Ned Drury

We did not care about where our energy came from until it stopped. The result: an energy revolution that transformed the UK. 

Having failed to properly invest in renewable energy infrastructure, the government introduced the Weekly Household Energy Allowance (WHEA) in an attempt to ration the resources that remained. The only way to maintain the energy-rich lifestyles to which we had all become accustomed was to generate personal energy from renewable sources. This resulted in a migration of people, homes, businesses and industry towards areas with more favourable conditions for the generation of renewable energy – Hastings for sunshine, Northumberland for wind and coastal areas for tidal.

As energy production became central to everyday life, new communities formed, bought together by a shared understanding of where their energy had come from. To capitalise on these conditions, the Big 6 energy companies (British Gas, Npower, E.ON, EDF, SSE and Scottish Power) team up with the six largest house builders (Barratt, Bellway, Berkeley, Persimmon, Redrow and Taylor Wimpey) to create new developments centred around renewable energy infrastructure.

These new energy communities saw the birth of local cultures based around the resources on which they depended. May Day and the Summer Solstice became the most important holidays within the Solar Settlements of the southeast, celebrating the extended hours of solar energy production, while the daily routine of the Tidal Towns are governed by the position of the moon as it exerts its influence over the tides.

Within this scenario, this thesis project focuses on London, imagining the development of Thamespool - a tidal lagoon created in the Thames Estuary between Dartford and Rainham.