Biggar Youth Project

The Old Mart and New Vision

The young people of a town get a poor press: disapproved of if they are visible or trapped online, in their rooms. In the Lanarkshire town of Biggar they benefit from a warm, non-judgemental place to gather.

Biggar Youth Project is a voluntary organisation which runs activities for High School age young people in Biggar, South Lanarkshire. They support them by providing a base for a range of activities, a place to gather and access hot food, food-share, computers, games and the emotional and practical support of the volunteers and staff that run the space.

As a valued and rooted local initiative funding came from local wind farms, with an obvious interest in low carbon solutions.

A Retrofit Exemplar

It’s now widely accepted – despite the persistence of demolition – that the greenest buildings are those sturdy ones from the past, with carbon and culture embodied, suitably upgraded. The urgent task facing us is therefore the upgrading of their fabric and heat generation; but this is usually done without the necessary understanding of how they move and breathe, and how to achieve the upgrades sympathetically.

Specifically, there’s been a historic change in building technologies, where pre-circa-1914 buildings are built from natural materials which move and breathe – are vapour open, where the tiny molecules of water vapour, CO2 and particulates are exhausted through fabric, while other large, heat-bearing gas molecules are retained. Modern construction, in contrast, looks to seal a building, usually in an effective poly bag, and stop all movement, both of the fabric and of moisture and other non-welcome elements. So: cement (with expansion joints) rather than lime mortar, and polythene vapour barriers. The resultant tendency to trap water vapour which rots timber is then treated with – often – arsenic-based rot treatments, and poisons and toxins are also introduced such as cyanide in cheap, plastic insulation. Such highly-processed materials are not only toxic in any construction but, applied in retrofit, work against the nature of the historic building techniques so, for instance, where unventilated voids are created, damp is trapped and rot thrives.

Specify For Health

We might start with what you might call the anti-Grenfell spec: do not specify poisonous, toxic, incendiary materials; do use natural, breathable ones – these are our young people, after all, and they deserve a non-toxic environment… though the same should go for all of us.

So: walls stripped of impenetrable layers – including gloss paints – and dubbed-out with Baumit breathable lime plaster to avoid voids; insulation to be hemp where possible (in roof – Indinature hemp, with huge carbon-sinking qualities and produced by a Scottish Borders start-up), wood-fibre where not (walls). The fabric remains breathable including continuous eaves-to-ridge ventilation, above the insulation and under the sarking. Walls reasonably airtight.

The energy source is then an air source heat pump, with mvhr – mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to remove water vapour but recapture and reuse heat from the exhaust air.

We architects also need to be upfront with Building Control and the application of their Standards: if they apply newbuild u-values to retrofit, then interstitial condensation is inevitable so, given the huge carbon gains from retaining old and sturdy buildings, relaxation is both reasonable and essential, to avoid condensation and rot. In proving this the standard tool is wufi calculations, and it is our contention that this examination should be required for all retrofit – its absence storing-up retrofit failure for the future.