A rare opportunity to buy an Eco-house in Hockerton Housing Project: Community living in an eco development, access to extensive outside space, food growing, low carbon energy supply, community building and resources, house and private garden with room for a family 4/5 bedrooms, on site work/income available, resilient against climate shocks, near to great schools and facilities, low impact living, talk to us now:
One of the most energy efficient homes in the UK, nestled in the rural village of Hockerton, near the bustling country town of Southwell and in the Hockerton Housing Project a world-renowned sustainable development. It sits in the heart of the community here. You can join the change with us. See “How to Join”
We all value clean air and a good place to live, specially to bring up children. An ideal place to grow up in as a child. This home offers a fantastic opportunity to live in a house fit for the future. Warm and comfortable living with built in resilience and community all around. The house space is flexible and full of light with a very spacious conservatory to the south.
BUY YOUR ECO HOME IN HOCKERTON
It is built based on the earth sheltered high mass designs of world renown architects Dr Robert and Prof Brenda Vale. This is a very rear chance to live the dream in a sustainable development.
So how to buy this eco home 3 Gables Drive Hockerton. Please make enquiries via our email address contact@hockertonhousingproject.org.uk . We can send you the brochure, arrange a viewing and enable you to meet the neighbours. It will be available to move into from March 2025.
This home can align your values with your living space, it’s a house fit for the future. The garden overlooks the lake, spacious and teaming with wildlife. There is also the opportunity to join the community business and share the facilities; Wind turbines, PV systems and self-contained water works.
The local pub is just a short walk away. Southwell just over the hill and offers good schools, shops, restaurants and many other amenities within a thriving community.
As Simon said “This is the largest house in the development and offers the most space for a family. The super insulated earth sheltered design with an internal heat battery works very well indeed at keeping heating bills to a minimum and the environmental impact low. It is adaptable to a 4 or 5 bedroom home suitable for families. It would be an ideal place to grow up in!”
Full details available in the sale brochure upon request.
We are helping the owners sell this property so Contact us now before it’s gone to arrange a viewing and put your offer in.
A rare opportunity to buy an Eco-house in Hockerton Housing Project: Community living in an eco development, access to extensive outside space, food growing, low carbon energy supply, community building and resources, house and private garden with room for a family 4/5 bedrooms, on site work/income available, resilient against climate shocks, near to great schools and facilities, low impact living, talk to us now:
One of the most energy efficient homes in the UK, nestled in the rural village of Hockerton, near the bustling country town of Southwell and in the Hockerton Housing Project a world-renowned sustainable development. It sits in the heart of the community here. You can join the change with us.
We all value clean air and a good place to live, specially to bring up children. An ideal place to grow up in as a child. This home offers a fantastic opportunity to live in a house fit for the future. Warm and comfortable living with built in resilience and community all around. The house space is flexible and full of light with a very spacious conservatory to the south.
BUY YOUR ECO HOME IN HOCKERTON
It is built based on the earth sheltered high mass designs of world renown architects Dr Robert and Prof Brenda Vale. This is a very rear chance to live the dream in a sustainable development.
So how to buy this eco home 3 Gables Drive Hockerton. Please make enquiries via our email address contact@hockertonhousingproject.org.uk . We can send you the brochure, arrange a viewing and enable you to meet the neighbours. It will be available to move into from March 2025.
This home can align your values with your living space, it’s a house fit for the future. The garden overlooks the lake, spacious and teaming with wildlife. There is also the opportunity to join the community business and share the facilities; Wind turbines, PV systems and self-contained water works.
The local pub is just a short walk away. Southwell just over the hill and offers good schools, shops, restaurants and many other amenities within a thriving community.
As Simon said “This is the largest house in the development and offers the most space for a family. The super insulated earth sheltered design with an internal heat battery works very well indeed at keeping heating bills to a minimum and the environmental impact low. It is adaptable to a 4 or 5 bedroom home suitable for families. It would be an ideal place to grow up in!”
Full details available in the sale brochure upon request.
We are helping the owners sell this property so Contact us now before it’s gone to arrange a viewing and put your offer in.
Occasionally houses come up for sale in Hockerton Housing Project. The opportunity to buy a house is rare. It is always sad to see old residents move on and yet exciting to have new neighbours. There are a great deal of opportunities in the project, both socially and in our trading business. You get full access to both when you move in. Living here is a mix of individual time and space combined with community. The houses are self-contained but there are also lots of shared elements around them. The houses have their own front and back gardens with access to the land around them jointly. This mix has proven to be popular with families.
Children have always loved playing here in a community space having lots of fun. Always very comforting to know that the neighbours will keep a weather eye out for them too. We have found it an incredibly supportive and safe place for children. In fact one of my children has come back to live here as a grown up! What better testament is there than that.
The grown-up stuff
As a community we have to cooperatives set up one for running the community business and one for organising the domestic side. These are Hockerton Housing Project Trading Ltd and Hockerton Housing Project Ltd. Each of these has its own organisation structures. More information on this and how to join can be found here. We suggest you read the community rules in these companies’ documents before joining the group and we will help you understand them if you come along to one of our community meetings. They come to life in a meeting!
