Value and Use Class Clips

Britain's biggest building company has a new name and a new boss.

Sir Neville Simms runs Carillion, formerly part of Tarmac.

They built the Channel Tunnel.

The Thames Barrier.

And most of our motorways.

But a key part of the business is refurbishing council and housing association homes.

The Government spends over £1 billion a year doing them up.

Carillion employ a tenant liaison officer to deal with

disagreements between the builders and the residents and to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Sir Neville will be Maggie Brownset's trainee for the week.

Well, my job is to move people out of their homes and to move people back when they're completed.

We're going to see Mrs Cook,

-who is going to be moving out on Wednesday of this week.

-Yes.

We haven't made any of the arrangements yet.

You're going to be doing that.

And we do absolutely everything for them.

Each tenanted home is receiving a makeover worth around £40,000.

The money comes from the government-funded Housing Action Trust.

Much of the cash is being spent on internal home improvements.

So it's vital to get all the little details right before work starts.

-This is Neville. This is Mrs Cook.

-Hello, Mrs Cook.

None of the tenants know who Sir Neville really is.

How long are you going to be out of your house for?

-It's roughly about 12 weeks.

-And what are they going to do?

-Patio doors there.

-Yes.

They're going to tidy all my walls.

New kitchen units and I'll have kitchen units on that side as well.

Part of the tenant liaison officer's job is to check on homes after they've been refurbished.

The paper. Instead of when you're coming along

with a strip of paper and you've got about an inch and a half left,

instead of coming round and matching up, they're just going into the corner and overlapping.

-Every corner's the same.

-Mmm.

-The work is atrocious, mate. I think so.

The work is so sub-standard.

None of it's joined. It doesn't even match if you look at it.

The wallpaper.

There are supposed to be two roses there. One and a bit.

Also, we're getting the dust, like I say. Sometimes it's on paper.

-Where's the dust coming from?

-This is what I don't know.

They're trying to tell me, the know-alls at the Housing Action Trust, once your carpets are down,

the dust will stop. Well, this is not happening.

If you were sitting there one night with the fire off and a window open, you can actually smell it.

However many times you clean it, that's what you get every time.

Yeah, it's most peculiar.

There's a draught coming through the bottom of that.

It was coming round all over it

and he put some sealant round it the other day.

But he still hasn't done it. We're made to feel the guilty party and I don't think it's fair.

Whoever put these in must have been either drunk

or something, but I don't know what was the matter wi' him.

There's no way in hell they've spent £35,000 here.

And if there is, I'd like to see a breakdown of everything they've put in this house.

Maggie.

-Hello, Neville.

-Oh dear. Don't be sad about it. I'd like to talk about Buchanan.

Oh, look, it's thicker than everybody else's.

Let me ask you the 64,000 dollar question.

Does Mr Buchanan really have any complaints, in your mind?

Is there anything of substance here?

No. I say to everybody, when you move back in your home,

you are bound to find something that you are not happy with.

And I just say to them, bring a little list in, which they do.

And I always say a "little list"

to them. We've had lots and lots of lists off Mr Buchanan.

Do you think we even go into loss on people like that?

Well, I suppose with the amount of time that trades have to go back there, I mean,

I'm not into the money side of it, but each time somebody has to go back

and they're not doing something somewhere else, I should imagine yes, it does cost the company money.

One of the most interesting things for me is what we do for the residents.

You help people to choose the wallpaper, you sit with people in the most amazing surroundings,

not very nice surroundings on occasions, to talk to them about moving their furniture out.

But one of the points I'm going to put on the table is, do we do too much?

Do we get the balance between operational activities and liaison activities right?

A Scots gentleman,

who amazingly, you are not going to believe this, we have featured in our magazine.

Ron, chuck me down the magazine, please.

I'll just show you what I found when I came back in here. I didn't know this until I opened this up.

"We understand you".

And I can assure you that if anybody understands Mr Buchanan, it's not us on the site there, because we don't.

At the end of the day, the brochure is full of people because our business is about people

and we're going to find that there's good and bad

-and we need to manage those as well.

-Take my word for it, I had my ear bent something rotten.

He has more complaints about more things than one could possibly imagine.

The difficulty is, how to take the few complaints that are genuine, seriously.

When 100 of them are totally spurious.

And that's where, you know, our resident liaison officer, our Maggies of this world,

have to show considerable patience because it's not an easy task.

It's been called Britain's single greatest contribution to urban design.

It's this country's most common form of housing.

It's the humble, and not always so humble, British terraced house.

It's built into our cultural imagination as a double-edged symbol of both community and poverty.

Plenty of people who were brought up in back-to-backs like these couldn't get out of them fast enough,

so why do conservationists want to preserve

what many would see as a basically obsolete form of housing?

The heritage group SAVE is best known for rescuing great houses and churches.

Now, with hundreds of streets lying empty, they say we must save the northern terrace from destruction.

