Home Truths

Hanham Hall is England’s first largescale volume house builder scheme to achieve the zerocarbon standard. HTA Design partnered with Barratt, HCA, South Gloucestershire Council, Sovereign Housing and Kingspan to provide 187 new private and affordable homes. © Nick Harrison

Ten years on from the completion of Hanham Hall, England’s first large-scale scheme to achieve the zero-carbon standard, the chair of HTA Design explores the challenges of both the biodiversity and housing crises.

At a conference recently I asked an audience for a show of hands on whether they would prioritise new housing to meet the worsening crisis of supply and affordability of homes, or green space to reverse the collapse in biodiversity. OK, the event was intended to explore the benefits of biodiversity, so my sample will have been self-selecting, but nonetheless it seemed like a sign of the times that not one single hand went up in favour of new housing over nature. But it is not a binary choice – we must meet both crises at once.

The practice which I am now proud to chair, HTA Design LLP, was founded in 1969 as Hunt Thompson Associates, and I joined in 1973. There were five of us when I joined, all architects. But our early work as community architects soon made it clear that meeting human needs and aspirations in a meaningful way, making places not just buildings, would mean a more holistic service and a multidisciplinary practice. So, 20 years ago we were joined by a young James Lord, a landscape architect who clearly had the same insight. Now we are 240 strong, in four studios across the country with members of a 50-strong team of landscape specialists spread among them. The landscape team has had remarkable success, winning the Landscape Institute’s Attenborough Prize for Cator Park and President’s Award.

The public realm includes allotments, an orchard, an apiary and greenhouses for residents as well as a wildflower meadow.

© Nick Harrison

I think it is very important for landscape architects to share our views of the challenges that must be met by generations of professionals that follow me. I have nothing to teach members of the Landscape Institute about the benefits of biophilia and the collapse of biodiversity, the most important cause of which to date is change of land use. In the future, climate change is predicted to become an equal if not more potent cause of species loss, while a greener built environment is increasingly understood to be essential to mitigation. It is clear to me, however, that the last century belonged to the car, enjoying a disproportionate allocation of space with policy and guidance that forced everything else aside.

So let us be emboldened that this century we can make good on the destruction of the last. Ten years ago, we demonstrated how this can be made possible with our scheme with Barratt at Hanham Hall, Bristol. We mapped neighbouring ecological resources and potential links in the surrounding green infrastructure. Our approach was based on respect for the pre-existing and underlying historical and natural characteristics of the site. A landscape of layers was built up from the underlying geology, topography and hydrology as well as the history of movement and human occupation of the land.

Hanham Hall facilitates social interaction between residents and the landscape, which is subject to communal husbandry, as well as the relationship with the surrounding countryside, which is connected to the built environment with green fingers and cycleways.

© Nick Harrison

Our post-occupancy evaluation on this development has delighted Barratt as much as it has convinced us that we were right to allow nature to create the template for development. Residents said they find the surrounding greenery and natural environment inviting to spend time in. The evaluation showed that 82.5% of residents agreed or strongly agreed that the neighbourhood gave them opportunities to stop and talk with people regularly, and 81.8% felt the design of the home and its environment lifted their spirits. To quote one resident:

‘I love living here. I’ve grown to love it even more in the last few months because we’ve been connecting more as a community. I have an allotment [on the site]. There are some really special people down there, so that’s been a big part of getting to know them – and a big part of the whole ethos here of getting in touch with nature.’

At HTA Design we call that Bringing Nature Home.

Ben Derbyshire is Chair of HTA Design and author of Home Truths, available from RIBA Books.

Ben Derbyshire