Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
'Thrive in Construction' is the only podcast that delves into the personal journeys of sustainability leaders and innovators in the construction industry across the UK. Our show differentiates by offering unscripted, passion-fueled conversations that go beyond the buzzwords to the heart of what's driving the industry forward. It's tailored for aspiring professionals, seasoned experts, and anyone with a keen interest in the sustainable evolution of construction. We're here at a time when the call for sustainable development is not just a trend, but a societal imperative, empowering listeners to build a career that contributes to a greener future.
Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
Ep. 80 Why Legacy Thinking Is the Missing Piece in Sustainable Architecture
Most developments are built to sell fast, but what happens when you design for the next 500 years instead? Jerry Tate, founder of Tate+Co Architects, reveals why a legacy mindset changes every decision in the design process.
In this episode, Jerry unpacks how long-term ownership, regenerative principles, and human-centred design can transform housing, universities, and public spaces. He explains why short-term profit thinking limits sustainable progress and how to build places that last.
You’ll learn:
• The financial and social benefits of long-term ownership models
• How to integrate nature into high-density urban spaces
• What “regenerative” means beyond net zero
• The barriers stopping mass adoption of sustainable materials
• Examples of projects delivering value across generations
This is a masterclass in thinking beyond the next quarter and designing for the next century.
If you want to see our other insightful podcasts, click here:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOHI_yaqB2U8KWbsfJDPCoYEfOh-TTnip
Find us on:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dDkxLWZ25nT0krYWaTiIT
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thrive-in-construction-with-darren-evans/id1726973152
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTrzqei7gttB8WB5wM6hUpw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/thrive-in-construction-podcast/
Our Website: https://darren-evans.co.uk/
Links:
Jerry's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-tate-7b69354/
Tate+Co: https://tateandco.com/
There's an anxiety as an architect I think Particularly architects really because they're kind of in many ways the protagonist of forming the thing, if that makes sense. They don't set the project up that's developers and funders and they don't build the building that's contractors but they're key about kind of form-making and creating what this thing is. And architects are also kind of slightly programmed through their education to always want to do the right thing. You know there's kind of ethics behind. So, particularly in kind of like an era of kind of environmental crisis, you know, where there's clearly climate change, there's clearly biodiversity loss, there's clearly kind of a bit of a well-being crisis as well, you know architects have this worry about is what they're doing going to help? All of that, you know, and so really wanting to tread lightly, if you like, in terms of what you do, even if the scale of the project is large, you want the scale of your impact in negative terms to be as small as possible. But then there's a sort of flip side of that which is and actually this is something I think is really important is to really dwell on the flip side. The flip side is you know, every project in our office we review, every live project. We review at least once a month and one of the key things we do it's a really simple form. It's what are the positive outcomes for carbon and energy, nature and biodiversity and people in communities? And we don't actually advertise that too much, we don't show the clients the form like it's just for us, but it's for us to understand what positive outcomes we're going to deliver on those three fronts for a project.
Speaker 1:And it helps you genuinely know that the outcomes you're delivering they're not just good for the people who are commissioning the building, they're not just good for the people who are going to use the building, they're good for, kind of, the world at large. And and I think that you know all good architects, I suppose. Actually, I think all architects probably want to have a positive impact on the world at large. Yeah, everyone wants to do the right thing right. Doing the right thing is hard and difficult and, uh, I think that's more of a problem than than the desire. In a way, it's how do you structure what you're doing to do the right thing? So, answer the question.
Speaker 2:I think that you know the, the, the comment that you made there that doing the right thing is hard, yeah, does it need to be hard? Um, why is it hard?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, now that is interesting. So, uh, why is it hard?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll give you an example, a really common example. Doing the right thing for me is going to bed before 10 30. Cause I get up at five. Yeah, yeah, sometimes it feels hard. Yeah, yeah, but it feels hard if I decide to give my time to something of low value, unless there's a family event going on or I'm traveling somewhere or whatever. Generally, the thing that will keep me up later than 10.30 is of low value compared to what I'm going to get for getting up at 5 o'clock. That's interesting. Yeah, so it just feels hard. Yeah, so I'm wondering if there's a parallel there between doing the right thing. Is it just a mindset or is it really hard, like jumping out of a window and flying? You know, maybe that's a bad example, but you know what I mean yeah, yeah, no, no.
Speaker 1:So I know what you mean yeah, yeah, no, no I. So I know what you mean and and again, I think there's kind of two, two parts, that there's the um, there's the. Why is it hard inside your own design process? And I think we've tried quite hard to structure what we do inside our company to just have good habits. You know so we have, you know, design reviews once a month. We have checklists for each rba stage where we check on, you know it's your air tightness, what you values. You know just, are you ticking? All right things are partly, those are about knowledge sharing and also have internal knowledge sharing sessions.
