Greenhouse (Leeds)

Greenhouse is an eight-storey, mixed-use block of eco-flats in Beeston, Leeds. The building took its present form in 2010, after renovation of a 1938 development, Shaftesbury House. As Shaftesbury House, the building was noted for its technologically innovative, modernist housing of migrant workers. As Greenhouse, it has been noted for an approach to promoting ecological and social sustainability far ahead of most of the UK building industry.

Shaftesbury House

In the wake of the Great Depression, Leeds was host to large numbers of migrant workers, who were frequently housed in appalling conditions. A programme of slum clearance, partly driven by the Housing Act 1930 and led particularly by Charles Jenkinson, followed, described by the historian Alison Ravetz as 'a heroic age of Leeds history' and fiercely opposed by the Conservative Party. Leeds City Council created the Leeds Model Lodging House in an old dyeworks in 1932, and then created the Shaftesbury House Municipal Hostel as its successor. Shaftesbury House was officially opened on 15 December 1938, opposite the old Holbeck workhouse. The building shared its name with Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, who introduced the Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act 1851.

Art Deco in style, the building was an imposing, five-storey brick edifice, designed in 1936 by George Clark Robb, then senior architectural assistant to R. A. H. Livett. Square in plan, it contained four small courtyards, as many as 523 bedrooms, and numerous common spaces and shared facilities for laundry, washing, cooking, and dining. It was designed to house 308 men and 196 women (in separate areas with separate entrances). It had a different colour scheme for each floor, along with over 60 staff, a barber's shop and a cobblers. It has been seen as a major example of inter-war social housing.

However, by the 1960s-70s, the development had deteriorated. While in the 1960s it was still intended as a hostel only for workers, it served increasingly as a homeless shelter for the unemployed and long-term homeless, and allegedly even became known as the 'dustbin'. It was noted among Leeds's black population for the racism of its staff and inhabitants. It was finally closed and boarded up in November 1998.

Redevelopment

The small Leeds developer Citu conceived a redevelopment of Shaftesbury Hourse in 2005, and completed the purchase of the building in 2008, with finance coming prominently from the Co-operative Bank. The development was co-ordinated with Leeds City Council as part of the regeneration of the Holbeck/Beeston area of Leeds, though local residents were not uniformly enthusiastic about the development, and investors were nervous at its down-at-heel location.

Work on-site began in December 2008. The ground floor of Shaftesbury House was turned into car parking and plant rooms, and the cruciform inner wings demolished to create a single large courtyard. To achieve this, a JCB was craned into the existing courtyards, and some use was made of remote-controlled robots. The remaining fabric became an outer ring, entirely residential, while a new inner ring was built, with business space on the lower floors and residential space on the upper. Two entirely new floors were added on top of these. This took the size of the building from 80,000 to nearly 140,000 square feet. The framework and roof were completed during August 2009, and the building was finished in April 2010, at which time it had 172 one, two and three-bedroom eco-apartments, and about 15,000 square feet of office space. The building was officially opened by Hilary Benn MP on 1 October 2010.

Units went on sale, off plan, in April 2007, many people buying the flats as investments, with 130 being sold within a week. However, the redevelopment took place against the backdrop of the Great Recession, with Greenhouse being one of few large developments to be completed in Leeds after the housing market crashed. Not all original buyers followed through with their purchases, but most did, and 75% of homes had been sold by early 2011, which was reported as a significant achievement. But Citu temporarily diversified their use of unsold units to include a conference suite called Greenspace and an aparthotel business.

The developers prominently expressed an ethos for the building that included a holistically conceived architecture and engineering system that focused on ecological and social sustainability and that promoted small, creative business and urban regeneration. The developers cited influence from Japanese design. Their emphasis, in line with ecomodernism, was on enabling more sustainable life without expecting residents consciously to make sacrifices. They expressly resisted what their director Chris Thompson called the 'build it and leg it' model of development, and as of 2018 were still headquartered in the building, while the building's concierge, Jimmy, was recruited from among the builders who worked on the redevelopment. Commentators noted that, since sustainability plant took up 10% of the building's space, the developers had foregone some easy profits. Citu continued to manage the building until selling the freehold to Ground Rent Income Fund and handing over management to Braemar Estates in 2013.

Sustainability features

The building has been ranked at Code for Sustainable Homes level 4 (out of 6); at the time this meant that it more than doubled the number of such units in the UK. A key aspect of its sustainability is that it involved renovating an existing structure. The following features were, at the time of the building's design, presented as innovative sustainability features.

Insulation, heating, and cooling

The building was built or, in the case of older parts, clad with high-performance insulation. According to the architects, the building achieved an airtight building envelope with the following U-values:

Energy for heating was designed to come from solar water heating through 44 roof-mounted panels, then among the largest such schemes in the UK, and ground source heating via two eighty-metre boreholes enabling heat to be condensed from a natural reservoire beneath the building. An electric immersion-heating system was installed as a back-up.

Heating and cooling of rooms is achieved through a shared system based on heat exchange, integrated into the water heating and cooling system, and delivered via air-conditioning (meaning that units contain no boilers or radiators). Instead of being expelled into the atmosphere, waste heat from warm parts of the building (such as busy offices) can, for example, be transferred to cool parts of the building (such as north-facing residences), or used to warm water.

Features reported but not implemented

One resident interviewed by the Daily Telegraph noted that there had been technical problems with some of the features of the building, 'but most residents accept that it comes with the territory of living with cutting-edge technology'; November 2020 saw the building seeking planning permission for the installation of an air-source heating system.

Carbon footprint

At the concept stage, the building was widely touted as being 'carbon negative', intended to generate more energy than it used. This was later tempered to 'zero-carbon', nearly zero-carbon, or 'self-sufficient'. On completion of the building, the architects in fact estimated annual CO2 emissions for a typical flat of 0.5 tonnes, representing a 60 per cent overall increase in energy efficiency compared with an average UK property, though a resident later blogged real-life figures that suggested higher emissions. The carbon footprint of creating and redeveloping the building appears not to have been measured.

Influence

The building has influenced subsequent work by the same developers, such as at Little Kelham and a factory in Hunslet to produce passive houses, initially for deployment next door in Citu's Climate Innovation District in Leeds.

Greenhouse was visited by the then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne, in 2012.

Awards

The building has won the following awards.
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