The terrace house is a great British invention.

Other nations live in great apartment blocks, but in

Britain we all have a front door. And that actually means something.

The terraced house began as an aristocratic idea.

It began in the squares in London,

the Georgian squares, and gradually the idea trickled downward because,

with the Industrial Revolution, you needed to house a lot of people

in quite a small amount of space, quite close to the factories.

Because people walked to work.

But now suburbanisation, the car and a surplus of

new housing in the North have all emptied the inner cities.

While the terrace is truly routed in our industrial past, the present day sees thousands, tens of thousands,

of these houses, abandoned from Liverpool to Newcastle.

So, what's it been like living on a real live Coronation Street here in Salford?

Well, I've lived here 41 years.

And there's been a big change in the area.

When I first moved here, it was a lovely area.

Cobbled streets, children playing in it, doors open, very good neighbours.

Then, it just all changed. People moved out, bad people moved in.

The area went down. It was a ghetto.

While most of the country obsesses about house prices,

terraces like these in Salford have become worthless. Literally, worth nothing.

The Government decided to regenerate this housing market.

Their advisers suggested demolishing between 150,000 and 400,000 terraced houses.

Figures initially endorsed by the Government, while horrifying conservationists.

We think that this demolition

on an enormous scale is completely unnecessary.

These houses can be quite simply and inexpensively improved

and made into nice places to live, with heating, insulation, warmth.

The numbers in the SAVE report are just complete nonsense.

I know there's been a lot of exaggeration in this area.

We should just look very practically at what's happening at the moment

in the current phase of the Pathfinder programmes.

They're proposing 20,000 refurbishments and 10,000 demolitions.

That's twice as much refurbishment as demolition. But they're also proposing new-build as well.

Back in Salford, just crossing the street can take you

from a thriving terraced community to an area of complete dereliction.

But behind the barbed wire and tinned up houses,

there's an idea for the future of the terraced house.

Because knocking down to rebuild is many times more expensive than just

refurbishing, a commercial developer is adapting these empty terraces into modern homes.

Keeping the Victorian facade and rebuilding the interior,

Urban Splash are turning the terrace upside down.

Beds on the ground floor, living space up to the ceiling.

Coronation Street crossed with Sex And The City, all to draw

a wealthier population into the skin of a dying inner city street.

You can see from here, it's quite a complicated process

keeping the facade. But I believe they're well-designed streets.

They're right in scale, right in stature.

They look attractive, the detailing is slightly different on every street.

There's a certain warmth about the architecture and the facade.

It's a housing form with at least two very loyal fans.

Is there a limit to what you can do with your terrace?

There's plenty you can do with it, if you've got a good husband like mine.

Thank you.

I might get a drink tonight.

The root of all evil in buildings is water.

It dissolves buildings.

It consumes wood, erodes masonry,

corrodes metal and peels paint.

It permeates everywhere when it evaporates and expands destructively when it freezes.

It warps, swells, discolours, rusts, loosens, mildews and stinks.

Water is the elixir of life to rot and insects.

All this damage has been caused by a tiny frost split in an attic pipe.

Water is one of the biggest problems

with buildings because it comes from so many sources.

It can be mixed with sewage,

it can be rainwater, it can be water from washing machines.

It can get into the fabric of the building and once it does, it takes a long time to disappear.

It stays there. With warmth and cold, the problem is magnified.

Maintenance is a never-ending cycle.

No-one knows this better than a south London Council's emergency response team.

Much of their work comes down to fighting the effects of water.

Maintenance is low priority.

When it competes with more pressing needs, it always loses.

It's a slow-moving problem in a fast-moving world, so we let it go, until it reaches a crisis.

Mick Morley and Albert Mills belong to a small unit of workers

providing round-the-clock emergency service for Lambeth Council.

They're on call to deal with anything that goes wrong

in the borough's 47,000 housing units.

On a busy night, they handle as many as 100 calls.

..I'll get them to send a contractor back out to do the job properly.

We'll do what we can with it, but it needs to be done.

Someone has to come here tonight.

We've been here the whole weekend and can't use the toilet.

I'll see if I can get a plumber out tonight. Hello, 799, receiving?

Hello, Sam.

What we've got is a brand new job, a toilet has been refitted but by Donald Duck, I'm afraid.

We need a plumber out here to rectify it because the toilet is totally unusable.

The toilet was not put in by the council's employees but by someone else.

It's a shoddy job, done in a hurry,

typical of the low priority that maintenance usually gets.

The building is like a living thing, you know?

It's bricks, mortar, timber, metal, glass and it needs maintaining.

If it's done a little bit and often, it'll be great,

but if it's left for 30 years and then someone panics and thinks,

it's going to cost them too much.

It may even be cheaper to knock it down and rebuild it.

The accumulated effect of rainwater running down the face of this old mill

in the West Country has nearly split the building in half.

