Robin Murray

Green Homes_Lockwood

Rethinking Energy, The Design Council, 2004-2006

 
 

By Matthew Lockwood

Robin worked in a sustained way on energy in London in the period 2004-06. This work evolved from earlier interests in green industries in Canada in the 1990s and from his pioneering work on zero waste in the early 2000s. There was a tremendous opportunity to rethink energy in London at this stage as Nicky Gavron (whom Robin knew well) became deputy mayor in 2004, with a major focus on energy and climate change. Robin applied some of the key themes in his thinking, especially post-Fordism and coordinated decentralisation, to the energy field, in a highly prescient way. As always, thinking for Robin went hand in hand with practice, and also as always, the process was highly creative, constantly evolving and lots of fun.

I first started working with Robin on energy for Nicky Gavron in the lead up to the 2004 mayoral election, with a focus on what could be done on energy efficiency. At that time, the main approach to diagnosing and improving the energy efficiency of housing was shallow and Fordist, usually consisting of a brief standardised survey and a few disconnected measures like loft insulation, new boilers or energy efficient light bulbs. By contrast, from early on Robin was interested in a deeper, more bespoke approach. In 2004, he used his Canada contacts to bring over Phil Jessup, who had spearheaded energy and climate work in Toronto, to share experience of deeper retrofits, with an emphasis on air tightness and draught proofing. The team brought a ‘blower door’ over with them, allowing us to visit various homes in south London to investigate how leaky they could be. By this stage, Robin was taking over leadership of the RED team in the Design Council, covering for Hilary Cottam who had gone on maternity leave, and he was able to bring together the Canadians with the Council and GLA energy and climate people for an event where some of these themes were explored.

Robin then made energy a major part of the RED team’s work, renting a flat in a Victorian building in Lee High Road in Lewisham for several months to work in situ on design ideas for energy efficiency, renewable energy etc., thinking about things from a user perspective rather than starting with the technical aspects. Robin and I wrote up the experiment in the RED Future Currents document Designing for a changing climate.

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Green Homes - promotional materials (top); installation of energy efficiency measures at the Lee High Road prototype in Lewisham (middle) and Green Homes car for home visits (bottom).

Green Homes - promotional materials (top); installation of energy efficiency measures at the Lee High Road prototype in Lewisham (middle) and Green Homes car for home visits (bottom).

Robin also got involved in Nicky’s attempts to bring the innovative approach to decentralised energy, especially electricity, taken in Woking to London, and scale it up. I travelled down to Woking with Robin and Nicky’s advisor to see Allan Jones, who later headed up the London Climate Change Agency. Robin was fascinated with the vision of moving from centralised electricity systems to decentralised approaches with multiple actors. This was pioneering work; only now, some 15 years later, are these concepts beginning to be mainstreamed into electricity generation and networks, and the process is only just starting.

Meanwhile, Robin’s work on energy efficiency deepened and broadened. He could see that what people wanted was not someone coming in and putting in insulation or a new boiler and then going off again, but rather a complete integrated service for greening the home, from recycling to deep energy efficiency retrofits, from solar panels to green travel plans. He sought out advice from Ten UK, a small boutique company running a ‘concierge service’ for cash rich-time poor clients in London. Alex Cheatle, one of Ten UK’s founders, got the idea immediately, and helped Robin reframe energy offerings, moving the emphasis away from the technical towards the personal and the social, and away from the intervention to the whole context. Through his Ecologika company, Robin developed a business plan in 2006 (A Green Concierge Service, Business Plan, Ecologika, 2006), and won funding for a pilot which ran for several months, again based in Lewisham (Green homes – A report of a prototype). The main challenge turned out to be making the business model work; people really liked the idea but ultimately bespoke services were costly to run, although in the long run they would generate tremendous savings. Again, Robin was ahead of his time; now with net zero, we will need the very deep energy retrofits and the other transformations the Green Homes prototype trialled. And because all homes are different, the bespoke approach that his model envisioned would be the best way to make it work.

August 2020