Speaker 1:So so we've, on purpose, tried quite hard to set up a sort of internal system that forms good habits, which is you're going to bed at 10 30 and getting up at five thing, um. But there is also, you know, and actually this, this goes a little bit the going to bed at 10 30, getting up at five thing is a kind of self-optimization thing, right, like it's a kind of modern day, I'm going to perform as well as I can, but the foil to that is your external environment. You know there are also external factors which aren't necessarily in your control, which are fighting against you doing the right thing. And again it comes back to the thing. Everybody wants to do the right thing, like all of our clients want to build the most sustainable building they possibly can, and the things that normally stop them are money, basically in terms of capital cost or insurances and warranties things that quite often catch us out or marketability, in that if we pursued this to its nth degree, it would not be a kind of something we could sell effectively which ties back into money, doesn't it? They all sort of tie back into money in a way, but that's not that money is evil.
Speaker 1:Money is just a representation of a resource that we deploy, and so there are certain values associated with the resources we deploy, and so a lot of decisions that kind of come from that and all of those things sort of, I think, shift over time. If you keep pushing, it's just you might want to push harder than those things are willing to move. And the reason I say that is because some of our clients so we work with Eagle Regeneration, which is Thrive Capital. We work with Equal Capital. Those are both ethical funds where the money has been deployed to do good in the world, if you see what I mean. So I think there is, you know, in terms of that, what's the desire of the resources of us as a species. I think there's resources now which are starting to be deployed to do the right thing. So I think it is shifting, but always, you know, you want to do more than the kind of more than the norm, otherwise nothing would change.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting I think, those two there, the money element and the not being able to sell the property at the end, which I've kind of attached, those two to value the oneness in the middle there around insurances. Just talk to me about that a little bit more. What struggles come up with the insurances and how have you been able to overcome them, or what routines or good habits are you in to enable that to be overcome?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so a lot of the insurance stuff comes from. We really like to use bio-based materials in our practice, so that's a big range of products, right? So that's from like timber frames to, uh, wood wool to hempcrete to, uh, you know, cob, so, um, I've kind of got more and more tricky actually on that spectrum there, and so one of the things is that you know, the insurance market in the UK sometimes struggles to understand certain types of construction and that's because there hasn't been enough of it around for them to have hard data.
Speaker 1:And they're not or not is not a very fair word it's very difficult in the setup they have, for them to sit down and really think through the implications of something. So to assess the risk, to assess the risk, so, for example, like Hempcrete for example, we've done a few Hempcrete buildings. Hempcrete is basically like a 400mm thick wall construction. It's got magnesium silicate here, some timber framing here, and then hempcrete and then lime render. There's no cavity, there's no vapor barrier, there's no breather membrane. So in terms of moisture risk, I won't name which one, but there's a couple of structural warranty providers who just won't look at hempcrete because they need to have a cavity that's ventilated with a vapor barrier, otherwise they just don't get it. It says no computer says no.
Speaker 2:Now henry's and really so, is it so is it on that computer says no, or is it that they as an organization there's not an individual in there that gets it so.
Speaker 1:So they have to have like rules about the you know the across the board rules, because behind them sits an underwriter who has made some rules, right, so yeah, so it's sort of like the computer says no for that organization across the board, right, really, you know? Um. So the difficulty is that whenever you're doing something that they're not quite expecting, you can hit resistance. So fire is another one. So timber frame and fire, um, there's a perception that fire is less durable in a. In a timber frame is less durable. So I can.
Speaker 1:There's a perception that timber frame is less durable in a fire situation. But the honest truth. Truth is, in terms of life safety, I can put in a char zone and I can tell you for sure that everyone's out of that building in 30 minutes or less and the structure is safe. But there's an insurance concern about the integrity of that structure afterwards, which is right. Of course, the structure has been compromised, but the honest truth is a steel structure would also be compromised. I wouldn't want to trust a steel structure after a serious fire as well. So in fact, I think that steel also gets compromised. It's just the perception is that timber is potentially more compromised, which, if you were working in, say, scandinavia, where they do more high-rise timber frame, you know that's not the perception and the real.
Speaker 1:So the interesting thing then is like, how do you overcome this, which is the second part of your question.
Speaker 1:And it's much easier to overcome it when the person who's commissioning the building will be the person insuring it, when the person who's commissioning the building will be the person insuring it in the end. So when we're working for, like, a school or a university and they've got a kind of campus of buildings and we're building a new building in the middle of it and they have an ongoing relationship with an insurer, we can start an early conversation with that insurer to make sure that the construction we're considering is fine and it will often be beyond building regs. So quite often we're fire treating things like timber cladding more than we necessarily need to for building regulations, but to stop the fire risk from an insurance point of view. So that's really good right. But the trouble then comes when we're building houses and that house is going to get sold. So, for example, at the moment we're working with Igley Regeneration and the Crown Estate on a net zero demonstration project in Knutsford outside Manchester.
Speaker 1:And it's a great project, like amazing, and I mean you know the stats that the Crown want to achieve are fantastic. So an EUI you'll get all this because you know this, your world but an eui of 35 kilowatt hours per square meter per year, which is like passive house, basically, and embodied carbon below 300 kilograms equivalent per square meter. So I mean, I think the standard for a new build house in the uk is like 800, so all of that points to like buy-based materials, right. So it's like okay, so we can do a passive house building made of buy-based materials. And then and to be fair, the Crown are really on top of this, Like they're already we're only at stage one or stroke two, sort of stage two.