The mill is virtually beyond repair,

thanks to £100 that was not spent on a new downpipe.

An empty building rots fast and attracts trouble.

Once it's left unheated and unventilated,

any moisture that gets in immediately begins to cause serious damage

with no-one around to notice or worry.

Just one loose roof tile can kill a whole building.

The wind gets in and starts lifting the other tiles.

Once the roof is open, water pours in,

causing the walls to bow out and the house begins to collapse.

People can be as destructive as weather to empty buildings.

Squatters know better than most about the netherworld of semi-abandoned housing.

People actually go around in vans and break-in to old properties,

if they're boarded up, or look empty,

take out the fireplaces, take out skirting boards,

light switches, floorboards,

joists even, they'll even take out the joists, you know.

That's how they make their living, basically,

by gutting the inside of houses.

I have actually woken up and found people knocking down walls

in the property that I've been staying in.

I was up on the top floor,

I heard loads of banging, come down and there was this guy taking out a bay window.

I was like, "What the hell are you up to, man? There's people living in his property."

SIRENS

Just like a jail, that was my first impression. It looked shocking.

995 flats, three persons in a flat, that's nearly 3,000 people on here.

-WOMAN:

-I'm terribly lonely. I feel as though I'm shut away from the world.

It's fantastic. It's like a piece of sculpture.

It's about reinventing something that was of huge significance at the time

and didn't really quite work for a whole series of reasons.

Getting to the roots of why it didn't work and what you've got to make it work for the future.

An amazing building, incredibly intricate

and finely formed and thought out.

While it's not perfect, there's so much about it that's good.

We want to kind of bring back the love, basically.

There was a dream, 40 or 50 years ago,

and it wasn't just quite right

and we have a second chance of getting it right.

Come on, listing '60s buildings isn't an exact science.

That's where you're wrong. Listing buildings

is an exact science, that's what it's about.

We try and make it a science, not an art.

It may have caused eyebrows to be raised, listing this building,

but as far as historians are concerned,

as far as English Heritage was concerned, this place made the grade.

It's a building that inspires strong emotions, either of hatred or love,

and that's more than a lot of new buildings today.

That's not good enough.

We need to make sure that it can have a viable future.

It can't just stay in a way that doesn't work.

A quick makeover for Park Hill was never going to work,

preserving the history in aspic wasn't ever going to work.

You have to have a plan that fits in with the city's regeneration plans.

It's about making it a neighbourhood that people choose to live in.

The thing that many people misunderstand when you're thinking about listing a building is that

the listing somehow means you can't touch it.

People say, "Oh, well, you're preserving this in aspic".

I don't know why everyone talks about aspic because no-one eats aspic any more.

That's what people say.

That simply isn't the case.

The solution, call in the developers,

in the hope they can sprinkle fairy dust on Park Hill's brutal facade,

keep EH happy, and perhaps make some money.

I'll knock down any building in the world

providing you're going to build a better building in its place.

In Park Hill, the basic structure is fantastic, the basic design is amazing.

What doesn't work is the way the elevation has gone.

We need a new elevation. We need to bring it up to the 21st century.

But the way you read the building as a single entity

is very important and the way the building is a big, abstract canvas is also very, very important.

Those I think are worth keeping.

What we all want to do is preserve it as a piece of great modernist architecture,

a bit of Corbusier's influence left in England.

Last century, London's electricity

was supplied by 28 power stations stretching the length of the Thames.

By 1982, only Greenwich and Lotts Road were still in action.

The rest were either demolished or left to decay.

Bankside was the first to be redeveloped.

It lay empty until 1994 when it was acquired by the Tate Gallery

who commissioned the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron

to transform it into the hugely successful Tate Modern.

But there are still two more left for redevelopment, Battersea and Lotts Road.

Until it closed last October, Lotts Road powered most of the London Underground.

The site is now part of a half a billion pound developer-led scheme

which aims to create a new urban quarter.

The plan is to build two residential 30-storey towers on the river front

with the power station made into luxury living units.

Battersea Power Station used to be known as the temple of power,

but since its closure in 1975,

it has been the subject of highly-charged controversy.

Previous bids to redevelop it have failed.

No major work has been done to this building since 1989 when the roof was taken off.

When Jules Wright bought this derelict power station for £4 million,

she wanted to retain as much of the original interior as possible.

The result is an imaginative restaurant and exhibition space called the Wapping Project.

Why did you decide to leave the building

more or less in the state that it was?

I spent £4 million on it, so I can assure you it's

-not in the state that it was!

-OK!

However, having taken that insult...

However I would have liked to have done absolutely nothing to it.

The restaurant is a plugged-in fusion of past and present.

The food is modern, the furniture contemporary, and there's only Australian wine on the menu.

It's all a big contrast to the old engines and pipes.

It doesn't fight the power, it feels it.

