Twilight Talks

The Green Register's early evening talks supported by Ecomerchant: together promoting ethical, healthy sustainable building materials.

Our Twilight Talks are a relaxed and informal string of events on sustainable building matters to complement our regular training topics.

Each one-hour event is FREE of charge and features short talks from one or more speakers. With Q&A and discussion sessions throughout, everyone is invited to be part of the conversation. We hold Twilight talks at 5-6pm, in the sweet spot between work and dinner – so join us to nourish the mind before replenishing the body!

About this event

What makes self-build sustainable? Is it the end result, the process, the types of people drawn to it and the choices they make, or all three?

Projects involving a number of families encourage socially sustainable communities, enabling young people to get on the housing ladder, elderly people to downsize whilst staying in their community, and families to live in environments where children can be raised by the village. Shared or co-housing projects can enable shared landscaping, biodiversity, energy generation and water collection – reducing bills and increasing self-sufficiency. They can also provide shared assets (laundry, spare rooms etc.) and access to green space and growing space.

The self-build process can support the economic sustainability of the local area by commissioning local trades and material suppliers rather than relying on national developers. The slower pace of building also allows for recycled material sourcing, waste reuse, educational opportunities, volunteering and skills building.

And what drives people to get involved in a self-build project? The empowerment of making your own choices about the place you live, either as a family or a community tends to encourage sustainable choices in terms of building fabric – both material sourcing and energy efficiency through making active choices.

Livedin will discuss the insights they have gained through developing their platform, share case studies and statistics, and explain how you could get involved and win work.

We’ll open up a discussion around the benefits and challenges of self-build and are keen to hear from anyone who’s experienced self-build projects as well as those who would like to get involved.

About the Speakers

May Fisher – Community lead - Livedin

Having sparked an interest in sustainable architecture practices during their BA, May Fisher has worked and volunteered on self-build projects both nationally and internationally: including plant-based passivhaus homes in the UK, and a flood resilience project in Pakistan. Now working as Community Lead at LivedIn, they facilitate the initiation of small, grassroots, self-build communities. LivedIn specialises in unlocking challenging parcels of land with planning - specifically for self-build housing- and May's role is to bring the right people into the projects to use the sites as a canvas for innovation.

Twilight Talks are supported by Ecomerchant.