Understanding Our Heritage: Monitoring of energy and environmental performance of traditional terraced houses of Northern England. A. Galán González 1 , B.I. Roberts 2 , R. Fitton 2 , W. Swan 2 , H. Elkadi 2 1 Building, Architecture and Town Planning (BATir), Université Libre de Bruxelles, ULB, Brussels, Belgium. Aranzazu.Galan.Gonzalez@ulb.ac.be 2 School of Built Environment, University of Salford, UoS, Salford, United Kingdom. B.I.Roberts@salford.ac.uk; R.Fitton@salford.ac.uk; W.C.Swan@salford.ac.uk; H.Elkadi@salford.ac.uk Abstract – Existing buildings play a key role in the achievement of the ambitious energy saving and greenhouse gas reduction targets that Europe has fixed for 2020 and 2050. Research has demonstrated that the impact in terms of decrease of energy use and CO2 will be strong, considering that, in Europe, 80% of the 2030 building stock already exists and 30% are historical buildings. To achieve these goals, reliable data about energy consumption, building components and systems performance of the existing building stock is needed to implement adequate strategies. United Kingdom (UK) is one of the most advanced European countries in regards to the implementation of regulations and programs to measure and assess the real performance of its old buildings. One of these programs is the Green Deal Go Early Project (GDGE) that the University of Salford has conducted for the UK Government during 2015 and which first discussions are presented in this paper. The values obtained from the monitoring of 16 solid-wall pre-1919 Victorian terraced houses in Greater Manchester are in accordance to those extracted from the BRE report on “In-situ measurements of Wall U-values in English Housing”, what validates the methodology followed to approach the monitoring of these case study houses as well as the preliminary results. This alignment provides a closer definition of the real U-value of solid wall housing typology confronted with those currently provided by the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) and Reduced Data Standard Assessment Procedure (RdSAP), leading the way to a better understanding of the performance of historic buildings and hence an improvement in the retrofitting strategies. Keywords – Traditional Housing; Monitoring; Energy Performance; Northern England; Terraced Houses 1. INTRODUCTION The urban fabric of European cities is largely shaped by old and inefficient residential buildings whose energy demand can exceed 200kWh/m² per year [1]. More than 40% of our European residential buildings have been constructed before the 1960s when energy building regulations were very limited [2]. As a matter of fact, the energy used in domestic buildings contribute a large percentage of the world’s carbon emissions [3]: while modern building techniques are able to produce dwellings with a low in-use energy requirement, a greater impact can be made by improving the existing, poorly performing housing stock [4]. Additionally, architectural heritage deserves very particular attention within a sustainable architectural approach, with regard to sustainable energy development and historic buildings protection [5]. Preservation of the architectural heritage is considered a fundamental issue in the life of modern societies [6] contributing significantly to the value of the city by branding the city´s character. The need of preserving historical constructions is thus not only a cultural requirement, but also an economical and developmental demand [7]. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by University of Salford Institutional Repository