This is the boiler house and you can still smell the coal in here.

This place feels really contemporary, theatrical and old at the same time.

The details are really sensitively done.

It's really raw and I love it.

I fell in love with it the moment I walked through the front door.

It was like walking into a film set.

When I walked into this building,

there was a sense of people being here and I think

the proportions and the shape and the feel of these buildings

is rather like industrial churches. At some level, people of all kinds,

all backgrounds, all classes experience that sensibility.

The sheer size and scale of these power stations make them unique sights.

Tate Modern and the Wapping Project have proved they can become cool, creative spaces.

As an architect, I hope Battersea and Lotts Road

can build on that success and show as much imagination.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, motorway junctions have been colonised by business parks.

The post-war search for the perfect living environment

has now become a search for the ideal work environment.

It's 180 acres of supreme opportunity.

It's highly accessible by the motorway network, so please come to Green Park.

The vision is simply to give people a stunning place to work,

where people will be inspired

by the architecture around them

and the environment outside the buildings as well as inside.

The bottom line is about maximising productivity, but there's an awful

lot of research that shows that productivity is maximised through people being happy where they work

and we're trying to play our part in delivering that kind of development.

Just metres from the M4, Green Park is set to provide a working environment for 10,000 people.

As was once the vision for the new towns,

the dream is for this to be a place you never have to leave.

It is ultimately our aim

to absolutely deliver a state-of-the-art, sustainable community here.

We're currently just about to submit plans for a community of just over 700 homes.

What we've tried to do is bring on board

all the other facilities that we would normally find in a town centre.

It's about creating choices, but it's always a challenge

to influence people's behaviour through planning.

These fantasies of futuristic motorway communities

are the product of business rather than state planning.

Bluewater is now the biggest shopping mall in Britain.

In a few years it'll probably be one of the smallest.

Britain is a nation not of shopkeepers, but of shoppers.

It's become a national disease, and I'm sure that many people in Britain

love shopping and they live to shop,

but what has it done to the country?

Physically, certainly in terms of its architecture and its planning,

it's littered the landscape with these enormous, great, gas-guzzling, air-conditioned stores,

American-style and Chinese-style warehouses

which just suck up masses of energy, they blast out lots of heat.

They're destroying the planet as much as the cars that use them.

Bluewater has 27 million visitors a year.

The product of a survey of over 20,000 people's shopping fantasies,

it's designed to exacting consumer requirements

and it aims to fulfil all of them.

'I come to Bluewater at least twice a week, probably three times,

'but at least twice, and if I'm here on my own

'I'm here for shopping, generally speaking, or for a beauty treatment.

'I come with my other half at least once a week

'and generally we come here to eat.

'We've also been learning Spanish here at the Learning Centre.

'Then I would be here for the cinema, I would come with a friend

'or for lunch or to meet someone for coffee.

'It's a relaxing place and enjoyable place to be.

'I wouldn't come here as often without motorways

'because the local roads are very narrow and very twisty

'and if the volume of people that use Bluewater

'were having to use the local roads, it would be impossible.'

Bluewater is straddled by two main motorways, the M20 and the M25,

so for Bluewater's success they are absolutely critical.

If they do stop running, we notice a downturn in feet.

We have people who will do a two-hour drive to get here who then may stay for 12 hours.

They will maybe have a massage in the spa,

they will have an evening meal

and they might take in a film at the cinema.

The motorways are critical for us.

The catchment site is currently about 10.5 million people.

Bluewater is also part of the national curriculum for geography,

so you regularly see big groups of school children being

taken around the centre and looking at everything, from the architecture

through to the individual stores.

I think the out-of-town shopping malls are a logical conclusion

to the way that the motorway system has developed here.

The aspirational quality of the British motorways was built

on a consumer vision of a future that was powered by consumption.

The out-of-town shopping malls have arisen to gratify that as an outgrowth of the roadway.

In all conscience, that is where we should go.

It is a symptom of our age that we are very worried about what we might build.

"Not in my backyard", or people who want to conserve the countryside,

or people involved in restoration or conservation.

Everyone is frightened of building.

Yet in previous ages, the opportunity to build a new city

would be seen as just that, and a new city would be seen as a terrific achievement.

But today we're worried that we're going to despoil the countryside by building on it.

What is the alternative?

This is the site of a proposed new town.

It's a stretch of land in South Wales.

But it's formerly the site of the first oil refinery in Britain.

Now laid to waste, it represents 1,000 acres of brownfield real estate,

and it's going to be developed by the Welsh Assembly Government

in partnership with the Prince of Wales and his Foundation.

The town will be called Coed Darcy, and I met with the project director Hank Dittmar.

-This is a real brownfield site because it was an oil refinery.

-That's right.

That is traditionally very unattractive to developers, isn't it?

It is going to be so expensive to turn it back into...

-a place.

-It is, but Government policy says the first priority

is for building on brownfield sites so as not to disturb natural areas.

