Ty-Mawr: A Small Welsh Miracle in a Week of Bad News

On the same day the Chancellor stood at the despatch box and quietly erased the last remaining bits of help for Britain’s coldest homes, I found myself thinking about a place that does the exact opposite.

Ty-Mawr.

A lime yard, a training centre, a materials hub, a knowledge institution, a living workshop and, crucially, one of the very few places in the UK where our battered, beautiful older buildings are treated with the care they deserve.

It is hard to convey what Ty-Mawr actually is unless you have stood inside it. It is not a brand-driven campus. It is not a manicured museum of heritage craft. It is a living, breathing, learning space, built around one defining principle Nigel Jervis articulated beautifully to me:

“There is a desire to prescribe a way in which you deal with retrofit and buildings, but there is no flowchart and there is no direct route.”

That line hit me harder than anything in the Budget.

A Course Where Everyone Turns Up With a Real Problem

When I visited, the course makeup was as eclectic as Britain’s housing stock itself. Tradesmen covered in lime dust. Architects and surveyors with clipboards. Homeowners exhausted from fighting with their own walls. A man living in his van while renovating a Gloucester hall. A woman from Bath who simply said her house felt watery.

In coveralls, everyone looked the same. No hierarchy.

Everyone arrived with the same look in their eyes though.
'I have got a building problem and I do not want to make it worse.'

The instructors were patient, forensic and quietly brilliant. Nothing was left to chance. Building physics was not treated as an academic exercise but explained the way only craftspeople can: with humility, lived experience and fragments of lime plaster in their hands.

Nigel put it plainly:

“We need to read the problems within a building rather than cover up those potential problems, which is what we have been doing for 50 years.”

Exactly the thing government schemes keep repeating.

Why Ty-Mawr Exists: Repairing the Damage of the Last Century

Much of the day i visited revolved around a simple, inconvenient truth.

Modern materials have accelerated the decay of traditional buildings.

Not because people were stupid. Because the solution they were sold ignored the physics.

Nigel walked me through the last half-century of mistakes. Cement coatings trapping moisture. Gypsum suffocating breathability. Cavity walls filled against their structural logic. Public money spent insulating homes, then more public money spent removing that insulation when black mould tore through the walls.

He said:

“I just cannot understand how we are continually making exactly the same mistakes with the knowledge being out there.”

Thirty thousand homes condemned because of poor retrofit choices. That is the real cost of getting this wrong.

Meanwhile, Ty-Mawr teaches people how to get it right.

Bio-Materials Are Not Just Nice. They Are Necessary.

What struck me most was the integrity that runs through every decision Nigel and the team make.

Take fibres.

Traditional plasters used animal hair because it was abundant. Today, most commercial animal fibres come from industries in China that Nigel refuses to support.

“Animal fibre in general comes from China, and it is not a particularly nice industry. Both ethically and environmentally I do not think that can be supported.”

So they spent years experimenting with plant fibres. Looking for ones that add strength and sequester carbon.

This is the kind of innovation the retrofit sector desperately needs. And it is happening quietly, in an old agricultural building in Brecon, not in Westminster.

A Learning Culture Without Ego

One of the most powerful things about Ty-Mawr is what they refuse to do.

They do not gate keep. They do not push a single ideology. They do not pretend there is one way.

Nigel summed it up:

“We are not making statements here. We are trying to have communication.”

In a sector full of conflicting opinions, proprietary systems, opaque standards and defensive manufacturers, Ty-Mawr is almost accidentally a model for what the UK needs.

I hear people having open conversations. They discussed their honest mistakes.
Lived experience. Practical evidence eas presented from their own homes and projects. All pointing towards solutions that were not always easy but they fitted those buildings.

You see it in their demonstration building, where Nigel freely points out things they tried that did not work, because teaching what went wrong is the fastest way to stop others repeating it.

A Multi-Disciplinary Table Where Everyone Is Equal

The course’s magic is the mixture. Historic England architects debating with tradesmen. Surveyors arguing with homeowners. People from completely different worlds discovering that the laws of moisture do not care about your job title.

Nigel described it perfectly:

“The best courses are when you get a mix of architects, surveyors, homeowners and tradesmen. You get such a great set of conversations.”

That is the antidote to the Budget. That is what real public interest looks like.

A Long-Term View in a Short-Term Country

Nigel is currently retrofitting a listed building in Brecon. I've got a personal attachment to this as it was one of the markers on my running routes. But for Nigel - there is no shortcuts. No one size fits all. They are measuring moisture levels before and after insulation so they can learn what actually works.

It is not cheap. It is not fast. It is not subsidy-driven.

But it is honest.

And at some point we have to face an uncomfortable reality. Britain is now relying on places like Ty-Mawr to pick up the slack left by short-term government thinking.

Because while Westminster is stuck in a decision death spiral, it dithers or deletes schemes, all whilst Ty-Mawr trains real people to solve real problems in real homes.

If You Are Feeling Lost After the Budget Go Here

If you are a homeowner unsure where to begin, a trade wanting to move into natural materials, a surveyor trying to unlearn the last 20 years, or simply someone who does not want to break a building while trying to fix it, go to Ty-Mawr.

You will find kindness, clarity and a type of deep craft expertise Britain is losing far too quickly.

You will also find something the retrofit sector rarely gives you.

Reassurance. Real reassurance, not slogans.

As Nigel told me:

“People are looking for reassurance. We try not to give them the answer but the ability to think about how to reach it.”

That might be the single most important skill we can teach people in the energy transition.

And it was not in the Budget.