Speaker 1:Now they're already looking at you know, okay, what can we do about mortgages? What can we do about mortgages? What can we do about structural warranties? What can we do about, you know, leases and housing associations and all of that stuff that is around the corner, that if you deliver these houses, you have to have those answers in place. Otherwise it's to that thing of actually you can't sell these houses because people can't get mortgages. So it's not. It's quite interesting. It's the problems with the using things like biobased materials or you know kind of really high in sustainability. Quite often isn't the technical delivery of it, it's, it's how does it fit within the framework of a project, you know, in its broadest possible sense, I guess um?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's really interesting, because one of the things that I'm planning on doing is having a a podcast session with three, four people around a table to address that very in that really is is what are the barriers? How do we overcome them? Because a lot of the things that you're talking about there is around the cradle to cradle piece as well. Yeah, yeah, and why is it? The mainstream mass house builders are not building with cradle to cradle? Is it an insurance issue? Is it? I don't think we're going to get the money back. I don't think anyone's going to be interested in buying the property. Yeah, is that? Is that the issue? Um and it's interesting that you mentioned about scandinavia there's a humongous um I don't know the exact size of it where they use the word humongous. Yeah, yeah, yeah Good word Commercial building that's been built over there and it's all been built from straw.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, yeah. Could I see that as a distribution center over here in the UK?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's no reason why not? Yeah, and I'm not sure, just going back to what you're saying, that it would fit within the current framework of thinking and it would be okay.
Speaker 1:Insurance risk computer says no try to develop a project which takes a lot of regenerative design principles when someone has got a very long-term view of what they're doing. We work with, for example, someone called the Burling Estate, one of our clients in Kent and I think he's been on that land for 500 years and he wants his family to be on there for another 500 years. So he's legacy building, it's legacy building, so he's less interested in immediate money back. He wants things to be in the very long term, to do right by that land and that soil and do the right thing. So it's really easy for him to do the right thing in a funny kind of way, because there's there's a lot of incentives, doing the right thing and thinking long term almost exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1:You know, the difficulty is that a lot of stuff like the house builders, for example, they basically need to sell up and get out. You know, at the end of it, there they, they sell up and it goes away. So what you know, again, it's back to that thing of people who are going to keep owning the buildings. We tend to find that when we talk to them about better energy performance or improved health and well-being of the people in the buildings or, you know, nature, positivity. Those are all benefits which they're going to benefit flame, you know, and their organization is going to benefit from. For a house builder, to be fair, it is structured so that, unless that translates to um a greater value in terms of what they can sell those homes for, it's very difficult for them to justify going beyond the standard if that makes sense. And actually, in a funny kind of way, that's why people like the Crown, who we're working with, want to push the envelope, because they can, they have the resources to do it.
Speaker 1:And there are some examples of um really good houses that are built where they're worth more money. I think accordia in cambridge, which is quite sustainable but it's certainly very high quality. Uh, I think those are 30 higher value than just a house next door in cambridge, for example. I think those are 30% higher value than just a house next door in Cambridge, for example. So there's starting to be some examples where you can kind of create a better local market just in the quality of what you do. But it is quite difficult because there's a process called red book valuations, which is what surveyors do, and if someone's building out a scheme, they will use a Red Book valuation. That's just how much is a three-bed house in the area, and the three-bed house in the area, no matter what it is, has a certain value. So yeah, there's a job to do, I guess, with house builders, which is talking about you're going to get a better financial outcome at the end of this if you go down this route. You're going to get a better financial outcome, you know, at the end of this if you go down this route.
Speaker 1:But some house builders we work with are structured in a way that that makes sense anyway. So we've done a thing called Eschart, positive Living, with Keyland Developments and they're part of Yorkshire Water. So we it's still in progress, but we've done 150 units or homes sorry, 150 homes outside a village called Esholt, with a kind of commercial area as well, and it's all set in effectively a new country park between Leeds and Bradford in the Green Bill. Partly that really helped get planning consent, you know, like it's not totally for the greater good, you know. But also Yorkshire Water are going to retain ownership of all the land around those developments and again it's back to that long-term thing. They really care that this is a lovely place to live. They really care that the land around these developments are well maintained. You know they have this long-term interest in in the land in that place and everyone who has that kind of automatically really pushes as hard as they can on that sustainability front.
Speaker 2:I think it's interesting, isn't it? The way that you're describing this has me thinking that, in order for the majority of house builders to go down the sustainable route and what I mean by sustainable is, you know, things like cradle to cradle, yeah, as opposed to net zero I'm not meaning that net zero sustainable they're going to need to change their, their value um drivers yeah, yeah um and um have more of a longer term view on something where, at the moment, what they're looking at is selling something as quick as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, off plan preferred yeah yeah, yeah, when it's built as a minimum. If it's hanging around for longer than that is financially a little bit of an issue yeah the customer that they're selling that to is looking to buy that house knowing that generally, within two to three years, maybe five years, they're going to look to move on somewhere else yeah yeah, and then go to move to a different house.
