Between Country and Town: New Concepts in Sustainable Rural Housing

One of the results of the UK’s housing policy over the past 50 years has been the proliferation of private, suburban housing estates. These are based around similar lifestyle models, low-quality spatial planning solutions and short-term, low-cost construction technologies. This practice disregards regionally distinct cultural and climatic contexts across the UK. It is widely recognized that standardised approaches to house building have been responsible for the poor quality place-making evident in suburban type countryside housing estates. These new developments lack the intrinsic sense of identity and richness that has historically given rural settlements their unique character and qualities. Moreover, the communities that result from this type of development are intrinsically unsustainable; proliferating high-carbon lifestyles. The suburbanisation of Britain appears to have no end considering the UK government’s targets of building up to 290,500 new homes per year to achieve the goal of 3 million new homes by 2020. It is now critically important that alternative, more sustainable, low-carbon housing models are envisaged which can be used as the basis for the conceptualization and development of more appropriate forms of housing that will inherently support new types of sustainable communities. This will inevitably require a step change in thinking to the provision, design and technology of new-build private housing in the UK. The following paper explores four strategies for a new sustainable development of low energy houses in a traditional village in rural Scotland. Anchoring, Court, Street, and Croft encapsulate these principles in four new models for the design of more sustainable housing in the Scottish countryside.