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Need for a lead on eco-living
• NO one from Camden Council was able to refute even one of the points I made about the £300,000 eco-showhouse in St Augustine’s Road.
For instance, that they’d apparently paid for cunning heat-exchange units but ended up with plain old extractor fans. Before blowing more public money on such projects, perhaps Camden would like to hire a competent surveyor?
This house isn’t even harvesting rainwater for toilet-flushing, an obvious requirement for eco-living, and which would have been cheap and simple to arrange in a full refurbishment. Councillor Alexis Rowell (Letters, September 4) boasts that ratepayers’ money wasn’t used on this showhouse. So who paid? The tooth fairy?
If Cllr Rowell’s clinching argument is that 200 people have seen this house – I make that £1,500 a visit – he should consider his position. We don’t need to be lectured about loft insulation after all these years. The indoor insulation in the showhouse looks fine.
It also reduces the size of every room, requires the plaster to be hacked off walls and the plumbing and wiring to be rerouted, door and window frames enlarged, and so on. Fine for a total refurbishment, but not realistic for inhabited houses. Where London’s Victorian houses do lose a lot of heat is through large, rattling, single-glazed windows. As Camden will have found, ordering custom-made replacements for just one house is expensive. But give Pilkington Glass and a local joinery an order for identical double-glazed replacement windows for 50 houses, and volume discounts will make a difference to the price and to local employment. Camden and housing trusts could pay their share from budgets or grants, with private occupiers repaying with a bit extra on the rates bill if they can’t pay at once. Then you would have a whole street talking about the benefits of upgrading Victorian properties.
Similar points apply to things like photo-voltaic panels and feed-in tariffs, which will need the clout of a council and not just one household.
What we need from Camden now is some imaginative leadership, not heedless waste of public funds.
MIKE WELLS
Laurier Road, NW5
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