Britain’s first zero-carbon retrofit was a Victorian semi-detached house transformed into a home with no energy bills for the architect John Christophers and his family. Leading one reporter to declare: “I’ve seen the future — and it’s in Birmingham.”
More than a decade later I walk into the same house. I can confirm that, yes, the future is still in Birmingham. But this time it is not because of one ground-breaking house. It is because this home is part of a grassroots movement to retrofit an entire neighbourhood — and could be a blueprint for a retrofit revolution all over Britain.
On a sunny winter’s day in November, Christophers leads me through his home’s airtight lobby (an “absolute must” to stop heat escaping as you enter, he says) to the sun-drenched kitchen where lunch awaits. His wife, Jo Hindley, a former midwife, is whipping up homemade soup and salad for local residents gathered around the table.
They are part of a team of local volunteers working to cut fuel bills and carbon in their Birmingham suburb of Balsall Heath. Since the summer of 2022 they have gone door to door to 4,900 homes to ask people if they want insulation, solar panels and other energy efficiency upgrades. The results are impressive: 1,400 signed up and 649 homes have been retrofitted within a year. The cost for each household? Nothing at all.
You may think this is a “nice, feelgood community” story, but it is not, says Imandeep Kaur, the co-founder and director of Civic Square community organisers. For Britain to become net zero by 2050, two homes must be retrofitted every minute, according to UK Green Building Council, an industry body. “We are so far away from that it’s almost a laugh,” Kaur says. “But everywhere we look, nobody says, ‘I don’t want a warmer, safer, cheaper-to-run home.’ Nobody.”
Top-down government and industry schemes have been marred by low uptake, Kaur says. For example, almost 80 per cent of the £1.5 billion green homes grant, which promised homeowners up to £10,000 for insulation and heat pumps in 2020, was never spent. In September the prime minister rowed back on key net zero targets, loosening the gas boiler phase-out and dropping requirements for landlords to insulate properties to higher standards.
As big programmes fail, Kaur argues that community-led projects like Retrofit Balsall Heath “are showing how you really do this at the scale and pace we need to locally”. She likens it to the community-led scheme that inspired the NHS: in 1948 Aneurin Bevan, the minister for health, used the model of a medical aid society established in 1890 by the people of Tredegar, his home town in south Wales, to provide free healthcare for the nation.
“Over the next three to four years I think you’ll see [community-led retrofit] going from the edge to the centre,” Kaur says.
Christophers won’t take credit for Retrofit Balsall Heath, to the degree that he and Hindley are reluctant to be photographed individually. It is, instead, a story of many coming together. That includes Birmingham city council, volunteers who transform unloved public spaces into urban orchards, the city’s first solar church and two local mosques.
Sheikh Nuru Mohammed, who leads one of the mosques, says most residents had never heard the word retrofit. “Initially people were sort of hesitant. We had to google it and try to find out, but he [Christophers] explained it better than Google.” He visited Christophers’s zero-carbon home (“the best source of inspiration”) and was convinced that helping the families who can least afford it to insulate their homes would “do a lot of good”.
The imam is a forward thinker whose mosque, the Al Abbas Islamic Centre, had been the first in the UK to become a Covid vaccination centre. Just like with the vaccine, Mohammed says, you must first build awareness that retrofitting homes will “save costs and save lives”.
“When we come together as a community we can take this to the next level,” Mohammed says.
Anji Page is one of the residents who now has a warmer home. Last winter the homelessness outreach worker heated her two-up, two-down Victorian terrace with an open fire in the living room because her broken boiler took six months to fix. “Two of my windows were broken and stuck open. It was freezing.”
Under the scheme Page got new windows, a new front door, loft insulation and extractor fans for ventilation in the bathroom and kitchen. “It has made a massive difference,” she says.
The scheme offered each home up to £10,000 in upgrades, including insulation, solar panels, new windows or doors and — in two cases — even heat pumps. It was free of charge for homeowners, while private landlords had to cover a third of the cost.
Funding came from a £7 million pot secured by Birmingham city council under the government’s (now defunct) green homes grant. The council targeted two areas where community groups have built up retrofit momentum.
A grassroots campaign spread the word, with residents learning about retrofitting from their neighbours. In Balsall Heath volunteers from Civic Square and MECC Trust, a respected local advice charity, went from house to house. Local school children even helped to develop a board game, Climania, about retrofitting their area.
“This ground-up approach led to us far exceeding the number of applications that we had ever managed to achieve in previous schemes,” says Jayne Francis, the cabinet member for housing at Birmingham city council.
The council secured funding to retrofit 700 homes in Balsall Heath. More than 1,400 households applied. In some streets 95 per cent of residents signed up to get their homes surveyed for the scheme.
“We have learnt many lessons but the biggest one is the importance of a community-led approach,” Francis says. “The success of projects such as this requires trust.” She adds that working in a more collaborative way with the local community builds that trust to deliver projects that meet residents’ needs.
Although Birmingham city council effectively admitted bankruptcy in September, the project funding was unaffected as it came from central government. The council appointed the private contractors Acivico and Dodd Group to project manage the scheme and do the work.
Successful retrofitting, Kaur says, is about “understanding the street as a system”. If residents on a street retrofit their homes separately, “it could be that contractors will come out 40 different times”. By working street by street — rather than house by house — you can pool resources, which can go further, Kaur says.
A few blocks away, retrofitted homes back on to a once neglected pocket park where residents have planted fruit trees and vegetables, with support from the local charity Fruit and Nut Village. In Ladywood, another Birmingham neighbourhood, neighbours have worked together to not only retrofit homes but also set up street composting systems.
Christophers and Hindley take me to Melrose Avenue, a street where most of the redbrick Victorian terraces have signed up to be retrofitted. A watercolour artwork sketches out a vision of what it would look like once their front gardens have been transformed too — into a shared green space with fruit and nut trees.
As neighbours and campaigners gather around big pots of Hindley’s homemade soup, she says: “The retrofit scheme is not just about the built environment. It’s about the neighbourhood, it’s about green spaces, it’s about community. It’s about hearts and minds and a whole way of thinking, much more than fabric. It all fits together.”
The campaigners are not stopping on their doorsteps, but fuelling a nationwide movement. In July 2022 Kaur and Christophers held a festival, Retrofit Reimagined, in a tent in Birmingham. This year it grew to five events, including in London, Bristol and Glasgow.
At its heart is a powerful question: “What if the climate transition and retrofit of our homes and streets were designed, owned and governed by the people who live there?”
Where can you start to retrofit your neighbourhood? Check if your area has a local retrofit project. Search the map of community energy projects at communityenergyengland.org and contact the National Retrofit Hub, says Sara Edmonds, the hub’s co-director.
The Energy Savings Trust website and local councils offer advice on how to reduce your energy demand. Increasingly local not-for-profits such as Cosy Homes Oxfordshire, People Powered Retrofit in Manchester, and Ecofurb and Selce in London offer one-stop shop surveys to map out and manage a step-by-step plan on how best to retrofit your home.
“Ultimately retrofitting is about trust. You need to trust people because this is your home, the most personal space that we all have. If you have a trusted source of support, it makes everything so much easier. And that was the success of Retrofit Balsall Heath Deep: deep levels of trust across the community through existing channels.”
