Houses of the future will be on stilts and have removable walls, reports Lucy Alexander.

The Government’s pledge to carbon neutralise every new British home by 2016 may sound ambitious now, but will appear pretty basic to the homeowners of the future, for whom zero carbon living will be a given. By 2080, the avant-garde may be living in houses on stilts (far right) with removable walls, kept cool by dirty bathwater, according to a new study by Arup Associates and Zurich Insurance.

In a separate report announced this week, the first steps on the path to sustainable housing were outlined by Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. By 2050, according to Ms Kelly, a third of the total housing stock will be less than 44 years old. And everything post-2016 will, of course, be zero carbon, which means producing enough clean energy to cover any power taken from traditional sources. Plans for increasing the eco-friendliness of the existing housing stock will follow next year...

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