At first glance, Melrose Avenue is just two ordinary rows of terrace houses, tucked behind Moseley Road in Birmingham. Only the eye-catching orange benches and a pair of communal pink bicycles suggest something special is happening here.
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, Jan Burley, a retired social worker who lives at number 10, fills her watering can and helps the children and grandchildren on the street to water the mint and coriander they are growing on shared planters. “I didn’t do gardening until I was 60, but if you can get the children young they will care more about the world to come,” she says.
Today, residents sit on communal furniture alongside apple and almond saplings. But it was not always this way: Burley recalls how over the past three decades concrete slabs covered over the lawns and flowerbeds that once lined the street.
This changed in 2023 when residents took part in Retrofit Balsall Heath, a movement that aims to improve housing and green space in preparation for the effects of the climate emergency, including soaring temperatures and wetter winters. It is one of a number of schemes in the UK where communities are working together to retrofit their buildings and improve green spaces.
More than 4,500 people are estimated to have died in the heatwave that hit the UK in 2022, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), an independent UK body that advises the government on preparing for and adapting to the effects of the climate crisis. That figure could rise to 10,000 every year, it added. UK health officials issued yellow warnings this week as a heatwave pushed temperatures above 30C (86F) in south-east England.
Two measures that can mitigate the effects of high temperatures are well-insulated and ventilated homes, and lining streets with plants and trees to provide shade and cool the air.
But many neighbourhoods lack both: the proportion of green and blue areas (ie parks and ponds) in towns and cities has decreased since 2016, the CCC has shown, and top-down retrofit schemes have barely scratched the surface of improving energy efficiency in Britain’s housing stock.
In 2023, Burley was one of 650 households in Balsall Heath to receive grant funding for a retrofit. She was convinced to do it after answering the door to a volunteer from Retrofit Balsall Heath.
This coalition of community groups, mosques and churches was set up in 2022 to use £10m from the government’s local authority delivery phase 3 (LAD3) to upgrade low-income homes in the area with measures including solar panels and insulation.
The LAD3 scheme ended in 2023, and the community groups in Balsall Heath are appealing to the Labour government to make the next one longer-lasting and community-led.
“The way the last government started and abruptly stopped schemes was a disaster, adding to the problem of a serious lack of trained, accredited professionals,” says Sara Mia, a coordinator at Retrofit Balsall Heath.
She received funding for insulation through the green homes grant, only for her installer to go out of business when the funding ended. Some councils have handed back funding because of a shortage of surveyors and installers.
In some of the UK’s densest urban areas, groups are showing how this centrally funded but community-led approach could work. In April, Civic Square, a community-led organisation based in nearby Ladywood, Birmingham, published 3ºC Neighbourhood, research that included ways citizens in the West Midlands could prepare for summer temperatures 8C higher than they are today, or above 40C consistently by 2030.
Civic Square has worked closely with the economist Kate Raworth to embed doughnut economics, her regenerative alternative to endless growth, in Ladywood, looking at how residents can adapt to the climate crisis and live in harmony with the local environment.
In Civic Square, Raworth found a community that pioneered the application of her economic ideas in a real neighbourhood. “I have always said that 21st-century economics will be practised first and theorised later,” Raworth said. “And Civic Square are a leading example of community-based practice.”
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Immy Kaur, the co-founder of Civic Square, says the organisation supports community-led retrofits in many ways, from weekly skills-sharing and supper clubs, to an intensive regenerative building course, hosted in partnership with the architectural firm Material Cultures, where participants learn to build with biodegradable materials such as straw and hemp. Civic Square is working towards retrofitting a derelict factory on the banks of the old Birmingham canal into a multi-storey centre for learning and sharing.
When it is finished, the reimagined factory, designed by Material Cultures and Architecture 00, will include three floors of public spaces and resources that will feature a book and tools library, gardening space, bicycle repair centre and communal dining – with solar panels powering the building and nearby homes. It will also serve as a cooling centre for people who live in overheating homes in hot summers, and warm rooms for those in damp, cold houses come winter.
Kez Sleeman was inspired to join the four-month regenerative building course after buying his first home and realising that modern materials such as cement had created damp and mould where previous owners had patched up the old lime plaster.
“The reality of the climate emergency is being exploited by an industry which can promise to insulate your home in an afternoon with completely inert and manmade materials,” Sleeman says. “But being more considered opens up opportunities to do things communally, creating skills within communities.”
In 2023, Civic Square joined with other neighbourhood organisations around the UK to host a Retrofit Reimagined festival, two months of events about community-led regenerative building. This year, the partners are focusing on how neighbours can retrofit and rewild their streets.
On Andover Road in Bristol, residents closed the road one Sunday to ride bikes, play games and talk to one another about ideas for shared herb gardens and bike storage. “Part of this retrofit is social relationships,” says Melissa Mean, the director at WeCanMake, the partner organisation in the Knowle West area of Bristol.
In Birmingham, Kaur says communities can show the way but it is the government’s job to distribute funding and design infrastructure that emboldens the power and imagination within neighbourhoods. She is calling for a government vision equal to the founding of the NHS in 1948, established when the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan saw a medical aid society in his home town of Tredegar, south-east Wales, transform people’s health.
This time, Kaur says, the challenge is to improve the health of the planet at the same time as the health of people. “We are preparing for the worst by building something much better.”