It is also hard to find 1,000 acres of contiguous land, and that's on our side.

The Prince is building something here which in a way reminds me

of the way that a lot of Cardiff was built originally, by...

a sort of... the ownership of a large estate, then putting

the money in and laying down the rules about how it should be built.

Well, that's right. It is the model for most of the great British cities,

really, were built by landowners setting out a simple design code.

-So, Bath, much of Cardiff most of London...

-Edinburgh New Town.

-Edinburgh New Town...

They are places that that remain the most valuable places,

and people's favourite places hundreds of years later.

Basically, the aristocrat wanted it sort of under his control.

It happened to be the aristocrat, in that case it could be the landowner.

You are sort of, reintroducing the autocrat into the process of rebuilding Wales.

-We are introducing quality into rebuilding in Wales.

-Of course.

Coed Darcy is similar to the other Prince Charles initiative of Poundbury Village in Dorset.

The idea is that the place will be built with a lot of houses close together.

With no cul-de-sacs or roads that lead somewhere.

And there are facilities to help people to actually work in the town.

Shops will be within five minutes' walk.

4,000 homes will house 12,000 people

with a mix of private and social housing all laid out in modern terraces along classical lines.

There has been quite a large number of a sort of,

a certain type of architect who looks at something like Poundbury,

which is also a Foundation development and says,

"Oh, it's just pastiche, you're building a Disneyland,

"a fake world, a world which pretends to be something it's not."

I wonder if they said that about Christopher Wren

when he brought Palladio's designs into England.

-You don't mean to say you are taking the safe option at the moment?

-Not at all.

We have had 50 years of zoning communities, for separating,

you know, sleeping from working,

from shopping and we're trying to change that practice.

That is a big challenge. It is hard work.

It is amazing what people get up to in parks these days.

But your local park was probably designed years ago

when most people's idea of fun was a brisk constitutional.

Many parks are now out of step with 21st-century living,

having been created in the 1800s as an escape from the big city.

The Victorian ideal was very prescriptive.

You could relax but in certain areas and in certain ways.

As cities got taller and noisier, it got harder to keep them out.

Decades of underfunding meant that, by the '80s, "going down the rec"

took on a whole new meaning.

We needed an update for the old style park.

Michael Heseltine came up with a very '80s answer.

Garden festivals are a sort of designer park.

They gave derelict areas a glossy makeover, but within a few years, they were a mess again.

In the mid-'80s, France led the way

with Bernard Tschumi's massive Parc de la Villette in Paris.

Tschumi turned the traditional park on its head.

The metal structures make it feel half urban, half rural.

He wanted the park to be a built one.

I mean with buildings inside, and activities, OK?

He did not want the park to be

a place where the city was supposed not existing, OK?

He wanted you to...

be able to walk in the park and leave the park

and go in the city without feeling differences between the places.

Tschumi scrapped swings and roundabouts in favour of interactive themed gardens.

There are no "keep off the grass" signs.

You are encouraged to touch, walk on and play with the park.

And messing about makes you see yourself afresh.

These spaces are designed just as much for adults as they are for kids.

Mile End Park in the East End of London

was an under-used mess, cut in half by five lanes of traffic.

But not any more.

Like Parc de la Villette, it is broken into a number of smaller themed spaces like this ecology area.

Despite its size, this is very much a local park for local people.

In the arts area, an earth-covered pavilion provides a meeting space for the community.

This area of the park was designed after consultation with local elderly and disabled residents.

When asked, it turned out they did not want another bandstand and bowling green, they wanted this.

Partly hidden from the road, it is easy to access, laid-back and peaceful.

CAR HOOTS

But there was still one big problem.

The road.

This is Mile End Park's most celebrated feature.

It's a Piers Gough designed living bridge and like all great design, its genius lies in its simplicity.

Covered by tons of soil, shrubs and trees,

it carries the park across the road.

It is hard to tell where the park stops and the bridge begins.

The rent from built-in shops cleverly coins in a steady source of cash

to help maintain the park.

The designers of this park by the Thames barrier faced a different challenge -

to transform a toxic dump into a green oasis.

Once the heart of London's Docklands, the land was so polluted,

the site had to be covered in concrete before building could start.

In five years, the land has been transformed into a calm, minimalist park.

As hoped, it has turned the area into a highly sought-after address.

The park's industrial past is incorporated into the design.

A green dock, complete with shrubs pruned to look like waves, pays tribute to the site's former life.

Even the flats look a bit like ocean liners.

We have moved on from Victorian times,

cities are no longer seen as evil places that should be hidden away.

We are an urban nation and need parks to reflect that.

Today's parks are very honest.

We are no longer kidding ourselves about who we are, where we live and what we want to do.

The spirit of Leicester is unlike any other city.

It is very diverse and yet very cohesive.

