Could this be the future of housing in Manchester?

Dear readers — red-brick Victorian housing is part of this city’s charm, but can come with considerable downsides: draughty conditions, mould creeping up your wall and monstrous heating bills. Your flatmates might tell you to simply stop moaning and put on another jumper, but chilly homes are a serious health risk. Excess winter deaths linked to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are almost three times higher for those living in the coldest quarter of housing. 

The good news is, retrofitting — making your house warmer and more energy efficient — can provide an answer to some of these problems. But at a hefty price tag, can the average person afford it? We accompanied a local architect to a three-bed in Old Trafford to do the sums — and accompanied a co-operative to Levenshulme, where they’re hoping their pilot scheme will inspire the rest of the UK in retrofitting street by street, not house by house. 

Your briefing

🏘️ On Tuesday, the government published its new Planning and Infrastructure bill. The bill will introduce a raft of new reforms to help build more homes faster — or as the government puts it: Get Britain Building Again. To do this, the government wants to introduce a new planning system called a Spatial Development Strategy. If that sounds vaguely familiar, or familiarly boring, it may be because you recall the old Greater Manchester Spatial Framework. The big development plan fell through in 2020 after it couldn’t get the unanimous approval of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs. It was then replaced by a new plan called Places for Everyone, which has also seen GM towns, most recently Oldham, threatening to pull out. This has been a headache for Andy Burnham, who watched the Spatial Framework collapse after Stockport withdrew over greenbelt building, and now has had to speak with Oldham councillors who have voted to leave Places for Everyone because it is too “developer-led". But the bill passing wouldn’t assuage any of the concerns councillors in Stockport or Oldham have. In fact, it would probably make them worse. 

That’s because the Spatial Development Strategies (SDS) would take into account new housing targets passed last year, which would mean a higher demand for development sites, which could be on the greenbelt. The SDSs set to be introduced by the bill would be a requirement of all combined authorities — including Greater Manchester. The SDS will decide what housing gets built where, based on the government’s housing targets. It would, in essence at least, be very similar to Places for Everyone. Except, Places for Everyone doesn’t cover all of Greater Manchester, it misses out on Stockport. But the bill stipulates that an SDS would have to cover an entire local authority. Which means that, if the bill is passed, a new plan would need to be drawn up to include Stockport again. It would also only need majority support — not unanimous approval — to pass, which has always been a thorn in the side of Burnham. And in even better news for the mayor: in the event of a tie over whether to pass an SDS, he would get the casting vote. To read more about Places for Everyone, we published a great long read on the subject last month: Places for Everyone proposes building on Greater Manchester’s green belt. Could this be a good thing?

🩰 And Manchester International Festival’s 2025 launch went ahead on Tuesday, just under four months before the actual festival begins — running from 3-20 July. We went along to see the programme announced by the very charming new Creative Director Low Kee Hong, and from his talk we gathered that it was a festival of firsts: The MIF’s first collaboration with the Royal Ballet, their first time inviting indigenous artists, and, perhaps most crucially, their first time spreading outwards to Greater Manchester, via a piece of performance art involving life-sized animal puppets. Among the various art installations announced was Football City, Art United, a collaboration between artists and footballers that Kee Hong described as “a project as Manchester as can be, but at the same time global”. Afterwards on the stairs we overheard a fellow guest ask their companion what bits from the programme they were most looking forward to, to which they quite reasonably responded: “You know, some of the art.”

Quick hits

Professor Jennifer Watling, a plant scientist at Manchester Metropolitan University, has called for visa rules to be revised so that international students can bring their families to the UK, the BBC reports.

Northern leaders, including chief executive of Greater Manchester Combined Authority Caroline Simpson, discussed devolution and regeneration at MIPIM, the annual real estate bonanza held in Cannes, earlier this week. Place North West has the details.

Could this be the future of housing in Manchester?

Despite first appearances, Jo Sharples and Jack Richards aren’t a couple. The pair are regularly mistaken for one, perhaps due to their habit of finishing each other’s thoughts and sentences — or the fact they’ve opted to live just one street apart. But their partnership is all business; the duo run Editional Studios, a sustainable architecture practice, based in a former balloon shop in Chorlton. Editional are just one of a number of Mancunian businesses and groups beavering away at an environmental innovation that could, maybe, help save our future: retrofitting.

Retrofitting is about carrying out work on old buildings to improve their energy efficiency. I appreciate this sounds boring — your eyelids almost certainly began to droop at the phrase ‘energy efficiency’. But in an era of rampant wildfires and collapsing glaciers, retrofitting is an oasis of good environmental news. 