Speaker 2:So in that chain there that doesn't appear to be that legacy value coming together. Where, from what you're saying with reference to the crown or with Yorkshire water, that they're looking to retain the value in that property over decades, yeah, maybe centuries?
Speaker 1:Yeah. As opposed to months yeah, yeah, they are a few years, yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. So they're super interested in legacy, I mean, and because you know, I I think house builders are much maligned in the uk and they are building our homes. You know they are doing good things, house builders, you know, and people slag them off and you know everything they do is because of the way it's structured, you know.
Speaker 2:But that's the demand that they're getting from the people that are buying their product. Yes, I'm not saying that anyone's the villain here.
Speaker 1:No, no, no no, no, but they're working with the system right, and so there's two things to that. So thing number one is um, how have people done it in other countries?
Speaker 1:you know so. So like I find like almere quite interesting in in in the netherlands. So we've been all around the netherlands, looked at all the housing and like if you bought a house in almere, what you do is you would buy a plot and then the next room, the plot comes from the past, so what you can build on that plot, so you've already got effectively planning. So in the next room there are six or seven house builders who you could talk to and you can go with, you know, if they want a picture of the kind of houses they do, and you can talk to them about the kind of house you might want. There's super energy efficient houses, there's probably ones that aren't so energy efficient, there's funky ones, more traditional ones, and that's about that works because the legacy of your decisions there come into you living in the house, if that makes sense. So again, that's a way of structuring that relationship house building process to make sure that the person is going to occupy the house kind of captures the value and and that in the uk is, you know, gaining currency, because that's what custom build is basically.
Speaker 1:So custom build, uh, which people like you know gus gustavovich of solid space homes is doing, for example. So it's, it's a growing thing where there's plots where effectively, that's the system that you get a plot, it's got outline consent, you know. And then there are, you work with the developer to, you know, choose a product, and we've been involved with things like that. So we did a house, actually three house types the habitat first, group down in um, well, they've got something in the coxwolds, and then they've got something in dorset as well, uh. And so, yeah, you buy the plot and then you choose the house. You know, I think we've done one, I think sarah featherstone's done one, rich reed, I can't remember the house anyway, you know.
Speaker 1:So you choose one, and ours was passive house um standard. You can't be certified because I don't know where, you have to do it for each plot by plot basis, but you know pass-through standards. So if you went quite highly eco, you could choose ours, you know. So that's definitely kind of a developing market in the uk. So that's, that's one thing, which is a, which is a way of doing it and it can work in the uk and it's definitely coming um.
Speaker 1:The second thing is there's been some really interesting work done by people like Adapt in Bath are doing this. Three Adapt. They're called and you probably know about this, darren, because I realise this is your world, isn't it? But the five capitals model, where you start putting a value on all of the five capitals so I'm going to struggle to remember them now but there, um, uh, financial, manufactured, um, social, I think, intellectual, and then there's natural, and natural wraps around the whole thing, if you like so, and then you can, within a scheme, put an effective financial value on each of those uh capitals. So, and that's to do with kind of, um say, social outcomes. You can say, well, if we did this in the project over a 10-year period, the value of social outcomes financially would be X kind of thing. So there's ways of valuing the financial kind of benefits or, if you like, just the benefits however you want to phrase it of a project without it just being the immediate financial return.
Speaker 1:The difficulty is how can you compensate someone like a house builder for those additional positive outcomes if that makes sense which are longer term, aren't they? Which are longer term? Yeah, for sure. If I said to I won't name a name, but like a house builder and said, okay, so you're going to get this much profit on a name. But like a house builder and said, okay, so you're going to get this much profit on your scheme, but because you've done this extra thing, this I don't know what it is 25% extra biodiversity I'm going to keep paying you a certain amount every year to thank you for doing that. There would be an incentive for them to do that.
Speaker 2:Or in three years' time, you get an extra bonus because you've done this.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's got to be ways of structuring it incentivizing it, and it might be just because of the time of year that we're recording this. I've got the football structuring deal of transfers in my mind. You get the initial payment and then you get add-on the initial payment and then you get a yeah, add-on bonuses and incentives and all the other things depending on how the player is going to perform, and then you get another payment as well. You can structure in the deal if that player then gets bought by another yeah, a higher amount.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, you know, I'm wondering if, yeah, that's fascinating to think about the financial structure of selling a house or delivering a house, just with those changes and adaptations. Yeah, construction more to the forefront. Yeah, as opposed to something which is in the back with at the back at the moment, with it feels like people trying to push it through but we're getting stuck because insurances aren't quite right, values aren't aligned. Yeah, yeah, there's no common enemy that we can point to and say this is the one problem. Let's all destroy it. Yeah, because it's not, it's the whole system and structure. Yeah, I mean, I problem that's will destroy it. Yeah, because it's not, it's the whole system and structure yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1:I think there's another thing, though, which you touched on there in terms of value, which is consumer demand. Right and um, I you know if there. If there wasn't consumer demand, like we wouldn't have a business, because for the first five years of our business we just did low energy, eco houses for people. So there definitely exists latent consumer demand to have a sort of sustainable housing product which isn't out there, because if it was out there we wouldn't have got any work. So that's interesting and I think that's growing.
