The designer and TV presenter Kevin McCloud has joined calls for the introduction of a new grade III listing for buildings.
The proposal by architects is intended to reduce carbon emissions by making retrofitting the norm, saving 50,000 old and historic buildings from the wrecking ball each year.
“Any safeguard that places on any historical structure a presumption in favour of protection is a good thing,” McCloud said. “It would be a mechanism which asks a developer, an owner, an architect, ‘What’s the opportunity for reuse?’.”
The longstanding presenter of the popular TV programme Grand Designs described the culture of “demolishing, removing and throwing away” as “wasteful” and “not green”, citing M&S’s plan to rebuild its Oxford Street store as a “lazy” example of this.
The grade III idea has attracted interest from MPs and public bodies after appearing in an article for the Architects’ Journal (AJ) that was republished by The Times.
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Setting out the proposal, the structural engineer Will Arnold said: “The status would apply automatically to every building and it would come with just one rule: the property may only be demolished if it is structurally unsafe, or is given special dispensation by the local planning authority.”
The AJ, which runs the Retrofirst campaign, says that hundreds of architects support the idea of properly exploring the prospect of refurbishing buildings before considering demolition. Grade III would be a way of enshrining this concept in law.
Historic England, the body responsible for listing historic buildings, stopped short of calling for grade III but insisted that more could be done with our historic buildings.
“Whilst there is a place and need for new construction, we should recognise the environmental benefits of reuse and look creatively at retrofitting or repurposing historic buildings before automatically building new,” a spokeswoman said.
The Retrofirst campaign is chiefly seeking to address the problem of embodied carbon, which broadly means the emissions involved in the construction of a building.
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However, McCloud believes that the benefits will also be cultural. “We undermine our cultural identity by removing the great signifiers of it,” he said. “If you want a resilient culture or society, then that is a society which is proud of where it lives, of what it’s built, of what it’s done and wants to make use of it.”
He cited examples from across the world where unsightly structures had been given new leases of life through reuse, such as New York’s High Line railway which has become a garden.
While grade III would change planning in Britain, Arnold claims that the benefits would also be swift and could help address the housing crisis.
“The quickest way to create housing would be to take an existing building and turn it into housing,” Arnold said.
The environmental benefits would not be small, either. The UK’s built environment produces 25 per cent of our carbon emissions. By 2035 embodied carbon is predicted to account for half of the built environment’s CO2.
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Historic England has already taken a lead on this. Earlier last year, it reopened the 225-year-old Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings as a modern set of offices, complete with heat pumps and other modern innovations which have made it sound for a greener age.
Such projects remain rare, with plans such as Marks & Spencer’s proposal to demolish and rebuild its flagship store on Oxford Street being more common. It has courted opposition on both environmental and heritage grounds, and McCloud is outspoken in his opposition.
“It’s just lazy,” he said. “You just haven’t thought about it and I think there is no excuse for that sort of intellectual or creative laziness. What it suggests is a complete lack of imagination.”
The problem of embodied carbon was the subject of a private member’s bill last month, which sought to introduce the measurement of and limits on embodied carbon emissions. The government declined to support it, but insisted that it was confronting the question.
“We’ve committed £6.6 billion this parliament and a further £6 billion to 2028 to make buildings more energy efficient,” said a spokeswoman from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
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“We have been clear that we intend to consult next year on our approach to the measurement and reduction of embodied carbon, which will consider the best way of doing this,” she added.
Jerome Mayhew, the Conservative MP for Broadland in Norfolk who introduced the private member’s bill, has been “interested” by the idea of grade III, but has reservations.
“As a conservative, I’m instinctively against prohibition,” he said.
“What I’m more in favour of is the economic costs and opportunities of retrofit to become more apparent.”