If you look at the carnival, you experience Diwali here,

you feel the buzz of the city.

You know that it is the people that make a city, and all we're doing

is giving the people of Leicester and Leicestershire what they want.

This is more important than ever because, by 2010,

it will be the first city in Great Britain

where the ethnic minority becomes the majority.

Are the planners and architects taking that on board or just ignoring it?

I think the planners in the City haven't taken on board the fact that

there is a critical mass in the city

of Asians and African Caribbean people

and we're going to reach 50% of those communities very soon.

That critical mass is going to impact on the economic life,

the social life, the recreational life, the retail, you name it, it is going to have a huge impact.

That is a very important issue for Leicester,

it is one of its great strengths, it is that depth of diversity.

As far as the city centre is concerned,

our ambition is to grow a wider range of jobs here which will benefit all the communities of Leicester

because the regeneration of those individual communities depends on a sound economic base for the city.

I feel that I am very, very visible,

but absolutely completely invisible in terms of the vision for the city.

That is my personal view.

Pawlet runs the Peepul Centre,

named after a tree revered by Hindus and Buddhists.

It sits amongst the serried ranks of chimney pots of the old slum quarter of Belgrade like the Taj Mahal.

It is a tribute to the efforts of five Asian women who decided Leicester had nothing for them.

Although this city council contributed 260,000 to the £20 million cost,

the Peepul Centre didn't figure in the regeneration scheme at all.

Maybe that is because the planners were focusing on a landmark project

only a mile down the road that would put Leicester in the vanguard of European culture.

After all, Gateshead has got the same has got the Sage, Manchester has got the Lowry,

Bill Bowers got the Guggenheim

and Leicester is pinning its artistic hopes on this,

the futuristic Performing Arts Centre designed by the New York architect, Rafael Vinoly.

Containing two theatres, a dance studio, workshops, rehearsal rooms and the mandatory cafe bars.

It's USP is masses of glass.

To create the effect of an inside out theatre where the performers are virtually in the street.

It is just as well it is close to traffic.

It is very big, how much is it costing?

It is costing a lot of money. Circa 55, 60 million.

You can imagine with a project like this, it is ambitious.

£60 million for an arts centre in Leicester?

It is about bringing the arts to the region.

It is not just about Leicester, it is about the entire region,

6 million people in this region and they deserve a facility like this.

Your community, people from Leicester, are going to fill this place are they?

Yes, it has 1,200 seats

and we have a population of just around 300,000 so why not?

This will be a centre which will have been nationally and internationally renowned.

There is no other theatre like it in the UK or in Europe.

How has this been received by the people of Leicester,

all this money being spent in the city centre on an elitist art centre?

I wouldn't call it elitist.

We have to make sure every citizen of Leicester wants to come here.

I have not seen it yet. I have heard about it.

Shiny and new with an American architect.

It could be good.

Asians and Afro-Caribbeans don't come to formal theatre like this do they?

They will if the performance and programme is right.

The PAC is going to find it difficult to attract Asians and African Caribbean people in the city,

unless they start connecting with the things that are important to those communities.

For example this year sees 60 years of independence for India and Pakistan.

There have been celebrations in our communities. Will they be doing it?

50 years since the independence of Ghana.

Will they be celebrating that?

Martin Luther King's birthday, will they be celebrating that?

All sorts of events which are very important to us need to be reflected in their calendars.

What is the biggest contributor to climate change?

Is it Ryanair? No.

General Motors? No.

Is it Jeremy Clarkson? Wrong again.

If you said architecture, well done you have won a coconut.

Amazingly architecture is responsible for a whopping 50% of our energy consumption,

our greenhouse gas emissions.

Our buildings are like gas guzzling SUV's with a leaking petrol tank.

Architects have paid lip-service to the environment for a few years.

A turf roof here, a solar panel here, all good PR but we need to do more than tinker around the edges.

We need planet saving and architecture right here, right now.

What is planet saving architecture?

What does it look like and would any of us like to live and work there?

The answer to some of these questions stands at the edge of Essex at Rainham Marshes.

It is the latest visitor centre for the RSPB.

Does the future of Eco architecture look like this?

A rough tough castle raised high off the marsh lands waiting for the sea levels to rise.

The burly concrete superstructure is designed to keep it warm in winter

and cool in summer and to ward off the local vandals.

RSPB centres are usually in remote areas but this one is an hour from London.

This is an attention grabbing building for the urban bird watcher.

The visitors who come here get a clear view of their wildlife right across the marshes.

You might think the RSPB centre is glowingly green, but it is not green enough for some eco-warriors.

All that concrete and metal gobbles up energy and a car park? Tut, tut.

If you really want to save the planet, maybe we need to go even deeper green.

Jubilee Wharf in Penryn, Cornwall is another zero energy development from pioneering architect, Bill Dunster.

The aim of these buildings is the planet-saving Holy Grail - zero carbon emissions.