Speaker 1:I think there's also generational growth in that as well. So one of the reasons that we have worked with a lot of universities, it's universities are really really on it in terms of making sure they have great net zero policies, nature positivity on their sites, that they're thinking about students' health and well-being. I mean students' health and well-being is a really big topic at the moment, and the reason that they're doing all that is because the students can the students who are now in their 20s, early 20s, that generation have a really good understanding of that, and they're getting older and they're going to become the consumers of tomorrow. So, you know, out of all the sectors we work in, I reckon the universities are, like the, the most aware of of what they need to do in those settings I think it also makes them more attractive to actually pull those students in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, having those, yeah those elements puts them one above the other when they're like oh, what university should I go to? I've got multiple offers, yeah, okay, I'm going to go with this one.
Speaker 1:I mean we did the Creative Centre at York St John University and I mean there's metrics like it's up front carbon was 800. That's not bad, you know. The EUI is 73. That's not bad. Majority timber frame. It's obviously like a really nice, you know, low energy building. It's a really lovely timber framed atrium. It's all naturally ventilated, the acoustics work well and so they show students around and applications were up by about 26 percent in the first year. That building got complete because people just think, oh, this place right, yeah, yeah, that really aligned with, like, what I think about the world. You know my values, my values, and so I'm going to go there. So it is exactly that it really helps. It's not a fake thing to do, do you know what I mean? It's not a sales tactic, but it is people understanding what your values are and seeing that they align with your own personal values, and then it's where people want to go. It's really important it's a.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting concept and it's true. I definitely see that the. The barrier that exists, though, is where someone doesn't have the resources to meet where their values are. Yeah, if you go, maybe, into an inner city so I was brought up in an inner city, william, bristol and lots of things that I wanted to do when I was younger just didn't have the financial resources to make it happen. I had the knowledge, had the motivation to do it and the desire and ambition, but just didn't have that's interesting.
Speaker 1:What were they? I'm quite interested. What were the things you wanted to do that if I'd given you a lump of money, you might have done them?
Speaker 2:for example, yeah, so, yeah, just have a house with a garden, Right? Yeah, so I was brought up in a flat first floor, flat high-rise block. I think there were 20, 20-odd floors, yeah 20-odd floors, yeah.
Speaker 2:It was massive. Yeah, the lift smelled of urine. Yeah, we had to put all of our waste down into a common bin. That absolutely reeked. You opened it up and you had to hold your breath, otherwise you felt like you were in it. Yeah, you're going to have your hands become your outers. Yeah, and we had this balcony which was probably twice the size of this table.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, yeah, that was our, that was our outdoor space. That was there. Everything was concrete. Yeah, there were cockroaches, um, coming up through the bath plugs there was. It was just a not a great place to be.
Speaker 2:I'd go to my aunt's house, um, she was in a different financial position to what I was um in in my family. She had a lovely garden. She had um trees, fruit trees, all of these different things. You know that's that. That would have been lovely for me. We did eventually move. It was a social housing place that we moved into. The garden that we had was completely overgrown. Yeah, um, yeah, people would come in and they would say, ah, look at the state of this garden. In my view, this is awesome. This is a playground adventure. It's great. This is, you know, go by, uh, you know, concrete balcony to that it was. It was absolutely amazing. So, yeah, that would you know, to me that was really really valuable. I know, to my mum and to my brother that was valuable as well, but we just didn't have the resources to get into that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, actually that's really interesting. That's one of those things where I think, so certainly one of the things that we're trying to do now as a practice actually is getting kind of nature, positive, regenerative outcomes. You know, sorry, it's suddenly gone very grand, isn't it? You know from talking about a house of fine, bristol, bright, but the real problem was, you know, that wasn't a very nice place and you had no connection to nature you know, and that is a problem which needs to get solved in kind of higher density urban situations.
Speaker 1:It's kind of easier to solve it when you've got a house on the ground and one of the sort of monkeys to solve at the moment in the UK is to avoid taking up all of the land with houses to avoid too much more sprawl. We do need to start thinking about denser development and it's really important. I think if you spend two hours a week, just two hours a week, in nature every day, two hours in nature every week, you get significantly better health and well-being. I think it's like 30% to 35% better health and well-being. I think it's like 30 to 35 better health. But being it's kind of loads and loads of stats but there's also loads of stats. I think um sacks. From 2019 to now, 1.1 million less people across the uk um go and visit nature once a week, basically, and there's huge kind of health ramifications of that.
Speaker 1:And when you ask people why, it's due to proximity, what you've just described.
Speaker 1:So you know it's not next to their back door and also there's nothing out there immediately for me to get to and I haven't got time because I've got to cook dinner, so I just don't do it, can't.
