Mr Tom Ardron

PhD Student

Tom Ardron joined the Use Less Group / UKFIRES as a PhD student in 2022 as part of the FIBE2 Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment.

Tom is an ARB registered architect with several years of industry experience working primarily within the private residential sector on low-energy housing renovations. His research (supervised by Julian Allwood and in collaboration with the Manufacturing Technology Centre [MTC]) aims to locate all possible economies of scale within the retrofit of UK housing. All of the UK’s 28 million homes need to be retrofitted to the highest levels of energy performance in the remaining 28 years to deliver the UK’s legal commitment to zero emissions by 2050. Current retrofit projects have shown that meeting these energy performance levels is possible, yet the costs are still too high, and they take a long time to complete. Converting from expensive one-off delivery to mass market covered requires that we deploy the design, production skills and technologies of contemporary manufacturing to the practices of one-off small-scale construction.

Tom is a graduate of architecture and holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Cambridge. Alongside his work in practice, Tom ran both BA and MArch studios at Newcastle University focusing on the reuse of existing buildings within architectural design.