personal finance

Spacious and green: inside Norwich's award-winning new council houses


After two years living in a third-floor flat in Norwich, Alex Jenkins, her partner and two young sons moved into a new council house in December. They are not alone in their adoration for their home, with its two large bedrooms, sunny back garden and high ceilings.

Goldsmith Street, a development of 105 brick properties on the outskirts of the city centre, on Tuesday became the first social housing project to be awarded the Stirling architecture prize. The judges hailed the development, owned wholly by the city council, as a “modest masterpiece”, saying it represented “high-quality architecture in its purest, most environmentally and socially conscious form”.

“The ceilings are really high and there’s loads of storage,” said Jenkins, 22, who works as a beautician. “The boys share a bedroom but it’s so big it could be two bedrooms. There’s so much space that honestly you don’t know what to do with it.”

The estate, which was designed by a London firm, Mikhail Riches, is built to German Passivhaus standards, a rigorous system that reduces a building’s ecological footprint. The houses are designed to be as airtight as possible, with a mechanical heat and ventilation system that circulates air through the rooms. Heating bills should theoretically be about £150 a year.

Tenants – who started moving in last November – reported lower heating costs, but many had been put on an initial standard rate by energy providers until they could prove their consumption was lower, so they had not yet seen the promised savings. “You can’t say that you live in a Passivhaus house,” said Jenkins. “They don’t know what that is.”

Some have front and back gardens.



Some have front and back gardens. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

The architects took inspiration from a conservation area of late Victorian homes in Norwich known as the Golden Triangle. They rejected the modern standard of having streets 21 metres wide and instead put the rows of houses 14 metres away from one another. This enabled them to fit in more self-contained houses with gardens, rather than blocks of flats, and had the added benefit of slowing traffic.

“A house with a back garden is a preferable form of housing for a family,” said the architect Annalie Riches. “Here, everybody has a front door on to the street and a garden – some have front gardens and back gardens. And a lot of them get access to shared communal play spaces as well.”

Having a back garden has been transformational for Jenkins. “The way that my boys play now and experiment and see the world is very different from when we were living in our last council flat,” she said.

“Tommy is talking much more and he understands things better. All of a sudden his world has opened up. He hadn’t really seen bugs before. We’d go to the park, but it’s not the same as walking out into your back garden and seeing spiders.”

Goldsmith Street



Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Emma Westgate, 23, loved her new house as soon as she moved in with her two children. “The place I used to live was horrible and there was black mould in the bathroom, so getting this place was a nice fresh start.”

She said the move had had a huge positive impact on her mental health. “Where I used to live put me in a really bad place,” she said. “I feel so much better living here. I’ve got two lovely neighbours and I feel like I want to have people round.”

Not all the feedback from tenants is good, however. Many complained that the houses’ fittings were breaking and they had struggled to keep their homes cool during the record-breaking temperatures this summer. Westgate said her toilet leaked and her taps had broken. “The longer we live here, the more I notice little things that are wrong, but it’s stuff that we can improve on,” she said.

Laura, 23, a personal assistant and carer with two children, has her issues with the Passivhaus system. “They’ve given us a ringbinder of instructions to understand it, but I’m not very good at understanding paperwork. You kind of need someone to talk you through it,” she said.

She resents the fact that she can’t install floating shelves or mount her TV to the wall because using long screws could pierce the insulating membrane. “You’ve got to know what you’re doing or you’ll break the house,” she said.

Under the Right to Buy scheme, tenants will be able to purchase their homes after they have lived there for three years – although because of the cost to the council of building the estate, any discount will be capped at £12,000. For Jenkins, it is a no-brainer. “I love this place,” she said. “I’d definitely like to buy it if I can.”



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