00:00It was once abandoned and boarded up but Canterbury's landmark has now been all shook up.
00:06For decades this house on St Peter's Place was known for one thing, the picture of Elvis Presley
00:13in its window. Now after years of sitting empty the building has gained another memorable title
00:19as Canterbury City Council has completed a major retrofit to turn it into the city's first
00:24net zero council home. We started with the house completely bare brick, holes in the walls,
00:32windows missing. We've basically just given it a massive facelift thermally and aesthetically
00:38so to make it a really efficient sustainable home. The last time I was stood here the Elvis house was
00:45just at the beginning of its retrofit journey but just over a year later the house is now completely
00:50finished and tenants are able to move in quite soon. But how much of a game changer is it really?
00:56So it's incredibly no compensation, no mould, it's just I think a game changer in terms of
01:03health and well-being and to do this for social housing is just fantastic.
01:07The council hopes that this home could help modernise older homes across the district.
01:12I'm very excited to be in this house and it is absolutely amazing you know the whole house is
01:17completely passive house founded now which means it's completely energy efficient about 90 percent
01:24less energy being used to sort of heat this house and generate energy in this house which is
01:30absolutely amazing. So yeah our the idea is to make sure that all our stock that is what we own
01:37in
01:37the council is net zero by 2030 and we've just received a huge grant warm homes fund to to help
01:47deliver
01:48some of the retrofit of our council houses within our stock so we'll be using all this information to
01:53inform that. But why did they choose to start with the Elvis house? This is a property that we've had
02:00on
02:00our books for many many years I think since the 1970s and it's um it's typical of a lot of
02:07our housing
02:08stock so we thought when it came vacant it was an ideal opportunity instead of just renovating it in
02:15the usual way and and re-letting it but what we wanted to do was use this as a as
02:20a project to see how
02:22close to um no cost in operation we could get a a council home as a as an example so
02:30that we've got
02:31warm you know cozy easy to heat homes that are healthy uh and learn the lessons and roll it out
02:38across the rest of our stock. The final national political point I would say the government has been
02:44consulting about revision to the right to buy so um I do hope that this will remain uh available to
02:51people
02:51in housing need rather than disappearing into the private housing market. The council has applied
02:57to royal mail to officially rename the address the Elvis house with the plaque planned to mark its
03:03history and with the first tenants expected by the end of the month Elvis could soon be back in the
03:09building Kristen Hawthorne KMTV in Canterbury
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