Andrew Marston commissioned this development and liked it so much, he moved in.

By moving to this building I have halved my family's energy consumption

and we have a quarter of the carbon footprint we had before.

In the past the public reaction to developments like this are a bit ugly.

Characteristic turbines and cowls come in for critical flak.

It is different and a lot of the differences come from its function.

Once they understand that function, for instance the wind cowls,

you might, if you didn't know what they were, you might find them peculiar.

Once I have explained them to people

how they it obviate the need for a ventilation stack,

and that they have a heat exchange on them and that they naturally ventilate the building,

people develop a love for them once you have lived in the building.

With energy prices set to double in the next five to 10 years,

perhaps we will all have to start cuddling up to the cowl.

The bulk of the British housing stock is of an ageing stock that is difficult to heat,

isn't thermally insulated and that is what has to change.

If they are available, I could have sold these units twice over.

If they are available, people would buy them.

This is a sleight of genteel hippie heaven but it is clever too.

The turbines fit in with the whole look of the wharf.

The building's position is to make best use of the power of the wind for energy generators.

Even the shape of the building makes sure there is nothing to block the wind that blows in from the sea.

Turbine bedecked flats entirely fashioned from sustainable materials.

They are selling like hot cakes in Cornwall.

What is a planet saving architect to do with a more practical challenge

like a civic building in the heart of London?

This is the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at University College London.

It is bold and inventive and is about what buildings are made from and how we use energy itself.

Alan Short is the architect and disapproves of the granola munching school of green architecture.

It is a building in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world.

Trying to make a piece of civic architecture

and we are sceptical about the gadgetry, the cells and windmills.

Architecture is the physical stuff of the building itself

and the geometry of the openings and exits and windows to make them comfortable and work.

It is about rethinking the physical space of architecture

and using that as far as possible to push towards a green agenda in some way?

Very much so.

This building is heavily constructed.

It has concrete floors you can see, it is made of brick, very thick brick walls.

That stabilises the temperature inside and there is the architecture that goes with masonry

which is different to the light weight stuff that I was taught to design when I was a young architect.

Alan has brought back the chimney,

killed off by central heating but had a complete rethink on how to use it.

This time it is not for churning out fossil fuels,

but as architectural nostrils to make the building breathe more easily.

In the way that the constructions work, the way it has set itself up is it is fantastically risk averse.

It is a huge issue with our PFI hospitals and schools.

The businesses usual architecture of the '70s, '80s, and '90s is frozen in aspic,

it's extremely difficult to innovate and that is something we are interested in.

It is innovators like Alan that work out the architectural recipe for planets saving buildings.

Now it is down to builders, developers and the government

to make the architectural oddities but the norm.

Over the next 15 years, nearly 4 million new homes will be built in Britain and many of them

will end up on greenfield sites in or around the edge of rural areas.

Building in the countryside is always going to be controversial

but how about if you can't see the building.

-This isn't a field, it is a roof and the people who live below me

think these sorts of houses are the way forward.

The five homes at Mystery Hill near the village of Hockerton in Nottinghamshire, are pioneering.

Not just because they are partly built underground,

but because they are specifically designed to have minimal impact on the environment.

Where most new developments are easy to see, this one is hidden from view by its earth roof.

While all new homes are connected to the water mains, these recycle rainwater for drinking and washing.

Mystery Hill's about as environmentally right on as it gets.

We are happy with it.

We have ended up with a house that does have very minimal energy use.

We don't have any space heating.

It keeps itself warm with the sunshine and body heat.

Our energy bills are very low.

We have a house that supplies itself with water.

The water comes from the rain and we collect it on the roof.

We have a house that's in a fantastic environment for the wildlife and for the children.

It has turned out to be an all-round success.

I think the houses show you can actually live in a fairly sustainable way

without necessarily having to have a very different lifestyles.

Our lifestyle is no different than it would be

if we lived in a conventional house.

But, there's 50 or 60 million people in this country and it needs to be appropriate to those people.

I think what we've done here,

some of it can be taken to the mainstream and from low energy lightbulbs and recycling,

to growing your own lettuces, those are things anyone can do in their garden, in their homes.

If we all do that, it's a step in the right direction.

The technology these houses use is cutting edge

and it took five years to get the project from idea to reality.

It's taken a four applications to get approval for a small wind turbine

which will provide the families with all the electricity they need.

The families have developed an independent water system.

You dug this lake yourselves and it's all a part of being water self-sufficient isn't it?

Yes, that's right. We collect rainwater from the roofs and it goes into holding tanks.

We take it out of the holding tank and then treat it and it goes back to the houses.

We use it for drinking and washing, it comes, once we've flushed it down

the toilet or down the sink, it into the reed bed here.

There is a settling tank for the solids, but the water is then treated in here,

the bacteria on the roots of the reed digest the pathogens in the water and it's cleaned up.

