Saving the planet, in style

The prospects for "green" living in Britain seem remote as you motor northwards along the A117 in Beddington, not far from Croydon. A steady stream of traffic, semis, dots and dashes of shops, filter-lanes, clutches of greenery - scenes so ordinary that they seem to haze into a kind of virtual townscape.

The prospects for "green" living in Britain seem remote as you motor northwards along the A117 in Beddington, not far from Croydon. A steady stream of traffic, semis, dots and dashes of shops, filter-lanes, clutches of greenery - scenes so ordinary that they seem to haze into a kind of virtual townscape.

And then, suddenly, phantom jump-leads are applied to your temples, and the virtual flares back into the sharply real. There, on the right, is the strangely configured cluster of terraced buildings that constitutes part of the future of "green" existence in Britain. This is the BedZed development, and a tall man is waiting for me at Dunster Way, to tell me about the environmentally friendly future.

I pull in to one of the parking spaces, and rather carefully: the metal stalks of the electric-car chargers look rather delicate. Casing the joint rapidly confirms BedZed's physical oddity. The ridges of the housing blocks are capped with brightly coloured ventilators. The blocks are linked at first-floor level by elegantly arched metal bridges that lead from pairs of homes on one side to their roof gardens on the other. The one-bedroomed flats loll out of the rooflines like lumpen Teddy-boy quiffs. This is a certain kind of communality in action - aka the "carbon neutral" lifestyle.

BedZed is essentially an experiment, conceived by the BioRegional Group, the Peabody Trust housing charity, and Bill Dunster Architects. It's an experiment that has housed about 400 people in flats and masionettes for more than three years; and which became a shortlisted finalist in the Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize competition two years ago. If Tony Blair's vision for a greener future is to come to pass, as he outlined in his call for a world scientific conference last week, the BedZed is the house of the future.

It will have come as no surprise to the people who live in them to learn that Norman Foster & Partners are working with the BioRegional Group to develop an eco-village for 5,000 people, likely to go on site in the Dagenham area late in 2005. Nevertheless, BedZed's residents are pioneers. It's just that, by now, the wood-burning 135kW energy plant - fuelled at no cost with local authority timber offcuts that would otherwise be dumped into landfills - and the photovoltaic screens on the south-facing glazing are barely remarkable. The super-dense, energy-hugging concrete slabs under their carpets? The water reprocessing, and the rainwater collecting? What's all the fuss about?

Steve Tarbard is standing in his first-floor conservatory. Light is streaming through into the living-room and kitchenette. From here, the bridge to his micro-acreage is a few steps away. There's a wide-open feel about the place, due to the south-facing arrangement of all BedZed's accommodation.

Steve and his wife, Sue, are living in the kind of house they'd always dreamt of - though they're clearly not members of the muesli-and-sandal brigade: Steve's a home-based recruitment sales manager, Sue is a London facilities manager. "We'd owned a terraced house in Bristol and lived and worked in Indonesia for 18 months," he says. "That was 10 years ago. Then we were in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and in rented property in London."

It was while living in a two-bedroomed flat in Wallington, Sutton, that they read about the BedZed project, then nearing completion. "We saw this article during a weekend in Bristol, and thought: great, it's five minutes from where we were living. It gave us everything we wanted from the green angle. It was local. It was perfect."

The Tarbards paid £189,000 for their three-bedroomed slice of BedZed two years ago; it's worth at least £240,000 today. What, ultimately, made them decide to buy? "It was the sense of space," says Steve, "and the light. That's what we really love about the house, and what makes it different. And if there really is going to be a carbon-tax, we're in the right place."

Perhaps surprisingly, living in this kind of higher tech eco-housing is essentially unremarkable. Apart from the brighter interiors and the notably well-ventilated feel, there's nothing that would surprise those used to ordinary housing. "There's very little here that fundamentally different," says Steve. "The nice thing here is that you can have a normal lifestyle without feeling that you're going over the top. The only thing that's very different is that there's no central heating, so you have to get used to regulating the temperature by opening and closing windows."

That's it, then, green living's bottom line: open window; shut window; have riveting discussion about which windows to open, which to shut, and which to leave slightly open. Put kettle on in knowledge that no fossil fuels are going up in smoke. Pad around in bare feet, or flip-flops.

But there is an unexpected wrinkle in the calm surface of existence at BedZed. Living in these homes is apparently so satisfying that it's hard to leave. Steve Tarbard notes that most of the turnover of houses has involved a kind of internal musical-chairs - people moving from one address to another within the four blocks of housing. The few who have sold up and left did so because their jobs demanded they live elsewhere. It's a definite issue; a kind of benevolent environmental lock-in.

"Where do you go after this?" muses Steve. "The only reason we would leave is if our jobs demanded it. We couldn't build a place like this for ourselves. We'd need an architect, and land. It's not practical, is it? The only way it could work is if there was somebody building big developments like this - a Wimpey or a Barratts."

The impending Foster development at Dagenham will be the first in Britain to pump up the volume in eco-housing. Like BedZed, it will be an experiment. But its size and methodology will be quite different. At BedZed, environmental gains are down to architecture designed solely with zero carbon use in mind. In Dagenham, the buildings - likely to take the form of highly glazed medium-rise apartment blocks - will be reasonably energy efficient; but the real gains will be made by designing infrastructure and transport systems that will cut energy use outside the home.

This approach is part of BioRegional's "eco-footprint" system of using local resources, ranging from food to materials, as much as possible. It's an attempt to reduce the UK's heavy "three worlds" use of fossil fuels: if every country used as much energy as we do, it would require the resources of three worlds.

Significantly, this project - working title, ZSquared - isn't a one-off. It's part of BioRegional's wider aim to establish sizeable eco-burbs in every European country. The Portuguese are already building a ZSquared clone settlement at Mata de Sesimbra, south of Lisbon.

Steve Tarbard may not want to move - but the prospect is becoming less daunting for Britain's environmentally concerned Pooters - in the south, at least. Bill Dunster Architects are working on an array of new projects, ranging from their bicycle-orientated Velocity scheme, apartment tower-blocks and other BedZed-like developments.

In a few years, we might expect to read "carbon-neutral" on a small percentage of estate agents' particulars. And some of us might experience the strange, and rather charming, greeting that awaited the Tarbards. "When we first moved in," recalls Steve, "we were sitting in the lounge, and we saw some movement. And it was like: what's up? What's out there? And it was the wind-cowls moving."