The Swedes figured out some time ago that if they were going to build an international reputation, then it would be based on not just exporting bog-standard goods, but products that seemed to embody the national character: powerful, stoic, individual, accessible, sensitive. Like Volvos and Saabs and bolt-together furniture. Most of which is, of course, blonde.
One of the country’s outstanding exports is the brand leader of the oldest profession in the world, the “Swedish model”. It was very exciting to discover that Yvette Cooper, the housing and planning minister, recently went on a fact-finding mission to find out more about Swedish models, but it turns out that my idea of this particular brand only enjoys success outside Scandinavia. On home turf, the Swedish model means only one thing: housing.
And a good thing, too. The Swedes take their houses, like their brands, very seriously. You have to when the temperature in more than half the country hovers below zero in winter. In British housing we worry about staying dry; there they have to make sure they don’t freeze to death.
I spent a week filming on the frozen Baltic coast some years ago, just south of the Arctic Circle near Umea. It was January and only light for a few hours a day. Not that our time was productive even then, because every time we stepped outside to film anything, the cameraman’s fingers froze to the camera and the whole crew fell dumbstruck with lockjaw. After 20 minutes, all the machinery stopped working, and after 30 minutes, my legs stopped working. Then my brain. And yet the Swedes were cheerfully popping in and out of their homes and offices and shops as though we were in downtown Godalming.
In such an extreme environment, it’s not surprising to find all kinds of progressive features in Swedish homes. Walls of a modern house will be insulated with 300mm (often more) of recycled newspaper, with maybe 500mm or more in the roof. Windows are triple-glazed and super-airtight. A heat recovery system — a big white box that looks like a boiler — will transfer up to 90% of the heat from extracted stale air and transfer it to incoming cold fresh air, replacing all the air in the building twice an hour. It’s not unusual to find a house extracting heat from rocks deep underground with a geothermal pump.
Because of the remoteness of so many communities, and the difficulties of maintaining infrastructures in deepest winter, many places have their own power supplies and district heating systems, where one boiler might produce all the hot water (carried through superinsulated pipes) and electricity the community needs.
Not that many of these ideas are new. Architecture’s primary role is to provide shelter and comfort for human beings, and in harsh environments it has to respond more robustly to provide a habitable environment. In Finland last year I visited a 200-year-old house built out of logs, with 18th-century cavity-wall insulation. Between two walls of timber, the Finns had stuffed anything they could get their hands on within a half-mile radius: sheep’s wool, felt, straw and moss. Add one giant wood-burning stove, and the place was not only toasty, it positively induced us to take our clothes off and smack each other with birch twigs. Very powerful and stoic.
And, of course, all these Scandinavian buildings I’ve visited are built of wood. Which, on the whole, makes them healthy to be in and sustainable to build. Not that the word sustainable has ever been bantered around much in these places. Just as people have had to insulate their homes to prevent themselves from waking up frozen to the mattress, houses are made from wood up there because there’s not much else to build with.
So the Swedish, or Finnish, or Norwegian model, it turns out, is something of a home-grown happy accident. Cooper may have visited the supercool ecodevelopments of Malmo, such as the ridiculously named Bo01 City of Tomorrow, or the magical self-heating homes of Glumslov, but these contemporary models of planet-friendly living owe their DNA to a tradition of construction that is second nature in that part of the world, thanks to a harsh environment, a concern for the air quality of an indoor environment in which people have to spend a large part of the year, and of course, a great profusion of trees.
The problem for us in Britain is that we’re a bunch of softies. Our weather isn’t life-threatening for half the year and, traditionally, we haven’t needed to worry about how well our buildings perform. A bit chilly? The answer has always been to turn up the heating, regardless that most of the heat then disappears out of the building. It’s one of the reasons why Britain is so grey: most of our fossil fuel ends up heating the lower atmosphere to make cloud.
Except that our climate is now changing fast; the social and political climates are changing even faster. Cooper has made two significant statements recently, one in which she announced energy performance certificates for every house in the country, a bit like the A-G ratings you find on a fridge. Significantly, she linked this move to an initiative to get mortgage lenders and insurance companies to offer “eco” mortgages to help fund the greening of our homes. So you can now buy some solar panels on the never-never just like you can a sofa from DFS. The trouble with this idea is that it will inevitably place pressure on low-income families who are already strapped for cash, and who may well live in poorly performing, underinsulated houses.
Her other move was to throw down the gauntlet to developers and take a lead from the north Europeans: “If other countries can do it, so can we. The challenge now is for UK developers to create low-cost and low-carbon homes.” The problem here is the reason other countries can do it so well is the same reason we can’t. Land in Sweden and Finland is cheap. In Germany, even though build costs are high, the planning system has released land for construction in such a generous way that over 30 years the price of a house has effectively remained the same. Even in Holland, a country more densely populated than ours, developers can afford to put more cash into the building than we can.
Meanwhile, in the UK, we suffer from both a restrictive planning system that can’t release enough land and an attitude that our home is an inalienable investment. We love the fact that our property increases in value beyond inflation, and don’t bat an eyelid that up to half of the cost of a new house is often swallowed up in land value. So by the time they’ve finally found and bought a site, a developer doesn’t have much left in the kitty to build the damned houses.
No wonder our homes are so cheap and nasty compared to our European friends.
Don’t believe me? Then look at the research. Lord Rogers’s Urban Task Force produced a report showing that German houses were up to 50% larger than ours: EU housing statistics put the floor space of new British homes at the bottom of the list, at, on average, 76sq m as opposed to France (113sq m) or Greece (126sq m). And yet we then take our pokey, low-ceilinged homes and divide them into even smaller, unmanageable spaces. Our average room size is about 16sq m, in Sweden or Finland it is about 21sq m, in Holland 28sq m and in Denmark 39sq m.
Of course, size isn’t everything, but there is a minimum amount of space that each human being needs. There are other “design quality indicators”, too, such as light, view, layout and facilities, but in every report from The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, or Lord Rogers, or the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, or the Royal Institute of British Architects, the same lip-biting fact emerges. You want to see exciting, responsive, sustainable contemporary domestic architecture? Go abroad.
Even the government’s own statistics bear out the story. In 2004, 6.3m homes were deemed “non-decent” — that’s 29% of our housing stock. But there’s an even worse figure, and that reflects our streetscape: 3.2m homes are in “poor-quality environments” where shoddy public space, traffic and lack of maintenance blight people’s lives.
Paul King is a director of WWF and the man behind its One Planet Living campaign to reduce our energy and resources consumption. He accompanied Cooper to Sweden on her search for the perfect house and, as he says, the problem with British homes doesn’t stop at the front door: “For the UK to overtake Europe, we need more than aspiration we need bold regulation sustainable, community-wide infrastructure for energy, water, waste and materials combined with top-class urban design — places that offer surprises around every corner, not predictable, bland buildings plonked in boxy rows.”
There are one or two inklings in this coutnry: glimmers of exemplary design, properly sustainable communities and some hopeful schemes in the pipeline from smaller developers. But King’s challenge seems more fully formed than Cooper’s; his is a real man-sized gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the chief housebuilders. Boy, have they got a lot of catching up to do. Thank heavens for Swedish models.
