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gardens to enable social interaction, promote communal living and provide habitats for local wildlife”.


“The question facing us is how we make the transition from the way we live and build now, which is fundamentally unsustainable, to living in an inspiring and healthy way,” said Mr Smales. “Too often the sustainability message is perceived to be about all the things we have to give up, living in a cave with the TV turned off. But we can make it about remaking places to provide beautiful, sustainable ways to live. What an agenda that is.” Paraphrasing US statesman John W Gardner, he said that building more sustainably was actually an opportunity disguised as an insoluble problem. “Construction, architects and designers have a huge opportunity to design a world that regenerates the climate, improves public health and helps make poverty a thing of the past,” he said.


He added that, as a “regenerative material” construction should “damn well use more timber”. The Phoenix is using as much local Sussex wood as possible. But Human Nature is not fixated on home-grown material to the exclusion of all else given that Continental suppliers may be no further from Lewes than Scottish ones.


NEW TIMBER HOUSING MODELS Melissa Mean of community land trust WeCanMake said it too specialised in developing brownfield sites and particularly infill projects. It also places a strong emphasis on engaging with the people who will live


in its housing. It sets up micro factories near sites to “localise modern methods of construction” and enables communities to “directly design, make and adapt their neighbourhood on their own terms”. “We are currently over dependent on financialised volume house builders and our relationship with housing is still very much as a commodity. We need to make it a right, a place of belonging and agency,” said Ms Mean “We want to bring [house building] to community level, promoting local jobs and skills to develop low carbon homes on small urban sites.” WeCanMake has also worked with timber building pioneer architects Waugh Thistleton to develop MultiMax, “an open source, home-grown timber-based kit-of-parts system for low-rise housing”. It meets UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard operational energy targets and, said Ms Mean, can be tailored to meet Passivhaus standards. This system is also about localised prefabrication and construction. “And using


home-grown timber can help us tackle the UK’s current £14bn building material trade deficit,” said Ms Mean.


She added that MultiMax housing has been tested on “real live sites” in Bristol. Robin Dodyk of timber construction specialist Gala Homes highlighted offsite timber frame’s carbon benefits, its capacity to deskill construction at a time of mounting skills shortage, and also its quick build aspect. But the accelerated pace of construction, he underlined, puts new demands on the supply chain. “It means earlier purchase and delivery of doors, windows and so on, and the land has to be ready sooner,” he said. “All the project team need to work to the same goal, supply chain communication is key, and we need to make sure the supplier is not wagging the dog.”


The growing market momentum of MMC timber-based building was underlined by Greencore Homes, which last year secured an additional £30m from M&G Investments, following an initial £15m in 2022. This, said head of modern methods of construction Ness Scott, would help fulfil Greencore’s ambition to become a national housebuilder and deliver 10,000 homes over the next decade. “Our current factory in Bicester can produce 200 homes a year, but future factories will have greater capacity,” he said. The core structure of a Greencore timber frame home is its Biond panel system, incorporating hemp, lime and wood fibre. These can achieve Passivhaus levels of energy performance and lock up 30kg of CO2


e/m2 Above: Jonathan Smales is CEO of Human Nature .


Greencore’s approach is also about optimising building shape, orientation and solar gain. ►


HOMES ENGLAND ENDORSES TIMBER IN CONSTRUCTION ROADMAP


Edward Jezeph of government housing and regeneration agency Homes England described its role linking public and private sectors to deliver affordable housing. It facilitated the construction of 36,000 homes last


year, a 14% increase, and cleared land for a further 79,000 for development. The agency will also be central in the implementation of the government’s recently announced 10-year, £39bn Social and Affordable Housing Programme, which aims to deliver 300,000 new homes. That will include 180,000 for social rent. The aim, says the government, is “to tackle the


entrenched housing crisis that has left families and over 165,000 children stuck in temporary accommodation, without the safe, secure, and stable homes they deserve”.


Mr Jezeph also looked at the role of the National


Housing Bank, the launch of which, as a subsidiary of Homes England, was announced in June. This new Public Financing Institution or ‘PuFin’ has £16bn of financial capacity, with a goal to leverage £53bn of private sector finance to build 500,000 new homes “foster community creation and rejuvenate existing areas”.


Mr Jezeph said the Bank brings “greater agility” to the funding of new developments and will facilitate creation of house building partnering with local community leadership. He concluded that the government’s ambitious target to build 1.5 million homes over five years should be viewed as a £330bn opportunity for the building industry. And that included the timber construction sector. Homes England, he said, endorsed the TiC roadmap and is working with the Timber in Construction Working Group. ■


www.ttjonline.com | September/October 2025 | TTJ


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