Speaker 1:I see, so it's one of the things immediately for me to get to and I haven't got time because I've got to cook dinner, so I just don't do it, can't, I think you know. So it's one of the things I would love to do, because we sort of started our first client base was, like the Eden Project and the National Trust and Habitat First group, so kind of reasonably rural, and our work now is transitioning to be quite urban and one of the things I would really like to do as a practice over the next few years is work out how to solve the problem you've just described. Inevitably you have to have some reasonably dense developments in urban settlements, but how do you do that and make sure you've still got that incredible nature positivity that you got once you had a go, suddenly your world was better you know, and everybody knows this to be true.
Speaker 1:I don't need any data to back this up. I'm probably trying to find more. You know, everyone knows that to be true. Achieving it is is challenging, you know, because, um, achieving it involves creating better amenity spaces for every apartment or block or wherever it is, having smaller pocket parks, possibly achieving less value. Maybe again it's back to value. You know you can't absolutely maximize value on every site. Well, I think there's some developers who are pushing quite hard. I think if you look at british land in canada water, the stuff they're doing there is actually quite interesting, you know, in terms of nature positivity, but it's definitely, yeah, that is the next frontier for us is more dense urban development, and how do we translate all these regenerative design principles that we've learnt, I would say, in kind of rural and then suburban settings? You know, in that kind of density Now our work is getting much, much more central. So how do you translate that to a more central setting?
Speaker 2:kind of interesting I think also when you overlay um children, the way that their uh minds are growing, developing, and the importance of that connectivity in that space, and that's not even including, like mental health, but it's more along the imagination and the creation and the resilience side of things, because you know when you're in nature.
Speaker 2:You do learn resilience from observing nature yeah yeah, you look at a cracked pavement and you see that there's a tree root growing up in between the cracked pavement or there's a what some might call a weed kind of growing up in. You know that there's that's resilience in that area, isn't it? The the, the things growing there, yeah, even though it's kind of pushed up through a um, a hard um and dense uh and dense material. Yeah, yeah, but that was my own personal experience and I guess that's one of the reasons why I did set up the sustainability consultancy that I had is to try and I guess, speak to the younger Darren and affect someone else, because there's a huge difference. I don't live in that environment anymore. I've got a really good-sized garden. I'm less than a five-minute walk and I can't even see houses from where I live. So, right out in the middle of nowhere, I find it's absolutely great. I've gone nowhere with my dogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I'm not in that position anymore.
Speaker 1:But just kind of speaking to that younger version of myself, I know that there are lots and lots of young children out there that would really benefit from that type of that type of environment yeah, and it is interesting because we I mean I think we've got five london park projects on the go at the moment because it just kind of suits us, you know, and, um, we're also doing like concourse, the headquarters of the national forest, and all kinds of things and a lot of what we talk about. There is natural play, you know, and that is reasonably new actually. You know the concept of natural play and the concept of getting rid of tarmac and the concept of kids having a large degree of freedom in a natural environment, which is pretty much your thing about kids running around the gardens, you know all that kind of thing. And there are, you know there kind of thing. Um, and there are, you know, there's like loads of really interesting stats.
Speaker 1:Like I'm gonna get a bit geeky, but there's a report by the university of salford called clever classrooms and it shows that naturalness in a learning environment gives 17 better educational outcomes for primary school students and naturalist being better natural daylight, better natural ventilation, views of nature and direct access to outside. So if you do all those four things in a classroom, you get better like two grades worth of better outcomes. And there's those stats as well about kids' heart rates, heart rates going down, concentration rates improving, all that kind of thing when they're immersed in nature. So that immersion in nature, you're totally right, that's really important developmentally for children and it's really unfair that in certain parts of the country it's quite easy to achieve that and in certain parts of the countries, because it's denser together, it's really hard.
Speaker 1:And the difficulty is, you know, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere, sorry, really hard, and the difficulty is, you know, I and I grew up in the middle of nowhere, sorry, I don't want to show off, but great, I'm afraid, the opposite of your truck. That's good, right in the field, basically good, and it was fabulous. I loved it, you know, but it was also really lonely. Interestingly, because there weren't, the nearest kid was a guy called martin dyer and he was three miles away, you know, and it's a in the 70s, so people drove 60 miles an hour down our road. It was lethal. Okay, you couldn't walk to his house.
Speaker 2:You'd never make it. You'd be like a skittle.
Speaker 1:Yes, so then when I came to London, it's fantastic, I've got all these friends and it's very social and it's very easy and there's culture and all of these things that I absolutely love and actually, interestingly, it's definitely getting better. So I live in Islington, who have done a really good job of developing pocket parks and maximizing green spaces recently, but when I first came to London there just wasn't that understanding of the benefits of nature and, um, that's sort of like in a way that describes what we're up to as a company. It's been funny, kind of I'd like to have the incredible benefits of living in nature in suffolk, but all of the sort of social benefits of living in london, and I'm trying to work out how those two things go together. And that's probably my last word.
Speaker 2:So there you go, which is great because that's what we need, right? You're no good with lots of green space around you on your own, isolated yeah, that's the other function of, again, early childhood and also just a healthy adult. Yeah, you need to have a support network around you. Friends yeah, you can have a laugh and joke with people that you can share a problem with and listen to a problem yeah, it takes a village, you know.
