that crystallised is recognised as kosher planning jargon, but it makes sense to me. Anyway, essentially their information is correct. But as so often happens it begs a whole series of follow-on queries.

How long does planning permission last? It used to be five years, but the government in its wisdom reduced this to three years back in 2005. The reason for this was to prevent developers stockpiling land — something incidentally which the developers denied doing deliberately. It was never meant to hit householder’s extensions but bureaucracy has a habit of scything down all in front of it.

The irony is that the credit crunch has wrought havoc with many development plans and there are now loads of 3-year planning permissions granted back in the boom years which haven’t been built and are about to expire. No one is stockpiling land – they just haven’t got any money!

How do you crystallise planning permission? You need to make a start on site. There is nothing in the planning guidelines to define what a start consists of, but it is generally accepted that it means having completed the foundations (or at least some of them). Everybody knows this, but you’ll have great trouble getting a planning officer to confirm this to you. Which was exactly the experience of my Sutton couple, which is why they were asking me this query.

Their story got even more bizarre as they explained it in greater depth. It turned out that they were wanting to build an extension to an already existing extension. The existing extension had been done under Permitted Development Rights but the new work would exceed the limits set by these rights. Hence they had gone to the trouble of applying for planning permission two years ago. They didn’t want to have to re-apply, so they were wondering what they needed to do to crystallise the permission. You see, they thought the existing extension was Gerry built and were considering knocking it all down and building the new improved extension from scratch. But then again, maybe not – maybe the existing extension could be adapted.

Can you see the problem? What is the point making a start on an extension when you don’t yet know quite how it is going to be built?

What I suggested to them was that they dug down at the corner of the existing extension and exposed the foundations to see if they were adequate. And at the same time, ask the Building Inspector round to see what they were doing and to ask his opinion. In doing so, they would have made a record of having made a start.

I think that will suffice. But in truth I am not sure, because there are no written guidelines. It seems they may well end up with a small hole outside their back door which may be there for some time — like the big developers, they also hadn’t got enough money at the moment to undertake this work.

After they moved on, I went into grumpy mode. It just seems such an absurd situation, doesn’t it? People having to dig holes in the garden to satisfy some stupid town hall planning policy. This wasn’t what planning permission was meant to be about…..but it’s what we’ve ended up with.

Heated towel rails

Lolli, my favourite Icelandic plumber, has pointed out that my section in the Bible on heated towel rails needs updating. He’s right. The mere ten lines I devote to the topic is very 1990s in both content and pricing.

It’s somewhat amazing to reflect on just what has happened to the towel rail market. It’s exploded. And at the same time, its sort of disappeared. Back in the 1980s, a heated towel rail was seen as a bit of an indulgence, an upmarket option for people wanting to throw money at a bathroom. The name everyone conjured with then was Zehnder: a Zehnder towel rail was white and it had a dinky little collapsible rail which you could use to hang your towels over. Other people, notably Myson, did towel rails, but they didn’t have extendible bits – they were basically just radiators designed to hang towels over.

Shoot forward to 2009 and there are now hundreds of designs to choose from dozens of manufacturers. Zehnder are still very much a top end option, although the plastic pull out bits seems to have gone by the wayside – I suspect they broke too easily. Wickes sells 11 different designs, varying in price from £70 to over £500. And there are several internet outlets which are easily Googled. The usual brand names all produce towel radiators: Stelrad, Quinn (formerly Barlo), Brugman, Myson, Acova (formerly Worcester), Aeon, Bisque. Plus now there are specialist companies that have sprung up, such as the Radiator Company and Radiating Style.

In fact, several radiator companies make no distinction between heated towel rails and ordinary radiators. They are, afterall, just radiators that you stick on the wall, which happen to be a slightly unusual shape.

But it’s not quite that simple. Because for one thing, you often want a towel rail to work to a different beat to your normal radiators. You may not want the towel rad to come on at the same times, or you may want it to work outside the heating season. As a result, you see towel rads with electric heating modes. Indeed, you can also find some which only operate using electricity – including some made of glass, would you believe.

Another option is to plumb them into a separate circuit so that they come on when the hot water is heated, rather than the space heating. This can work well, but it can also be a real waste of heat as it takes that much longer to heat the hot water and there is no knowing that the hot water heating times are better suited than your space heating times.

Towel rads are available in many different sizes. The larger they are the more heat they give off: small ones tend to emit around 300W. Large ones, anything up to 1kW, which is probably rather more heat than you would need in a small bathroom. Prices vary enormously. The cheapest are made of white-painted steel, next comes chrome plated, then stainless steel, then chrome, then brass, if you can find one. Cheap makes — you can pick them up for around £60 off eBay. A big brass one can cost you over £1500.

Final question. Do you actually need one? Well, it’s a good idea to have heating in a bathroom. We get cold when we are naked and wet. But you don’t actually have to have a dedicated towel radiator. If you are a slob, you can just chuck a towel over a chair and it will still dry out if there is some heating in the bathroom. And a lot of people like to fit underfloor heating in bathrooms, esp. electric mats. So, no, you don’t need one. But nevertheless, you might want one.