Rooftree

This blog has been rather neglected of late because I have been working on trying to start a movement called ROOFTREE. I have hinted at something similar in this blog before but I was galvanised into more direct action by a strange course of events.

I was doing some research on the history of the old Hull and Barnsley Railway and in particular Drewton Tunnels, a rather spectacular set of Victorian tunnels under the Yorkshire Wolds near Riplingham, in the East Riding. My research led me to a site called 28dayslater.co.uk, which is dedicated to the pastime of Urban Exploration. Urban Exploration is apparently the practice of exploring derelict buildings and associated sites.

I was staggered, literally staggered, to see how many of these derelict sites there are in the UK. Often large, publicly owned buildings, sometimes hospitals, with (presumably expensive) medical equipment still inside them. This set me thinking, and the result was what I call the Rooftree Letter, the text of which is below:

We have a country where some people are homeless. This is unacceptable. We have a country where some people who need it, cannot access affordable housing. This is unacceptable. We have a country where hundreds, maybe thousands, of sites are derelict, many of which feature large, substantial. public buildings which we, the taxpayers, own, in effect, and which are being allowed to deteriorate to the point of no return. Finally, we have a country where many bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and electricians, roofers and tilers are either now unemployed or on short time, as the credit crunch bites.

I would like to propose a solution to deal with all of the above. The Government, and/or the relevant local authorities, should compulsorily purchase these sites. They should then use any existing structures on the site to provide either accommodation and or core services to support a “settlement” in the grounds, based on the existing modular timber-framed prefabricated structures of the technology favoured by Walter Segal, to provide a source of low cost, affordable housing. The central core building could provide a local source of combined heat and power technology based on a combination of waste incineration and anaerobic digestion.

People have told me this is impossible. Too expensive, compared to building new houses on greenfield sites. That is as maybe, but “expensive” is a relative term. Does it take into account, for instance, the cost of having all of those unemployed builders, bricklayers, architects, draughtsmen, carpenters, roofers, plasterers, tilers, electricians, and plumbers? No, it does not.

Basically, my idea is this: you take the central building on the site and turn it into tenements to house people along the lines of those produced by the Victorian Architect HENRY ROBERTS and also the central building houses the communal waste incineration leading to CHP unit, the anerobic digester, the other communal facilities, and then around it you scatter these individual bungalows, modular timber framed buildings built by the Walter Segal method, which draw their heating and other services from the central building, enhanced by solar panels on the individual houses themselves. Each house gets a stake in the communal allotments which are laid out over any spare land left over which is too small to build on.

It seems to me that most of what Henry Roberts did would be consistent with building regs anyway, I would have thought that the major stumbling block would be cost in his using (for eg) slate for the floors etc. My idea is to start a *campaign* (doing what I do best, allegedly, pontificating and badgering people) to pressure the authorities into changing the building regulations on socially useful housing to make it easier to do this sort of development; to pressure the government to acquire these sites, many of which, I repeat, belong to us, the taxpayers and are currently standing empty, decaying, and prone to vandalism, some of them (the ex-NHS ones) still containing presumably valuable equipment, and many of them having extensive grounds, which could also be utilised; and to pressure the government and the authorities to provide the wherewithal, the seed capital, to allow these communities to come into being, on the grounds that they will eventually recoup the cost in rent and show a profit, and of course they will have the site on their books as an asset, owned for and on behalf of all of us; it would reduce pressures on social housing elsewhere in the system, and building on brownfield sites that would otherwise be derelict is much better than tearing up green fields and trees; and finally that it is socially useful to have all of the construction workers, brickies, electricians and joiners who would otherwise be drawing the dole, actually working.

We just need 1000 sites housing 63 people each, or 500 sites housing 126 people each, or 63 sites housing 1000 people each, and suddenly that figure of 63,000 homeless people in the UK last Christmas becomes much less daunting.

Now is the time, with the property market still depressed, for the government to step in and compulsorily purchase these sites. Say at £2M a site on average, that is £1BN. Small change, compared to what we have been chucking at the banking system.Rooftree is not a charity, not a company, it’s not an anything really. It’s a movement, in the same way that Solidarnocz was a movement. We don’t even have a web site unless someone wants to donate one to us. But what we do have, is a desire to build the new Jerusalem, one brick at a time, one site at a time, until there is no one left sleeping out in the cold.

Please join us. Go to the ROOFTREE Facebook Page or ROOFTREE Facebook Group, (enter “Rooftree in the search box) or sign our petition on the Number 10 web site (search under “Housing” or "Rooftree")

Anyway, that is what I've been doing. Just in case you thought I had been slacking or anything.