The man behind a 700-home extension of the East Sussex town of Lewes claims the scheme will be “the most sustainable development in the UK”.
It is a bold claim to make. But given Jonathan Smales’ former roles as managing director of Greenpeace and the creator of the Earth Centre charity, as well as 30 years as a sustainability consultant, it is hard to dismiss this as hubris. Besides, Smales makes little secret of wanting his development company Human Nature to become a rallying voice for the ESG agenda; to be “like Patagonia, but for the built environment”.
“We have got less than eight years now to cut our carbon emissions as a country by 45%,” says Smales, his eyes fixed on a large-scale wooden model of Lewes’ Phoenix scheme. “The UN themselves said there is no credible pathway to that, either in policy or in practice.”
Smales and his colleagues want to make a mark with the Phoenix and then ensure it is “replicable”. Plans for the £430m project have been submitted to the South Downs National Park Authority but even after two years talking to the planning authority about the proposals, Smales remains nervous about the outcome. “It’s not a ship that they have seen before,” he says.
Radical thinking
If approved, the largest timber-structured neighbourhood in the UK will rise from the ashes of a near-20-acre former industrial estate, just north of the historic town centre. It is currently a hinterland, with a car wash and some dilapidated sheds, but once it was an iron foundry, its frontage on to the River Ouse serving as the town’s gateway to the wider world.
The entire development, apart from the reclaimed foundry buildings, will be made from engineered timber. The buildings will be insulated with bio-based fibres and finished with low-carbon and repurposed materials. The scheme will be assembled using modern methods of construction, with as much as possible assembled on site by a local workforce.
The buildings will be served by rooftop photovoltaics, off-site renewable energy facilities and ground and water-source heat pumps, cutting heating bills by 80%.
An electric car club, bike “library” and a last-mile freight service, operated from a hub at the southern tip of the site, will eliminate the need for personal cars. Most daily needs can be met within a five-minute walk, says masterplanner Periscope, and the train station is a 10-minute walk away.
Cars are not the only things that will be shared. The scheme will have communal gardens, courtyards and rooftops, encouraging interaction between people of all ages.
“None of this is radical,” Smales says. “But putting it all together in this way is. Doing it in the UK is.”
For Smales, the Phoenix is more than just a regeneration project. It is a fusion of everything he has ever been passionate about, the product of a near-lifelong obsession with sustainable place-making. He comes alive as he describes his creation. His hands sweep down the model’s river, into the planned courtyards and pedestrianised streets, pausing to point out where the communal buildings will be, the belvedere, the new bridge, the flood defences.
“The courtyard block here is very innovative,” he says, then laughs. “No, it’s not. It’s stolen from a courtyard block in Copenhagen. Jan Gehl’s favourite urban block in the world, adapted for Lewes. But if you are going to steal from someone…”
He crouches down to the model. “Why don’t we build those in Britain, they are so proven? It’s like a 200-year-old typology that not only works, it is loved.”
“Lewes is our inspiration,” he says. “It has a historic core, it has twittens” – alleys, to anyone outside Sussex – “and nooks and crannies, and interesting juxtapositions. That’s good density.”
Despite emulating the grain of Lewes to an extent – it will have nine twittens – the Phoenix is not a replica, homage or pastiche. Human Nature has deliberately moved away from the homogeneity Smales thinks lets down most placemaking in the UK. There are 18 apartment blocks in the development, designed by 13 architects and masterplanned by Periscope, Arup and Human Nature’s in-house design team.
While Lewes is a town made up of terraced houses, the Phoenix is almost entirely comprised of apartments, many with shared facilities, influenced by the five years Smales spent living in Copenhagen.
“You absorb this sense of the everyday being a bit better,” he says. “British-style apartments are usually shit.”
Local support
As well as the flood risk to the site – the reason for the flood defence wall taking up £15m of the budget and dictating access to the river – there are other complexities. At 30%, the Phoenix has less affordable housing than Smales would like. But the very fact Human Nature is building apartments, not houses, means they will still be among the lowest-priced homes in Lewes.
There are compulsory purchase orders to worry about and ancient covenants – there is a rumoured Saxon wall somewhere, although no one has ever been able to find it. “We are assuming it does exist. It’s got the same status as Stonehenge, so if we build on that we go to prison,” he deadpans.
