Retrofit House: Open House

Name: Retrofit House: Open House
Start: 2025-11-10T10:00:00+00:00
End: 2025-11-15T19:00:00+00:00
Location: Link Road

Schedule

Mon, 10 Nov, 2025 at 10:00 am to Sat, 15 Nov, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Link Road | Birmingham, EN

Retrofit House opens its doors for a week-long exploration of reimagining retrofit for +3°C futures at the scale of our homes and streets.
About this Event

Retrofit House will open its doors for a week-long exploration of how we reimagine retrofit to meet +3°C futures at the scale of our homes and streets, taking place 10th — 15th November 2025 in Birmingham, UK.
We invite you into a living site of learning and demonstration to rehearse what a common house for our street/s could look and feel like. This includes the skills it will take to care for our shared infrastructure, the tensions and contradictions to be found in the materials we will need to re/use, and the kinds of governance that can help us steward it together.
Bringing together neighbours, builders, repairers, gardeners, designers, researchers, organisers, funders, artists, activists, and curious visitors of all ages, together we will gather for workshops, talks, co-builds, screenings, shared meals and more, with a continued role for everyone in the reimagination of our relationship/s to land, materials and each other in order to face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead together.
—

Event Photos

SCHEDULE
The week will feature offerings from a range of hyperlocal street and neighbourhood, city, ecoregional, national and international contributors, including:
—Alastair Parvin, Open Systems Lab + WikiHouse
—Andy Nevins, GUTA Enterprise
——FORIJ
—Generous Waste
—Henna Burney
—Kevin Kimwelle
—Material Cultures
—Sara Edmonds, National Retrofit Hub + HE-AL
—Sarah King, —Siana Bangura
+ many more TBA.
Whilst the schedule details are finalised, below is an top level overview of the theme for each day and the kinds of sessions to expect in order to support your overall planning.
Monday 10th November—Retrofit Street [Neighbours Only]
We start the week with a special day together with Link Road neighbours only, with no wider public invitation.
Tuesday 11th November—Retrofit [House] Reimagined
11am—8pm
Together we’ll pick back up where Retrofit Reimagined left off, diving into the rich field of practice emerging from the Retrofit Reimagined ecosystem, exploring how ideas like FreeHouse from Dark Matter Labs and Fairhold from Open Systems Lab can help us fundamentally reimagine our relationship to the built environment around us. All welcome.
Wednesday 12th November—Material Matter[s]
11am—8pm
Get hands on working with clay, exploring the material practices of those in the region, beyond and the possibilities they unearth for retrofit, with a range of activities and relationships growing from our bio-based material and designing for reuse enquiries with Material Cultures, Sarah King and more, concluding with a talk from Kevin Kimwelle. All welcome.
Thursday 13th November—Designing With Our Ecoregion
11am—8pm
Together we’ll deepen the relationships emerging from the Building Skills ecoregional mapping with Material Cultures, bringing together the incredible work happening locally with wider approaches of Henna Burney and Lewis Jones to explore the material opportunities of the landscape Retrofit House is situated within. All welcome.
Friday 14th November—Re:Builders
11am—8pm
Retrofit House hosts a build day for the Re:Builders 2025-26: Routes To Regenerative Retrofit cohort, exploring bio-based insulation, alongside winter planting with neighbours, foraging to make pigments, and more. All welcome.
Saturday 15th November—Site As A Classroom
11am—7pm
A bumper day of learning opportunities as we reimagine the Retrofit House site as a classroom, from repair missions together on the street with Andy Nevins, to prototyping natural paints and even glazing on the grill. All welcome.
You can also drop in any time Tuesday 11th—Saturday 15th November to find out more about Retrofit House and explore what a common house could look and feel like in a variety of ways that will run throughout the whole week; from artist in residence activities and relaxed chats over a cuppa in The Front Room, to repair sessions and neighbourhood tours, with lunch and dinner served every day for all who come through the doors.
—