Speaker 1:But again, it's one of the I mean back to you know things that we do in housing schemes, you schemes. One of the things we do in housing schemes is everyone has a pretty good-sized garden, but we do also try to create as much communal natural areas as we can we've got, maximize the amounts of nature, include and give them a use. So have things like ponds that you can swim in, which also to do the biodiversity and to do with suds, include allotments, include areas of biodiversity, include play areas. Make sure you've got as much of that as you can, as few roads as you can. And then there is a thing.
Speaker 1:So back to like the structure of a job. The trick there is to make sure you have the right stewardship stewardship set up for that in the long term. So it's sort of, basically, what kind of management company is going to be running that in the long term, you know, making sure that's a community-based piece of infrastructure. But you know there are yeah, there are things that as designers we can build into developments to make sure that people get the most connections possible with nature, particularly to make sure they come together as communities and that we're providing for kids. So yeah, it's really important. It's the job isn't it?
Speaker 2:What's the overall ambition, then, for you in terms of impact? Because of the conversations that I've had with you, you seem very much legacy led as opposed to. I've just set this architecture firm up so that I can just churn as much of a profit as possible, exit and go and sit on a beach and um yeah, so pina coladas all day yeah, um, I well, as a sort of scale thing, you know, I guess, and then as sort of what would you like to do?
Speaker 1:I think there's a few things in there. So thing number one is that we really want to do regenerative design projects, you know, and regenerative design sounds terribly grand, doesn't it? But you know, essentially you have to operate outside your red line boundary because the outcomes have to be kind of quite broad reaching and like, essentially there's a certain scale at which it operates correctly. That we've noticed. So when we did Eschott positive living with Keyland Developments, we had enough, you know, had a commercial, about a million square feet of commercial, 150 homes and a country park, and all of that together we could generate some incredible regenerative outcomes, you know, which benefit the broader communities, and we could do things like improve footpath links through um, create community spaces which were viable for everyone. You know, the sort of scale of that canvas meant that you could really create incredible outcomes. And so we, you know, we would like to do those kind of regenerative design projects. So they require a certain scale.
Speaker 1:It, I think, if we could produce, you know, three or four truly regenerative design projects, so they require a certain scale. I think if we could produce, you know, three or four truly regenerative buildings that you know make the world a better place by existing, that would be, you know, ambition achieved. But I think that is a lifetime of work to get to that point, you know, of growing in terms of scale, of understanding the projects well enough to really know how to kind of get those outcomes right, you know, and for the world to move with us as we go in that direction. It sounds terribly grand when I say it, I've realized, but there you go um.
Speaker 2:It also sounds like the ideal scenario is so far away.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's so rare, yeah, that it's almost you're. You're finding you know a new, I don't know a new mineral. Oh yeah, it's not been. You know that it's the you know. Why is that not? How can, how can we get to a place where that becomes common? Yeah Well, is it even possible? Am I just talking about here, where you know it's like creating a spaceship that travels at light speed, but just never going to do it really, or faster than light speed?
Speaker 1:So people have done it before. You know, when you go to things like the East Kali Hills in India, they make bridges from tree roots right, and so they well tree branches and they snake this sort of living bridge that benefits the community, benefits the tree and it looks good. So all of those there are projects that already have been done which kind of meet all the design principle boxes. You know that essentially this project is making the world a better place on kind of all fronts.
Speaker 2:But the challenge is lifting that up from India and plunking it into the UK.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, sure, I think it's a really hard problem. I mean again, so it's like one of these things. Yeah, yeah, sure, I think it's a really hard problem. I mean again, so it's like one of these things. It's like I think that in 200 years' time, all projects that you do will have huge positive outcomes for the world at large. That'll have to be where we land as people making things you know. So I'm certain that's where it's going. I'm not sure that we will achieve it as a practice in our lifespan. I really hope we will.
Speaker 1:Certainly, some of the clients are working with huge ambitions towards that end. I would say at the moment, the best project we've got in our books that could well meet all this stuff is Igloo Crown Estate. Net Zero project I mean that really is ticking a lot of boxes. Net zero project I mean that really is ticking a lot of boxes. But, um, you know, the other thing is that there's we have to be honest about what we do achieve and what we don't achieve, because that's the only way we'll all progress in the industry. And one of my slight anxieties about sustainability and actually I don't really like marketing the company in a funny kind of way as as a sustainable company, because it puts pressure on you to kind of over claim what you've achieved.
Speaker 1:You know that you're talking greenwashing it. Well, yeah, greenwashing, because you told everyone you're really great at, you know, doing these sustainable buildings or regenerative design, and then you feel like you have to tell everyone I know we've done it. You know, definitely done it. You know I can say without a shadow of a doubt, we haven't done a building that's truly regenerative yet, but I would love to do one. That's the ambition and I think we're probably one of the best people in the UK at doing those kind of buildings. Right, but we still haven't done one. You know, and I think it's really important to be honest like that, because otherwise you are a green machine. Basically, you're telling everyone that you know the answer. When the answer's really hard, I think you know well, not hard, just complicated, just a little hand in it, yeah, and you've got to work within the systems. You've got the systems need to change, so you've got to keep pushing All the things we've been talking about. You know it'll definitely get there.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about this Igloo project that you're doing with the Crown of Stone. Oh yeah, what stage are you at at the moment, and what is that expected to look like when it's done?