It goes round the reed bed and out through and into the lake

and that gives us water at bathing water quality, so that's really good.

But it also is very nutrient rich, so the fish in the lake are thriving.

And the project's proving an inspiration to others.

This development of 25 new homes is on the edge of the Nottinghamshire village of Collingham.

It's proving that the eco homes don't have to have fields on the roof.

They do have double the usual amount of insulation and solar panels as standard.

How long until all new homes are like this?

It could be a while, yes.

But just because it takes a long time to get people to accept it.

But I think the pace is changing,

the more examples like this one there are,

the more the message will get through it's not that difficult.

The more people are encouraged to put them on existing houses, although the costs are high,

nevertheless it is the sort of thing that gradually takes off and get faster.

But building this development hasn't been either easy or cheap,

there were problems finding the energy-saving technology and renewable building materials.

The houses cost about 10% more than conventional homes, but fuel bills are cut by at least half.

Throughout Britain, thousands of buildings,

which most people wouldn't even think of as being architecture,

yet they are buildings we all use and spend a lot of time in.

Can supermarket architecture ever be anything better than big, bland boxes?

Way past their sell-by date, are the edge of town superstores

built in the style laughably called traditional.

In fact, the first was built less than 30 years ago by ASDA in Essex.

That's why the trade calls them Essex barns.

In a sense, supermarkets are the modern barn, they're big sheds full of foodstuffs.

There is the challenge, how do you design big buildings well?

Everyone wants to live near a supermarket,

but no one wants a giant box dropped next to their house.

So these stores try to blend in with their surroundings

by disguising themselves as quaint country cottages,

straight out of Trumpton.

Somebody decided if you put a little pitched roof on a huge great whacking box of a building,

you make it feel small and approachable. It just doesn't work.

It's a bit like putting lipstick on a gorilla to disguise the fact it's a big fat, hairy simian.

Essex barns replaced vast areas of real countryside with a fake pastiche.

They still scar the whole of Britain, but very few have been built since the late 1990s.

A genuinely Conservative piece of legislation in the last years of the Tories,

made it hard to get approval for edge-of-town superstores.

Some new superstores are still being built, but there are signs they're being built better.

Tesco's style has moved on from rustic barns to high-tech machines for shopping in.

The architects now choose from a range of standard kits,

a bit like giant Meccano and a whole store can be put up in less than 15 weeks.

This modular approach is cheaper and greener.

The new stores need less energy to build and run than a brick barn.

And they're flexible enough to be extended easily or even moved wholesale to another location.

Tesco's arch-rivals have been exploring new ways of building.

What's claimed to be the UK's most environmentally responsible superstore

was built by Chetwood Associates in South East London.

Its walls are embedded in earth which keeps it warm in winter and cool in the summer.

And makes the place look kind of stylish.

Some of the features here are a little bit of an environmental gimmick, it's a bit of a green wash.

Like this, I wonder how many people have actually charged their electric cars here?

This one is certainly petrol.

And while it's great to recycle plastic bottles to make the toilet walls,

it does look a bit like someone's splashed vomit everywhere.

But there are some very impressive features, one of which is very simple.

JS Sainsbury's final words, the words he said on his deathbed, were keep the stores well lit.

Now there's a man dedicated to selling produce.

80 years on, his dream has come true.

This place, even on a dull day like today is flooded with natural light.

That cuts down on electricity being used to light it, which is good for the environment.

But it also makes you feel like no other supermarket I've ever been in,

it's far less artificial and oppressive.

For night-time shopping there are funky spotlights,

much better than huge fluorescence high on the ceiling.

The building also uses natural ventilation in place of air-conditioning.

Sainsbury's says some of the features will be incorporated into other stores.

But don't hold your breath, it was much more expensive than most supermarkets,

something of an architectural loss leader.

This place is a massive improvement on the Essex style barn,

but if we are going to build more supermarkets, and undoubtedly we are,

there are even more environmental and more radical ways we can do it.

This brand new barn is in West Sussex

at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum of Historic Buildings.

It houses their rural crafts workshop, but with its light, open interior,

it would also be ideal for a supermarket.

This is a truly green building. It's made from sustainable oak and cedar

and thanks to the astonishing way it it was built, took very little energy to construct.

It's one of only three grid shells in the world.

This means it was built as a flat grid on scaffolding with joints carefully plotted by computer.

As the scaffolding was removed, the sapling wood simply dropped into shape by force of gravity.

If we are going to build on the edge of towns or replace the stores

that have already encroached on to the countryside,

this seems a better way of doing it than these stick on brick barns.

This building is very functional, it's not covered in decorations

so it's much more in keeping with rural traditions, but it's also very beautiful.

And the quality of space inside is really magical.

It cost only 10% more than a conventionally built space the same size.

If mass produced, the structures would be cheap enough even for stingy supermarket chains.

Tesco's have already been to look at it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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