Green makeover for old mill

From the The Oxford Times, first published Thursday 14th Aug 2008.

Property developers may be right up there among the front runners when it comes to business people being squeezed out by the credit crunch.

But Henry Reily Collins, okat just 23, is a developer with a mission, who hopes to ride out the economic downturn by offering something unique that buyers with an environmental conscience will be unable to resist.

Certainly his £3m conversion of the Grade 2 listed Dandridge's Mill, in East Hanney, must be the most exciting, original, and green property development now coming onto the market in Oxfordshire, possibly in the country.

He said: "People buying here will know that this conversion has reduced the carbon footprint of the development by 91 per cent through the use of energy efficient measures and through renewable energy technologies."

The former silk mill, built in 1820, is being trasformed into three apartments each containing three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and the former mill overseer's house is also being transformed.

The green appeal translates into tangible money-saving too. Owners of homes here will have neglible energy costs or even find themselves in credit with suppliers - with their meters at night clocking backwards, so to speak, as the building produces rather than consumes electricity.

Mr Reily Collins, who won the prestigious Worshipful Company of Ferroners (Ironmongers) prize at the University of Manchester in 2007, where he did a five years masters course in Materials Science and Engineering, said: "The whole project would not have been viable had it not been for a grant from the Low Carbon Building Programme, funded by the Energy Savings Trust and the Carbon Trust, which is paying for half the costs of the low or zero carbon technology.

"Residents will have the benefit of that grant."

And at the core of the impressive technology in the beautiful building is an ancient device harnessed to modern use, namely an Archimedian screw driven by the original mill race.

It will be open to view as an impressive feature, and will produce 4 kilowatts of energy, offsetting 25 per cent of the building's carbon dioxide emissions.

In addition, another energy source will be efficient solar panels hidden from view in the double apex roof. They will supplement the water power, particularly in summer when river levels are low and solar energy levels are high.

Then there will be a water source heat pump system, based on more than a kilometre of pipes sunken into the river, which will heat 100 per cent of the building's hot water, and will displace 60 per cent of the building's carbon emissions.

On top of all that there will be super-efficient insulation, 25 per cent better than building regulations require, low energy lighting, efficient rain water harvesting, and maximum use of natural daylight.

There are also a number of clever innovations, such as a system for allowing residents to check their energy usage at any time on the web.

Mr Reily Collins, whose award-winning research for assessing crack damage in nuclear reactors has now been taken over by Manchester University, is project-managing Dandridge's Mill under the auspices of his parents' family firm of Halidays Developments, a sister company of the family antiques business in Dorchester, Halidays Antiques.

Director of Halidays Developments, and Mr Reily Collins' mother, Binny Reily-Collins, said: "We bought the mill in April 2007 but had Henry not been around we wouldn't have concentrated so much on the green side."

The family development firm bought up 13 properties in Dorchester two years ago, nine of them residential, nearly all of them listed, and some dating from the 15th Century.

Now the firm has also restored the magnificent 18th Century house next door to Dandridge's Mill, formerly the mill owner's house. It has gardens stretching down to a half-acre lake. Offers are invited of more than £1m.

Certainly the converted mill will make idyllic homes. Mr reily Collins described the Letcombe Brook, which the mill straddles, as "one of the most protected brooks in Britain. One of very few chalk bottomed brooks."

The flats and house will have both private and communal gardens overlooking the stream.

When investigating the building's wheel room, to see how the modern equivalent of a mill wheel (the Archimedes Screw) could be installed, he came across the original spindle dating from the 1890s.

He said: "When I saw that, I knew the scheme would work."

The spindle dated from the 1890s rather than earlier because the silk mill enterprise came to an end in the mid-19th Century and the building converted to a grain mill run by the Dandridge brothers.

Then it was used by maltsters until the Second World War when it was adapted to make wings for the Mosquito aeroplane.

The apartments and house will go on the market next month through agents Pink and Black. Prices have not yet been decided.

Bad luck of course that the crunch should strike just when such a wonderful project as this is nearing completion, but the family remain confident of success.

Mrs Binny Reily-Collins said: "Its no good being worried. We think and hope that what we are doing is so unusual and exciting that now is the right time."

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