Speaker 1:So we're at stage two, rba stage two at the moment. So it's 75 homes. It's sort of also a bit larger as well, but there's a phase one which is 75 homes, bit larger as well, but there's a phase one which is 75 homes. It's um just on the edge of a town called nutsford in east cheshire, near manchester, um. The targets, the metrics that the crown estate want to hit are really good. So we've talked about that. You know, an eui of 35 um embodied carbon 300 up front, more than that bng 15 or more. But there's some really kind of broad ambitions we've got as well as a really human-centered design where it's the right scale for people, it's the right scale for the community.
Speaker 1:We're trying to minimize road infrastructure in particular, minimize the impact of kind of cars and vehicles on the master plan. Quite often we do housing layouts. Now the thing that drives a lot of it is the rubbish truck. Actually, we're talking about the rubbish truck, the thing that comes once a week around the site can drive this quite substantial road infrastructure. So it's trying to unpick that so that we have, you know, less tarmac and more green space, basically for everyone. And then think about the overlaps between kind of nature, positivity and community spaces. So things like a suds pond, which is also a swimming pond, which is also, you know, community facility as well and also good for biodiversity. So it's got lots of things. We've got some quite innovative things as ideas in there as well. So there's a community barn to it putting in, which is a kind of unprogrammed portal frame shed that has this kind of flexible, rain, safe, community use, facing onto the square where people can kind of take that on and start doing different things in it, and we can introduce maybe some retail in there, certainly a community hall and that will also help us manufacture with a local manufacturing process, um, during the build as well, so we can have local pre-fabrication. One of the problems with pre-fabricating stuff is quite often the factories come miles away. So if we have a kind of flying factory on site, we can use local materials and local craftsmen and have a local training school, which then that factory can potentially do later phases, so it can be something that makes its own little house manufacturing thing in that area, so it can have an economic benefit. So it's one of those things where you can just start if you really care about making multiple benefits and you have a real legacy mindset, which both crown and igloo. Do you know? You can, you can really, you know, get a lot out of it potentially.
Speaker 1:Um, the other interesting thing about knoxford is I have to admit this is just a little quote, but I love it there was a, there was a super, slightly crazy guy called richard harding more in the early 20th century who did the grand tour and then came back and built these very, very strange italianate kind of strange but beautiful italianate um villas and community centers and a memorial to elizabeth gaskell who, uh, used to live in knutsford and actually, I think, cranford. Her novels are based on knutsford as a town. Um, so you've also got that kind of riff off, this sort of slightly quirky Italian-y feel to the whole thing, which is quite a nice language to riff from as well in terms of the Knutsford vernacular. So it's potentially a really characterful, really amazing project that's been going on for Now.
Speaker 1:It's ramped up in terms of speed, but it's been rumbling for a long time. It's got quite a solid setup. So I've got this thing touch wood, really hoping it goes through and it looks to me like it will kind of thing. And, um, you know, hats off to all the team you're working with. They're also working with a company called useful projects. Are incredible planet urban and landscape designers and they're incredible. You know um slr, who've been brilliant about getting rid of cars transport consultants. You know really beautiful team as well. So it's just one of those projects where you know you were talking earlier about setting a project up at the start correctly to get a good outcome. It's just been very, very well set up, I think you know, so yeah, that's um at the moment.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm really excited about in the office, yeah well, when that lands, and as that completes, I'd love you to to come back in and showcase that. It would be great here to to do something on that and and show other people not just how great you are and the people and organizations that you work with, but also what the outcome is, and just give them a chance to kind of look under the proverbial hood, as it were, so that they can see the inner workings of that, because I think that that is one of the ways that we can just make things easier for people to do is show them look, this, here's a pathway that's been forged, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Here's the lessons that have come from it, and I know that sometimes there's a, a, a desire to um, protect intellectual property yeah, but if the overall value is legacy yeah then I think it just needs to be a little bit more open source, and you seem like more of like more of an open source guy than a let's protect it all.
Speaker 1:So we're completely open source. So if you go to our website, we have something called the Knowledge Hub, which is basically everything we've learned along the way and a lot of stuff I've talked about today. You can get more on that. On the Knowledge Hub in terms of and there's big things in there like how do I build next to a tree, or what is embodied carbon? Or, um, even more prosaic things like how do I know how many residential units I can get on a site, or something like that. There's kind of uh, how do you make sure the health and well-being of students is great. You know, there's all these things. Yes, if you go to takencodecom knowledge hub, um, yeah, rope source, it's all up there.
Speaker 2:Love that, love that. Yeah, brilliant. It's been great having you on the podcast. Thank you, darren. Appreciate your wisdom, your passion and also your expertise.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, thank you for having me, darren, I've got to admit this is a great podcast. Hats off to you for doing it. Yeah, you have a lot of interesting guests and it's got real positive to real positivity to it. So, uh, thanks for having me.
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