A rare opportunity to buy an Eco-house in Hockerton Housing Project: extensive outside space, food growing, low carbon energy supply, community building and resources, house and private garden with room for a family 4/5 bed, on site work/income available, resilient against climate shocks, near to 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. 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 AN 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.
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.
How do we approach trying to have a green holiday after all we are not in the office all the time. My hobby is climbing and often aim to climb on holiday. There is a new approach to reduce the impact this is called “Green Pointing”.
So what is Green Pointing and can you apply it? (Also know as EcoPointing for esoteric reasons)
We have been minimising flying for the last 20 years, perhaps a flight every 10 years over this period, the last one was to Sardinia in 2014 when the boat from Italy wasn’t running and we would have missed out on the “team trip” without a flight. With family, the journey involved Eurostar and sleeper to Barcelona, Malaga or Venice. These were great starts to climbing trips, some family time and a shared novel before launching into a frenetic week of climbing with a bunch of teenagers, and grownups. In those days we squeezed the children into the smallest hire car for the last leg.
Offspring are long gone but the urge to climb in Europe stays and in early 2020 we invested in electric Brompton bikes so we could get to the destination without a car at all. Then COVID struck and we had to wait until summer 2022 to try them out with our gear. We had a great trip to the Arriege returning to the lovely accommodation of John Arran (Chez Arran) and all his new routes.
This year as the Climate emergency becomes the focus of much of our spare time, we still need a climbing break. In Conversations with our daughter Flo and the Lattice team we have become aware of “Green Pointing” or as they call it “Ecopointing“. So, our trip to Orpierre is just that!
Breakfast at home. A 7-mile spin on the bikes to Newark. Train to London and lunch and then Eurostar to Paris for dinner. Cycling through Paris cycles routes gets better each time and we stayed in a very tiny but perfect flat in an Airbnb before catching the morning train to Grenoble. A coach through an Alpine pass to Eyguians and the final leg back on the Bromptons for 5 miles to Orpierre.
Unfortunately, the precise moment we set off from Eyguians the weather broke and we had one of our wettest rides ever accompanied by hailstones, thunder and lightning. We dripped into our chalet and sorted ourselves out, snuggled down ready for our first sunny days climbing.
We had 2 weeks to rack up a long list of redpoints, flashes and on-sights (All climbing jargon for ascending rock faces.) before we reversed the trip home with a night in Grenoble rather than Paris. And for the really keen climbers who read this…Notable climbs achieved were: Caroline 7b *** redpoint, La Fin Justifie les Moyens 7a+ redpoint and Misere 7a Onsight. All the stars were absolutely spot on. Many more lower grade routs were very worthwhile but often the lower the grade the more the polish. It’s becoming a popular sport!
Green pointing the trip is part of the adventure and although it will still be carbon heavy its much less so than flying. It will almost certainly have cost more than flying depending on how far in advance you book and there is lots of embodied energy in our bikes but they are a long term investment. We have have to change our behaviour in some way in thee face of the climate crises. To all the conscientious climbers out there we can and should do what we can to reduce our impact whilst we do what we do! How can the non climbers reading this apply it? Well that’s up to you … perhaps consider reducing you impact by taking more local holidays , stopping flying and getting into active transport. And may be give it a name! Happy Green Pointing!
Simon
May 2023
Hints and tips:
I booked the Eurostar and internal French trains via the Rail Europe app.
If you book your UK trains in person in a station showing your Eurostar ticket you can get it as part of the CIV scheme which means if the UK train is late and you miss the connection you can hop on the next Eurostar without paying… just a hint.
Brompton electric folding bikes are the bees’ knees but do bear in mind if you want to take them on the Eurostar you need to put them in a bag. I used our rope ground sheet with elastic in the corners to wrap around mine to make it look like it’s in a bag. Seemed to pass muster. I think it’s to protect other bags from oily chains etc.
The bus from Grenoble was the 51 to Nice, runs once a day and we could only reserve a place via the Zou web site. We could only buy the ticket on the bus which was fine as there was plenty of space. I could not get the Zou app to work to buy a ticket in the UK!
The camp site in Orpierre, Koawa is great and very close to the climbs, we looked out over most of the cliffs! Most of the campers seemed to be climbers when we went in May. Walking up to the crag… fifteen minutes to the closest and may be 60 minutes to the very furthest towards the North-eastern sectors via Adrech parking. We cycled up to this car park and walked from there.
Sadly Le Puy sector is currently closed as the locals fear rock falls.
The France Haute Provence Rockfax guide is good but the local guide has most of the new routes in which are numerous – plenty of un-polished routes. Available in the tourist information centre in Orpierre.
There is a market on Sundays in Orpierre and a good small supermarket with very friendly staff. Check out the opening times when you get there.
More on Ecopointing or if you prefer green-pointing
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!
One of our longest-standing residents reflects on her time at HHP….
This is the 20th year since we joined HHP. We had recently returned from volunteering in Namibia and felt that sustainable development needed to start in the affluent West. We had relocated to Nottingham as I had a medical job there and Simon was looking after our small son Luke and looking for some way of using his engineering skills and doing it sustainably. By chance he came across HHP who were looking for a family to join them and the rest is history!
In those days (1995) I think we were more about sustainable and autonomous housing and climate change was not such an obvious issue but of course that has all changed and Simon now spends a great deal of time thinking about Renewables although our core business of demonstrating and promoting zero energy and sustainable housing continues and has lost none of its relevance today.
We moved into our brand new house in February 1998 after 18 months in a caravan with by then 3 small children. Simon had contributed to the self-build and being on site allowed him to juggle the family and building whilst I went off to a warm comfortable hospital every day! Our neighbours at the time were in a similar position which allowed some complementary childcare and a lot of mutual support!
Over the 20 years the Project has grown in so many ways. We had not realised the amount of interest it would generate with about 30,000 visitors, a significant amount of media interest and a small business that has continued to promote sustainability and provide employment for some of the residents.
Families have come and gone and we are now the last original family. Our children are grown up and Flo who was born when we were in the caravan is doing A levels and considering her future. It is perhaps not surprising that Luke is studying permaculture and small-scale organic horticulture in Leeds and Naomi is down in Falmouth studying Environmental Science. Their childhood in this wonderful site has been spent in the woodland and lake, in a small community of children and adults where they have had the freedom to explore and learn in safety. Parenting them has been easy. It is a pleasure to see other small children growing up and enjoying this space that we have helped to create.
As old families have moved on it is sad to lose that collective memory of the first days and the struggle to get planning permission and the houses built. We will be the last to remember why we did things this way or that and why that particular phrase in the secondary rules was written that way. But new families have brought in fresh energy and ideas and keep the direction of the business gently changing depending on interest, skills and available time.
Simon and I have no plans to leave and this lifestyle and place is perfect for us. The apple trees are in blossom and the new plants in the polytunnel are thriving and ready to go out. As the spring sun floods the conservatory after earlier rain, I am as excited as ever to throw open the doors to the bedrooms and know that the temperature in the house will stay in the low 20s until November.
After 20 years here our lives will change as the children leave and we have a bit more time for ourselves. More time to spend on the land, more time to sort out 20 years of childhood paraphernalia and more time to sit in the kitchen, conservatory, garden or lakeside depending on the weather and the season just enjoying this extraordinary place we helped to create!
