For the first time in 95 years, family-sized housing is being built within Leeds’ city boundary. And you can forget high-rise flats. These homes have more in common with sustainable urban development in Malmö, southern Sweden, than what you might expect to see in northwest England.
The project is the pioneering £125m Leeds Climate Innovation District – part of the city’s South Bank regeneration and the brainchild of sustainable developer Citu. Its airtight, timber-framed homes are manufactured a stone’s throw away in the developer’s own factory, Citu Works. The first residents moved into their homes in early 2019. Since then, more than 100 people have moved into 60 new homes built on land previously used for an oil refinery and go-kart track. Citu’s development director Jonathan Wilson, as well as the company’s founder and managing director Chris Thompson, are among them.
Soon, there will be more than 1,000 low-carbon houses and flats here. Standard features include triple-glazed windows, solar panels, green roofs, space to grow vegetables and mechanical ventilation and heat recovery systems to bring in fresh air and recycle heat.
These homes will be generating power rather than guzzling it, selling any excess to the grid. Cars are allowed, but relegated to an undercroft car park with electric charging infrastructure. This is a landscape geared towards cyclists and pedestrians, with easy access to Leeds city centre.
Yorkshire’s first zero-carbon office building is here too. Citu and housing association Yorkshire Housing will shortly be moving into The Place, complete with a tennis court on the roof.
Meanwhile, a planning decision is being awaited for the next phase of the district: a two-form-entry primary school and a 72-bedroom care home including apartments in one multi-generational building.
“We think it’s the only one in the world to combine all three facilities in one building,” says Wilson.
Setting the bar
An architect by profession, Wilson shares his determination to shake up the status quo with founder Thompson, a quantity surveyor. Both want to accelerate the transition to net-zero cities, and they view the Climate Innovation District as an overt way of “setting the standard for every decision we made”.
“We wanted to ensure that we were constantly innovating and that we were doing a project that would not just protect and support sustainable development, but also hold all stakeholders to account,” says Wilson. “We set out to create an exemplar model of how to do this type of development at scale and to show that it doesn’t cost more.”
Before Citu, he was working in the third sector, having “fallen out of love with purist architecture”. He experienced first-hand the impact that “great interventions” could have during his time with a development trust based on a council estate just outside Hull city centre.
Projects ranged from putting allotments onto wasteland to give tower block residents access to their own green space, through to designing a code for sustainable homes which were then manufactured off-site and put “bang in the middle of the housing estate”.
“We wanted to show that great design is accessible to all, and it should be,” Wilson recalls. “And we worked hard to make sure that the occupants of those homes were employed professionals in the city to try and start to shake that changing demographic. And it was amazing, absolutely amazing.”
There were plenty of synergies with what Thompson was doing: in 2008, he had bought a disused 1930s workers’ hostel in Leeds dubbed the “Dustbin” and set about transforming it into Greenhouse, a 172-flat development which uses technology to produce enough energy to make it entirely self-sufficient. A free-to-residents gym, on-site deli and bicycle club were all part of the design to foster a sustainable community as well as create a sustainable building.
Transforming forgotten spaces
Wilson joined the company in 2015. Core to their model is a focus on sites which he describes as the “forgotten areas of cities”. In Sheffield, that led to a development of 156 sustainable homes as well as shops and offices on a former industrial site called Little Kelham. A further 114 homes are in the pipeline at Kelham Central.
In Leeds, the Climate Innovation District spans 21 acres of what was “misunderstood” land, surrounded by industry on the banks of the River Aire. A year was spent working with Swedish architect White Arkitekter on the masterplan. “They were able to give us a very different perspective of how to allow industry and residential to be knitted together in a positive way, as they do so well in Stockholm and Malmö,” says Wilson. “They started by looking outside of our red line, at how we could connect with those different communities.”
Citu’s commitment to regenerating and reshaping urban, industrial land highlights not only its sustainability credentials, but also one of its biggest challenges as a developer: land and land values.
“We don’t sit in the housebuilder market, in the sense that we don’t do 20-storey blocks of apartments. We are in that middle density, more akin to a European model,” Wilson explains. “But what that means is that sites and land can be a challenge. If we don’t buy in those forgotten areas, we will be competing with [the developers of] those 20-storey apartment blocks that will make an investment fund somewhere a lot of money.”
If we don’t buy in those forgotten areas, we will be competing with [the developers of] those 20-storey apartment blocks that will make an investment fund somewhere a lot of money
– Jonathan Wilson, Citu
Rethinking industrial locations also means Citu can assemble sufficiently large sites to make a real impact on how people live and use urban spaces – rather than simply filling in gaps in the skyline.