It’s also a specifically local spot of good news. Because it’s an area where Manchester is forging ahead. In the case of one project in particular — more on this later — one retrofitting group claims we’re amongst the first on the scene to retrofit private homes at scale. And if successful, we could be showing the rest of the UK how to tackle the impact of climate change on our housing.  

I first came across Editional thanks to a booklet they put out in 2022: ‘Decarbonise your house now!’ It’s a bracing read: within the first few paragraphs, it explains that the energy we consume at home counts for almost 20% of carbon emissions in the UK. Oh, and this country has the poorest performing housing stock in Europe. 

But there’s also an excitement bubbling throughout, about what a new approach might entail. We learn: “Tudor houses were sometimes made from the gnarled timbers of shipwrecks absorbing all their history and character” and that “We can easily re-use waste bricks to make spread foundations, like the ones you’ll find in any Victorian house. We can make rubble terrazzo…!” 

This is an attitude Manchester badly needs — in part because of our history. As the land here industrialised, people were sucked into the city from the surrounding countryside. This meant incredibly rapid house building, to accommodate the new influx of people. But such homes were constructed for an age of coal: they were designed to be draughty.

This wasn’t sadism on the part of Georgian and Victorian architects but a necessary design feature. Without gaps to the outside, oxygen in a house would get burned up by coal fires, leaving those inside feeling drowsy and sick. Yet the march of time has transformed practical innovation into a drawback and is a factor in the high heating bills and damp, draughty conditions that contribute to high rates of Mancunian ill health in the present.

Chilly, damp homes are a serious health risk. Excess winter deaths — linked to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases — are almost three times higher for those living in the coldest quarter of housing. Such homes increase risk of colds and flu, while worsening existing conditions like arthritis. And Manchester suffers disproportionately with its health. Life expectancy for men and women here is at least four years shorter than if they lived elsewhere in England, while Mancunian ill-health is also worse than the national average.

Two of the four conditions responsible for the majority of preventable deaths in Manchester are heart and lung disease — the same diseases that cause many of those excess winter deaths in the coldest quarter of housing. Now, it’s not as simple as claiming the housing is bad here, and therefore people are unhealthier. But the overlap seems obvious. And part of the solution is making homes warmer. 

Most of Editional’s projects — whether for private homes or larger community schemes — are retrofits. When they founded the practice in 2018, there was an environmental reckoning going on, with the construction industry grappling with the polluting impact of steel and cement (if these industries were countries, Jo tells me, they would be the third and fourth largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the world). Jo was also teaching a Masters in Architecture at the University of Sheffield in which she educated students about being more sustainable in their designs. In 2020, lockdown hit and Editional was called in by swathes of middle-class homeowners to enact long-planned renovations they finally had time to realise.

But there was a problem: prospective clients wanted work requiring lashings of steel. A moral quandary arose. “Saying to clients: ‘yes, it’s fine to consume as much material as your gloriously Instagrammable open plan kitchen requires’ whilst doing nothing to make the house less consumptive, felt completely fraudulent," says Jo. So Editional doubled down, both in carrying out retrofits with sustainable materials, and simultaneously educating clients on why this was important.

As Jo explains to me, we’re at the beginning of a transition. While there’s been some to-ing and fro-ing on the part of national government (Labour just scrapped a Conservative initiative to reduce new gas boiler installations), it seems likely that eventually all UK houses will switch to being heated by electricity rather than gas. This is because there are renewable sources of electricity but natural gas isn’t a renewable energy source. Electricity is also more expensive. Which means, on top of all the climate adaptation required, there’s a pressing need to insulate houses, or current electricity-based fuel bills will “triple,” warns Jo. 

But even if you don’t care about skyrocketing energy bills, another issue looms. 

There isn’t enough renewable energy to go round. We haven’t yet found a perfect way of storing it. As such, retrofitting is a key part of the puzzle because it reduces the energy each house uses — therefore meaning we’re less likely to run out of energy. Seen through this lens, it’s less of a luxury for the wealthy and more of an essential for all. 

In terms of what a retrofit might entail, Jo stresses that it’s a spectrum, not a one-size-fits all. I want to see their work for myself, so I invite myself along to a three-bedroomed terraced house they’re midway through retrofitting in Old Trafford. I want to know: what sort of work would it need? How much does it cost? And how much would you stand to save on bills?