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Most people will buy turf to create a lawn to be enjoyed by family and friends during the (all to brief) British summer, however throughout history there have been many examples of turf being used in slightly more imaginative ways, say to build a house!

History

As with most things the web is full of information about the history and benefits of using turf in housing; from the Icelandic houses of the Viking Age using turf through necessity due to it’s superior insulation properties and the unsuitability of birch wood to make complex structures. This practice (along with pillaging) quickly spread to the other Scandinavian countries and even as far as Canada.

Modern Houses

Fast forward to 1960’s Germany when the modern trend for ‘green roofs’ started as a method of; reducing heating costs, reduce cooling loads on a building by fifty to ninety percent (a concentration of green roofs in city’s can reduce the average temperatures during the summer), reduce stormwater run off, create new natural habitats and filter pollutants out of the air and rainfall helping to lower disease rates.

CBBC or Sky Sports?

These environmental and economical benefits of using grass as a building material has helped the trend to catch on worldwide, the most famous example of an earth house in the UK (and possible on earth) has to be the Teletubbies house built for Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa and Po in Teletubby Land.

The latest big news in the earth house world came earlier this year when, to the rejoicing of tabloid headline writers everywhere, ex-Manchester-United-and-England right back Gary Neville applied for planning permission to build a Tubbytronic Superdome all of his own. The underground structure resembles a flower with five ‘petals’ radiating from it’s central point a far cry from the nouveau riche ‘cribs’ most of his contemporaries call home.

This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of every earth house on, erm.., earth. It’s merely a brief introduction to an imaginative use of turf away from the back garden. So when it comes to re-tiling your roof why not think green!