Cambridge homes to open to help meet city’s zero-carbon challenge
Cambridge’s annual open doors event – Open Eco Homes – will celebrate its tenth anniversary on September 10.
This special one-off event will bring together five speakers, including Baroness Brown of Cambridge Julia King and award-winning Cambridgebased architect Meredith Bowles.
The event, Cambridge 2030, will compliment the usual mix of Open Eco Home tour days (September 22 and 28) and workshops (September 17 until October 9).
Other speakers include Greater Cambridge senior sustainability officer Emma Davies, leading community housing developer Chris Brown, and particle physicist eco-home retrofitter Bart Hommels.
The focus of the evening will be the challenge of meeting the Greater Cambridge goal of becoming zero carbon by 2030, as set out in their climate emergency declaration earlier this year.
Organiser Allan Shepherd said: “Our tenth anniversary is a good opportunity to create a city-wide conversation about the next 10 years.
"What do we want our homes to be like by 2030? Will they answer the challenge of the climate emergency, while still delivering comfort and inspirational living spaces?
"We’ve reached out to people who are working at the forefront of these questions and asked them to bring their wisdom and experience to Cambridge 2030.
“Open Eco Homes is the longest running event of its kind and has delivered more than 4,000 tours over the last decade.
"It has helped hundreds of Cambridge families to improve their homes in an environmentally-friendly way.
“We want people to use the opportunity of celebrating this achievement to spark some creative fires and inspire longterm relationships that can take Cambridge forward through the next ten years of transition to the low-carbon economy.”
Two of the speakers, Bart Hommels and Meredith Bowles, also have homes open as part of the Open Eco Homes open days on September 22 and 28.
Mr Hommels has transformed his home in Whitwell Way, Coton, with a largely-DIY retrofit that has slashed energy bills and carbon emissions.
Ms Bowles is the chief architect at Mole, the architects of RIBA award-winning co-housing project Marmalade Lane in north Cambridge.
There are 12 Open Eco Homes, including the largest passive house development in Cambridge and a newly-refurbished Victorian terrace house.
openecohomes.org
