Episode 3: Brighton’s Housing Tree

For my final thesis at the University of Sussex, I produced a three-part audio docuseries exploring Brighton’s housing landscape. Its history, its present pressures, and its uncertain future.

Brighton’s housing crisis is often spoken of in terms of rents and shortages, but in the final chapter of Brighton’s Housing Tree, the crisis expands into a new dimension: the climate. With homes responsible for 20% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, the question is no longer just how Brighton houses its residents, but how it does so without deepening environmental harm.

“Brighton’s housing system is stretched, but not beyond repair, the challenge now lies in how we build, rebuild and adapt our homes in ways that provide shelter while safeguarding the environment and our communities for the future.”

In Brighton, where the sea forms one boundary and the South Downs National Park forms the other, the city can no longer grow outward. Sustainability isn’t a policy preference, but a spatial necessity.

Architect Duncan Baker argues that the solution isn’t more demolition, but more imagination.

“Adapting the existing situation rather than demolishing it,” he says. On a university campus not far from the city centre, developers plan to tear down three-storey student blocks to build a new tower. Baker pushes back: “Leave existing and just build around it and up… You don’t have to demolish the existing stuff.”

Construction accounts for one quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions. Retrofitting—the process of upgrading old homes to make them warmer, greener, and more efficient—offers an alternative to Brighton’s build-and-replace cycle. Retrofitting lowers bills, improves health, and reduces strain on the NHS. But national policy has been slow to catch up.

Tim Beecher, a retrofit and domestic energy assessor, sees the consequences every day. Fuel poverty, he explains, “seems to be highest in the private rental sector,” where landlords often do the bare minimum required by law. Current rules only require homes to reach an EPC rating of E; far below what experts say is needed to meet climate targets.

“I think… engage the private landlords to actually provide some sort of buffer to help make the right choices,” Beecher says. But loopholes allow landlords to avoid upgrades if costs exceed £3,500. It’s a system built for delay.

Beecher advocates what he calls a “fabric first” approach: “For tenants… to feel warm has numerous knock-on benefits,” he explains. Insulating walls and roofs isn’t glamorous, but it cuts bills, frees households from cold homes, and eases pressure on public services. “There’s no silver bullet… it’s a combination of lots of different things.”

Baker widens the environmental lens to global resource limits. “Resource security is a thing of the past,” he warns. “We’ve got to rework what we’ve already mined.” His most famous project, Brighton’s experimental Waste House—a building made almost entirely from discarded materials—was designed to challenge the culture of disposability.

“People think I’m telling them to build new buildings out of toothbrushes… it’s not that at all. I’m just saying don’t be the designer that designs the next generation of toothbrushes that are never used.”

The point is not novelty, it’s responsibility.

Development economist Simon Maxwell looks ahead. With Brighton’s population projected to reach 400,000 by 2040, the pressure will only intensify. “Where do we put these new people, and what kind of housing is available to them?” he asks. A recent Decarbonisation Pathways Report estimates that nearly all of the city’s 130,000 homes will need retrofitting to meet Net Zero goals, at a cost of £3.5–4 billion.

Brighton’s geography allows no expansion and sustainability is no longer optional.

Beecher suggests economies of scale: landlords retrofitting entire blocks at once to reduce costs. “If you can do that at scale, that reduces cost,” he explains.

The future Brighton needs is not defined by demolition, but by care. insulation instead of excavation, adaptation instead of expansion, imagination instead of inertia.

“Because a city’s strength is not measured by how high it builds, but by how well it houses the people who call it home.”