Event Photos

PRACTICAL INFO
Open House activities will take place in and around the Retrofit House site on Link Road, Ladywood, Birmingham, B16 0EP.
As we take early stewardship of Retrofit House together alongside our incredible neighbours, we are very committed and excited to keep the site as open as possible as a place of learning, demonstration and shared possibility throughout the design, retrofit works and collective stewardship ahead. In order to make this work, we invite you to adhere to some important principles and take postures of collective care to keep each other safe and well on site.
— We regret that access into the house is not currently wheelchair accessible due to both the doorway raised above street level and a narrow entranceway
— Activity will take place across three storeys of the house, with steep stairs up to the first and second floor rooms, with no assistive capacity such as a lift available. This may pose challenges for those with limited mobility, and we will clearly label which activities are taking place at ground level to support you to plan your visit with these limitations of the existing infrastructure in mind
— The house is in the early stages of a strip out process, with flooring uneven in places and many features that need care and repair. Please ensure to navigate carefully and look out for each other
— Please be prepared to take an active co-stewardship role together, including:
+ being patient and adaptable in taking care of yourself and being considerate of others, particularly at times when the house may become busy or feels crowded
+ keeping corridors and walkways clear
+ ensuring others have a plate of food before we receive second helpings
+ looking out for younger and older visitors
and countless other ways we know you will show us in what it means to navigate the house with collective care and sensitivity to the needs and wellbeing of everyone
— All children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult
— The house has toilet facilities available on both the ground floor and first floor
— Please be considerate and respectful of our neighbours at all times by acting with the shared understanding that you are visiting a house on a residential street. This includes:
+ visiting Retrofit House by public transport and/or active travel wherever possible
+ organising for drop offs in taxis or private cars only as needed, with no street parking available on Link Road or the surrounding streets
+ not including any residents in photos or video without their explicit consent
+ keeping noise to a respectful level, particularly if visiting Retrofit House in the evening
— Please treat the material library and other displays with care, and be advised not to touch the exposed materials of the house's built fabric. This is for your own safety and wellbeing, as well as ensuring future visitors can continue to enjoy and learn from these shared resources after you, over the longer term
— Please listen and respect any further care guidance shared by our team and practitioners on site, for whom your safety and the safety of others is their number one priority
If further information would support your visit, please contact Brodie on . You can also let us know about any specific access requirements you may have during the sign up process, and where possible we will of course seek to meet these, whilst also being honest about the limitations of the current infrastructure where needed to ensure you have any information you may need before attending.
—

CONTEXT
In 2022 we outlined the scale of the challenge of retrofit, posed six shifts towards the broader reimagination it requires of us, and threw open a warm invitation for the role for everyone in doing so—resulting in 2 years of national Retrofit Reimagined festival convening alongside many partners and peers in 2022 and 2023 in Birmingham, London, Machynlleth and Glasgow.
In 2024, through co-authoring 3°C Neighbourhood with Dark Matter Labs we went further to show that the UK’s current decarbonisation strategies are unviable without further extraction that would deepen the social and ecological harm they seek to address. Without profoundly transforming how we design, build, use, re-use, and live with the built environment around us, the +1.5°C threshold is only a few years away.
If there isn’t enough time, material, carbon budget and people’s needs aren’t being met, how do we reimagine retrofit at the level of creativity and transformation required?
The level of creativity and transformation required to rise to the challenge of meeting ambitious climate targets means learning from the best examples around us, taking them even further, and into more widespread applications across our homes, streets and neighbourhoods.
3°C Neighbourhood calls for the resilience, adaptation and extension of existing buildings for the most effective use of resources, alongside other Reimagined Neighbourhood Fundamentals, all of which have application at the foundational scale of our homes and streets.

Event Photos

“In our communities we’ll organise and design to normalise space sharing to make the most of the buildings we have. This contributes to a revaluation of our built surroundings to treat them as a further form of shared community infrastructure to be cared for and made to last longer.”
—3°C Neighbourhood
We know our agency and ability to organise is highest in our homes and streets, as well as being where intersecting crises we face converge most viscerally, making them a fractal for addressing the inequalities of wider, interlinked systems, of which our built environment sits at the heart.
Alongside the Retrofit Street Learning Journey currently being hosted with neighbours from Link Road, we are now starting to prototype at the intersections of reimagining retrofit for 3°C futures at the scale of our homes and streets through Retrofit House as a tangible demonstrator site, working alongside Dark Matter Labs and Material Cultures, asking what a common house for the street could look like.
None of us have all the answers, so we need to build, test and try together. Together, we’re excited to be taking early steps for assets to be held within a street entity, starting where we are in our neighbourhood to take housing out of speculation and into common ownership and stewardship by the people who live there through Retrofit House.
Whether your connection is through industry, funding, research, construction, artistry, rooted organising and/or everyday life, you are warmly welcome to join us for Retrofit House: Open House, and along the journey ahead, with a role for everyone, starting from where they are.
—

Event Photos