There is a lot of embodied carbon, but just one building will be refurbished and retained, turned into a modern office space. Four other structures will be kept, but entirely reborn. The former Soap Factory will become a bouldering, climbing, music and skateboarding venue. The Old Foundry Galleries is set to become a new event space. Two other structures by the river, the former foundry workshops, will be refurbished as community spaces. The materials from the others will be repurposed and reused.
Human Nature is the third developer to take a swing at the site. The last effort, North Street Quarter, was a joint venture between local landowner Santon and South African investor Mas Rei. That got as far as securing detailed planning for 400 or so homes in terraces, mostly three storeys, with lots of parking spaces and thick artery roads.
That was in 2016, at around the same time that Smales moved to Lewes with his family. The local community was not keen on the North Street Quarter plans and a group of artists working in the buildings launched Phoenix Rising to design their own scheme. Smales, who had set up Human Nature a year earlier with his former Greenpeace colleague Michael Manolson, offered assistance.
Three years later it transpired that the scheme was financially unviable. The flood defences had never been properly costed. “Phoenix Rising said ‘Shall we bid together?’ And I thought, ‘OK, let’s do it’.” Smales soon found himself in a competition with 50 developers. In the end it was Human Nature against a “very big developer” and Human Nature won.
He raised money for the scheme through local families. “They are really behind us,” he says. “They really love that ethos. They are proud of their town and they want it to be brilliant.”
By early 2021, Mas Rei and Santon’s holdings had been bought out. There is now an option to buy the remaining 35% from Lewes District Council.
Power of a good example
Smales wants places like the Phoenix to change behaviour. “It’s making it easy for people to make good choices,” he says. “It’s a series of simple, everyday things, the gentle nudges that when you add them together, become a quite appealing, cultural thing.” He adds: “The purpose of the business is social imagination. We want to create these wonderful stories about why living sustainably is desirable. It should be positive – not the narrative of self-sacrifice, the moralistic ‘must-do-this’ attitude of saving the planet.”
The Phoenix is a calling card, a statement of purpose. “If it were just this project, it would only have a limited impact,” Smales says. “But if you turn it into a business with a powerful brand, then the power of that is huge.”
“The power of a good example,” he adds, quoting IKEA’s Ingvar Kamprad. “Investors say, ‘show me it works and show me that you’ve made the profits and then you can have as much money as you want’.”
And Smales wants a lot. “There are four typologies we are looking at,” he says. “Phoenix is one, the purest form, an urban neighbourhood. But how many pieces of brownfield land of this quality are left?”
Another is individual elements that can be plugged into larger masterplans. A third is small-scale housing developments of 50 to 200 homes on the edge of existing towns or villages with good infrastructure. Finally, there are entirely new communities. Where the Phoenix is a brownfield regeneration, Human Nature is also working on plans for schemes that will be “unapologetically greenfield”.
But the ethos behind the schemes is the same – better than best practice.
Human Nature is already mapping out a 6,000-home scheme in Norfolk, by the A11. Smales says the firm “can produce thousands of beautiful, timber buildings really quickly” and that 60% of the project could be sold as affordable housing. “And you can build them in 10 weeks.”
Smales is finalising legal details for the Norfolk site. He hopes to start work on planning in the summer. There are other projects in the pipeline. When we meet, he is fresh off the phone from a landowner near Edinburgh, who is keen to partner on a 600-acre development.
But the ambition is greater. Human Nature is creating what it calls “the Village”. “Immodestly, the aim is to create a global network of amazing people, from artists to academics to investors to politicians, who buy into the idea of what this project is trying to do,” Smales says. “They aren’t trying to create development opportunities for Human Nature, they are supporting these objectives and the way we are trying to achieve it.”
That is why Smales makes his comparison with Patagonia. “No one’s doing this. No one is facing the climate emergency, the nature emergency, social cohesion, the new economy and combining that with good urbanism. I don’t think literally anyone is doing that. Or at least not doing it well. So why don’t we do it? We have been around the block a few times as campaigners, thinkers, writers, consultants, advisers, and we have also built quite a lot of stuff too.”
The Phoenix is just the start. “My job here in the next five years isn’t to build a housing development,” Smales says. “It is to create a leadership group and a team with a culture, a network of brilliant architects, engineers, consultants, storytellers, build a brand and raise a fuck load of money. That’s my job.”
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