No Home to Waste
Katharine Hibbert won her night on board the Room with an ingenious idea for making use of London's huge quantity of empty housing. She was resident in A Room for London on 26 January 2012.
Interview, 11 January 2012
What's your big idea?
London has almost 40,000 long-term empty homes - each one of those is a problem for the owner, a blight on the neighbourhood and a real waste at a time of housing shortage. My idea is to place people who do great voluntary work in empty homes on a temporary basis, as property guardians. This will offer flexible, cost-effective security to the owners and cheap accommodation for the guardians - allowing them to devote even more time to work which benefits local communities.
When were the first seeds of the idea sown?
At the beginning of the financial crisis I wrote a book - Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society - about the squatters and scavengers who use society's waste to get by under difficult circumstances. I was horrified by the scale of waste I saw during the project - particularly the empty homes. Many were sitting empty for years because they were in limbo - waiting for demolition, renovation or sale. I wanted to find a way to allow those houses to be used on a temporary basis, which would benefit everyone - owners, residents and the wider community. This idea - which I'm setting up under the name Dot Dot Dot (www.dotdotdotproperty.com) is my solution.
Who have you invited to dinner in A Room for London to help develop the idea?
I'm really looking forward to meeting Campbell Robb, who does outstanding work at the housing charity Shelter, and Alan Benson who is head of housing at the GLA. It will also be great to be able to invite along some of the fantastic people who have already been helpful in the development of the idea.
What single thing would you like to happen that evening to help your idea get off the ground?
I need to prove to property owners that letting my organisation place guardians in their houses is far better than simply boarding them up and leaving them to rot - I hope that the guests will have some great ideas for how to do that!
How would you describe your relationship to London?
I'm a Londoner - I can't imagine living anywhere else. The city has its problems, no one could deny that, but it also has so many things going for it - not least the number people who are determined to make things happen, and to change things for the better, for everyone.
How are you feeling about spending the night on board?
I can't wait. I love how, in a big city, whatever time you look out of a window there's someone going about their business. I can't imagine a better place to sit and watch the world go by.
I felt so lucky to get to spend the night aboard A Room for London. I arrived just before sunset, so I got to watch the sky changing across the amazing panoramic view. There’s a funny mixture of sounds – buskers, skateboarders, revellers, traffic. But somehow you feel quite separate from the buzz of central London.
I loved the attention to detail which had gone into making it a really lovely place to spend time – the selection of books about London on all the bookshelves, the huge ship’s logbook in place of an ordinary guest book, and the excellent fresh coffee.
The dinner which was organised to celebrate my win was fantastic – it was a huge privilege to meet people like Campbell Robb, the Chief Executive of Shelter, and Shaun Bailey, who advises David Cameron on the “Big Society” agenda, and to have the chance to discuss my plans for No home to waste with them.
We talked about the problems faced by those who struggle to pay London rents – and who therefore end up sleeping on sofas or even in garages and sheds despite working full time for low wages. We also discussed the problems faced by owners of empty homes – particularly in the current economic climate, where funds to complete planned renovations or rebuilds are hard to come by, meaning that some empty homes are likely to sit empty for even longer as planned projects are delayed, creating costs and risks for their owners and a blight on the neighbourhoods where they are located.
The guests had some great suggestions for making sure that my idea for dealing with both those problems is a success – particularly around making sure that we get the scale right – so the organisation doesn’t get so big that it loses what makes it special, but isn’t so small that it can’t sustain itself.
It was a shame to leave and get back into the ordinary hustle of the city the next morning - but the whole experience left me feeling very buoyed up for the next stage of developing No home to waste, which is to do a brilliant job of looking after flats for the two east London housing associations which have agreed to use us.
Katharine Hibbert, January 2012
Katharine's dinner was attended by:
Shaun Bailey, Managing Director and co-founder of My Generation
Alan Benson, Head of Housing and Homelessness at Greater London Authority
Philip Colligan, NESTA, Executive Director of Public Service Lab
David Ireland, Empty Homes
Emily Perkin, Management Consultant and Dot Dot Dot Director
Campbell Robb, Chief Executive of Shelter
Read the Evening Standard's report on the night here.