We’re thrilled and honoured that the Institution of Civil Engineers has published an article featuring Warksburn Old Church in its “What is Civil Engineering” series about important projects. The article is here.

It was a pleasure to be able to “bring history full circle” with our first-in-world project to convert a former church into a home which meets Passivhaus standards for airtightness, insulation and extreme energy efficiency. In 1875, the building was originally funded by Sir George Barclay Bruce, who served as President of the ICE in 1887 – 1889. He’s holding the architect’s sketch in this hand in the portrait below.

His Presidential Address on 8th November 1887 contains the world’s first recorded reference to the renewable generation and storage of electricity. In 2024, Sir George’s vision came to life in the very building he funded a century and a half earlier: the completed Warksburn Old Church Passivhaus now produces more energy than it consumes over the course of a year.

Sir George Barclay Bruce. President of the Institution of Civil Engineers 1887 – 1889.
Portrait by kind permission of Westminster College Cambridge.

Electricity is to us now light, heat, and power. Our streets and beacons shine with it, it signs and speaks for us around the world, across the desert, and beneath the ocean. When we shall have learnt the way of storing up in a more efficient and financially successful manner, the unemployed forces of nature such as the winds and streams and tides, which can be so readily converted into electrical energy at trifling cost, then will it become a factor in the world’s life compared with which the present is as nothing.

George Barclay Bruce – Presidential Address to ICE 8 November 1887

For more information about the historical connection to Sir George Barclay Bruce, and his remarkable anticipation of renewable energy please see this page.