“When we started to parcel together the land here in Leeds, there was always a vision that we needed to get the mass to create sustainable, amazing places at scale,” adds Wilson. Indeed, six of its 21 acres – almost a third of the site – have been given over to public spaces and gardens, which interconnect across the site. A new pedestrian bridge connects the site across the river.
Scale is important precisely because Citu is doing things so differently. “These are the first family-size houses to be built in the city centre boundary for 95 years, so we’re not stepping into a market where people have already done this,” he says.
Sustainability that is sustainable
Scale also means that Citu can “show the industry that doing sustainability and high-performance homes isn’t more expensive,” says Wilson.
“There’s a real misconception that sustainability costs more. We are proving that this isn’t the case. You have to change the model, but end-to-end it doesn’t cost more.”
When it bought the Kelham Island site, Citu’s delivery model looked traditional enough, even if the designs did not: developer appoints main contractor, buys an off-the-shelf timber system, designs scheme through an architect, sells homes through the market.
But what has happened over the subsequent seven years is that each of these elements – either through design or necessity – has been brought in-house, and with it the risks that were previously passed on to third parties.
As well as keeping costs down, a key driver in creating its own vertically integrated delivery model has been the need for complete control over standards – something that comes into even sharper focus when your homes succeed or fail on being super-airtight. Hence setting up its own timber frame company in 2016 and more recently its own multi-skilled fit-out teams known as the “Citu Squads”.
“We have four squads working on a site, so there’s healthy competition not just to do it quicker but to do it better,” Wilson explains. “Each squad has joiners, electricians, plumbers and apprentices; they work together from when the house has been erected through to completion, and they have ownership of that house.” The aim is to break with the typical industry model, where your joiner might jump from house to house to house.
“There’s often a lack of accountability, often a lack of ownership. And actually, most importantly, they don’t know what winning looks like sometimes,” Wilson says.
Winning team
Tearing up the rule book in this way has inevitably led to a swift hike in staff numbers: from 20 to 120 in just five years.
Wilson describes it as a very “solutions-focused” team. “The most important thing that we can do is create an amazing culture and a team of people who are thoroughly excited by the challenge of unravelling the status quo,” he says. Whether that’s navigating a planning system not designed for zero-carbon development or bringing homes to a market where there are no comparables, they “don’t get frustrated, don’t turn into victims”, he says.
Thompson, Wilson and a third shareholder, finance director Fraser Stride, are on the ground, working with the teams every day. Projects are funded on a phase-by-phase basis. “We don’t have an investment fund that is dictating how we deliver, what we deliver, when we deliver,” Wilson says. “The challenge for housebuilders is that they might start by saying ‘we need to deliver 500 homes this year’ and work back from there. What we’ve done in the past five years is to start with culture and people and build a new model. And now we’re saying, ‘OK, we’ve got people, we’ve got culture, we’ve got this model that is comfortably doing this. What can we do with that now?’”
For Citu, the answer lies firmly in the Yorkshire region – at least for the next five to seven years. The company is actively looking at land across Leeds and Sheffield. It wants to share its knowledge and experience with other developers and housebuilders too.
“It goes back to how we help accelerate the transition to zero-carbon cities, how we create a model that can be replicated and create those ripple effects,” says Wilson. “By staying within the region, we can create more of an impact by not diluting it across the UK.”
Citu is committed to sharing its vision. Its homes may not carry a premium for being green, but neither do they cost any more to produce – that’s the message it really wants to get home to the rest of the industry.
Every Citu home features as standard:
- Rainwater and storm water collection as part of a sustainable integrated urban drainage system
- Solar panels
- Green roofs and green surfaces to increase amenity and biodiversity, and reduce flood risk and overheating in summer.
- A specialist mechanical ventilation with heat recovery system which reduces heat loss and improves energy efficiency
- Cycle storage provision with cycling paths incorporated into the wider development.
Public realm
Much of the public realm has already been landscaped, with green spaces surrounding the homes, meadows along the riverbank and areas for residents to grow their own food. Four key pieces of public realm are being created, positioned on an east-west axis guiding pedestrians and cyclists through the site.
Community
When the development is finished, Citu will transfer the land (freeholds), infrastructure and renewable technologies to a community interest company, set up to put residents in control. The CIC will run the development and own a utility cooperative which will supply renewable energy to the residents at cost prices. Residents will pay a bond to facilitate the creation of the community interest company, and their stake in it will be handed to the next resident if they decide to sell, increasing the value of their property.
Through the CIC, residents will be able to invest in new renewable technologies as they become available and reap the rewards themselves in terms of lower energy prices or greater profits from feed-in tariffs.
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