Rebel Riders – The 522 Mile Cycle to Cop26 with William Ranieri – Day 4/9

On day 4, the cyclists travel from Loughborough to Rotherham, and William visits the Hockerton Housing Project, a site of super-insulated houses. Recent demonstrations from Insulate Britain, an activist group demanding action from the government on home insulation to cut domestic energy waste, have caused a lot of headaches blocking roads and disrupting travellers. Though their demands are straightforward, working out how to implement this strategy on 20 million homes has yet to be determined. The group demanding the government fully funds the plan to insulate all social houses by 2025 may be far-fetched, but what about new houses built with insulation in mind?

Simon Tilley, Director of Hockerton Housing Project, was one of the founding members involved since 1995. They have built sustainable, autonomous homes using water recycling, earth-sheltering, and allowing the sun’s energy to heat up the buildings (along with solar panels for electricity). The houses store the summer heat and keep it until winter, but for this to work the houses must be super-insulated, otherwise the heat battery doesn’t work. The houses are also next to a lake that provides water: they can treat it to make safe for consumption and generate income from fishing. The wildlife habitat can also naturally dispose of their waste, so they don’t have to pay for it to be taken away. We’re currently building houses that we know will need retrofitting in the future, and Simon hopes that the system will change to make homes sustainable from day one.