Please contact us if you think you might want to buy one of our houses.
Hockerton Housing Project is excited to announce it has released its own housing standard fit for the future world of zero carbon houses. It is called the Hockerton House Performance Standard and outlines the requirements that houses will need to be built to in order to achieve a sustainable low impact world. Unlike the Passivhaus standards these are free to use and go far beyond what Passivhaus can achieve. They are there to inspire!
Minister for Housing Nick Raynsford visiting Hockerton Housing Project
Since the visit of the Minister for Housing Nick Raynsford at our opening we have been pushing the boundaries of construction. Our latest development of nine houses is taking shape with the walls going up in Howgate Close, Eakring with a predicted SAP score of 142! Jerry Harrall is delivery the project and writing Howgate Close, blog.
Howgate close foundations
The UK is facing a crisis in housing which requires a dramatic change in how houses are designed and built to achieve the carbon reductions necessary to meet our climate change targets. With this in mind we are proposing standards of construction to inspire people to construct very high-performance houses factoring in embodied energy and within sustainable communities. The lifestyle of the people living in houses affects emissions of carbon significantly so cannot be ignored. A well-engineered house and designed community space will help inspire them to reduce their carbon emissions. Inspiration can lead to action given the right environment.
The imbedded House Performance Standards are performance based to allow individual designers and builders to create their own solutions. This should encourage creativity and enable future solutions to be incorporated in the finished houses.
These performance standards have been inspired by Dr Robert Vale, Professor Brenda Vale, Mr Nick Martin and the practical experience of the members of Hockerton Housing Project since 1993. They have drawn on General Information Report 53 produced for the Department of Environment Transport and the Regions by the Building Research Energy Conservation Support Unit. More recently the Leti “Net Zero Operational Carbon” targets have pushed us!
We have now been running our aquaponics system for a year. It was installed as part of a PhD project emerging from Sheffield Hallam University, exploring how a lay-person would take to soil-free gardening, and capturing lessons that may prove of use if the approach is to be taken up more widely.
Last September we posted our lessons from the initial design and cycling of the aquaponics system, and here is the experience gained from using it in earnest.
Temperature: we are still waiting for the live temperature monitoring system planned by the University, but temperatures in the tank got down to 5C in this uncharacteristically long, cold winter. We keep carp in our system in part due to their ability to cope in a range of temperatures, and whilst their activity seemed to slow, there was no significant problem.
Temperature time-lag: the salads planted in the spring were a lot faster growing in the soil than aquaponics. Without monitoring data it is hard to specify the cause but it is likely that problems with the auto-siphon (see 8) slower supply of feed and oxygen, and we suspect that the temperature of the water was slower to rise than that of the soil.
Over-winter plants: our main problem over winter was vermin rather than temperatures. The kohlrabi were eaten in one night. But other plants thrived, and we had a supply of green leaves from Mizuna, chard and spinach plants through til Spring.
Thermal mass: Another success were the tomatoes which survived 6 weeks longer than those a meter away that were planted in soil. This may be due to their later planting, but their close proximity to heat-storing thermal mass may also play a part. The mass is in the clay balls in which they are planted, the water, and the dense concrete blocks that support our growing beds – against which the tomatoes were trailed.
Minerals: We share the produce grown between our five households, and concern was raised about whether they were as healthy as soil-grown plants due to a lack of minerals. This prompted some further reading but we were on the right track:
Maxicrop to add micronutrients in our initial cycling
Rocks from our carp pond helped introduce naturally-occuring bacteria
To this we added, after three months, composting worms which seem to be surviving well, and there is no sign of mineral deficiency in the leaves or crops.
Sowing medium: some seeds have self-sown (tomatoes), and some peas and beans have successfully grown from seed scattered in the beds, but vermin were a significant problem – perhaps due to the long winter. To get round this we started seedlings off in an Ikea hydroponics kit in a conservatory, made more sustainable by using our own sheeps’ wool to form the sowing medium, instead of mineral wool.
Evaporation: again, we are yet to receive the monitoring equipment but it seems more water is evaporating than we would expect, with the system requiring approximately 300 litres top-up every 2-3 weeks in growing season.
Cleaning: it took a long time to select fish food and it’s not clear we made the right choice. A lot of it is either not properly digested or dissolved and so occasionally blocks the pipes or is spewed out in to the last growing bed in the system. This bed is now protected to some degree by a sieve under the inlet pipe, but we would advise others to experiment with different feeds before buying a 25kg bag! The outcome of this was that the inlet water slowed to the point it was insufficient to trigger the auto-siphons, the growing beds did not drain once flooded (unless triggered manually) and so plants were starved of oxygen for much of the day.
The plants we are now testing for the first time (for us, at least) are French beans, squash, kale and spring onions. The French beans are densely planted, and are producing many more although much smaller, finer beans than those planted in neighbouring soil; the squash and courgette are slower to take off than those planted in soil, as is the kale, so it is still early days; but it is a delight to finally grow some spring onions which have never taken off in our soil beds.
You can follow more of our food-growing ventures on Instagram.
