Lessons From Creating a Carbon Reduction Plan for a Large Heritage Building

• Start with a baseline, but don’t wait for perfect data. Measuring emissions — even with limited information at first — gives you a starting point to track progress and identify the biggest sources of carbon.
• Keep your carbon reduction plan focused and manageable. A short plan with a few clear objectives and achievable actions is more useful than a long, overwhelming list that is difficult to deliver or report on.
• Prioritise the biggest carbon impacts. For large heritage buildings, energy use — especially heating and electricity — is likely to dominate, so understanding and tackling these areas is essential.
• Small, practical improvements can add up. LED lighting, plant reprogramming, secondary glazing, better event planning and grant-funded upgrades can all contribute to meaningful reductions over time.
• Engagement and partnerships are vital. Senior buy-in, staff involvement, local authority support, consultants, suppliers, clients and funders all have a role in making carbon reduction achievable.

Speakers: Sarah Rousseau (she/her) and Mark Evison (he/him)

Sarah: Hello everybody, thank you for joining today!
I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm Sarah Rousseau and I work for Historic England in the Sector Resilience and Skills team, and I manage the delivery of the Sector to Net Zero carbon reduction training rollout.

So I'm really, really pleased to welcome you all today to this webinar, and I'm excited that we'll be hearing from Mark Everson from Alexandra Park and Palace. As I'm sure you, many of you know, Alexandra Palace is a large and complex multi-use Grade II listed building in North London, and so I think we're going to be hearing a bit from Mark about the different purposes it has now, the different uses, and a bit about their how they're working on measuring and reducing their carbon reductions.

So I'm going to hand over to Mark to tell us all about that. Do put your comments in the chat and we will go through them later, and I'll also be able to tell you a bit about the next webinar that's coming up in June.

Mark: Excellent! Right, hello everyone!
Thanks for the introduction, good to be here!
Yes, as you said, I'll spend a bit of time today talking about my experience with sustainability and carbon reduction at Alexandra Park and Palace. Background on the place, I'll talk through our sustainability journey as a bit of a case study and discuss some of the lessons I've learned. And yeah, hopefully we'll have time for some questions at the end.
So, start with myself. I began working at Ally Pally in 2007 as the park manager, so I've been here quite a long time now. My role expanded about 5 years ago to cover environmental sustainability for the whole organization as well as the park.

Slide 2

Mark: And in terms of the site, Alexandra Park and Palace. There is the palace on top of our hill. We lie within the London Borough of Haringey, and the palace is now over 150 years old. And our most recent large-scale sort of refit or update of the building was in the 1980s after a large fire. So it's a challenging building to work in.
The park and palace are managed and maintained by a charitable trust which has a mission set out in our Act of Parliament, which is to uphold and maintain the park and palace forever. And more recently, we sort of got into the 21st century and adopted a new vision to be a sustainable home for all that we do, so we're starting to take sustainability seriously. But what is it that you do? I'm sure many of you have heard of Ally Pally, but for people who are not familiar or haven't been here for a while, I'll give you an intro because there's an awful lot going on.

Slide 3

Mark: So let's start with our park, 196 acres of registered historic park. You can see in the photo there, we've got grasslands, sports fields, woodlands, the flower beds, ponds, the boating lake, everything you'd expect in a large urban park. We estimate we get almost 4 million visitors to our park every year, and we've achieved the Green Flag Award, the quality standard for parks, for the last 18 years and had many London in Bloom awards as well. So we're definitely proud of our park, community, and more regionally.

Slide 4

Mark: Moving on to the building, the building is 7 acres, the floor plan, which is equivalent to a football pitch, and it contains the large exhibition halls, a permanent ice rink. We've got a pub, we've got a theater, we've got community spaces, and all the back-of-house facilities that go with it. At the moment, about 30% of the building is actually derelict, so there's a lot going on and we're not even using the full volume of the Palace. And we get around a quarter of a million ticket holders visiting the Palace each year, whether it's live music, exhibitions, the theatre, or whatever.

Slide 5

Mark: So the halls are home to events and exhibitions large and small. That image is of a bike show, but it might be railway modelling, it might be some of our fantastic live music programme. One of our biggest exhibitions of the year is the Knitting and Stitching Show, so it really is a broad church. We also host sporting events from boxing and ping pong, snooker and pool, and of course many of you will know the World Championship of Darts makes its home at Ally Pally every Christmas.

We also have an ice rink with men's and women's ice hockey, international figure skaters, public sessions, family sessions, discos, and a community pantomime as well every Christmas.

Slide 6

Mark: A more recent addition to our active space is our new old theatre. The Victorian Theatre was derelict for 80 years and reopened in 2018, which has now got a full programme of drama, music, comedy, spoken word events, and even sport in there. So we've hosted a squash competition in our theatre and it's the home to, later, with Jules Holland as well, so you see, see it on TV as well.

Slide 7

Mark: So a quick summary of the park and palace: 196 acres of parkland, a 7-acre palace maintained forever. We bring about £100 million into the London economy each year, 4 million people visit the park, and we've been going for 150 years. Well, the park actually opened 10 years before the palace, so that's more than 160 years of leisure and cultural opportunities.

So as you can imagine, that all comes with huge amounts of energy consumption, catering services, staff travel, visitor travel, maintenance work, rubbish disposal, and all of those activities of course have and environmental impact.

Slide 8

Mark: So I'll tell you a little bit about our sustainability journey. It was around 2020, just as the lockdown started, we began talking about sustainability seriously for the first time as an organisation, and we called in Julie's Bicycle. They're sustainability consultants who specialise in the arts and culture sector. You may have heard of them. They used our utility bills and waste bills to create our first-ever carbon footprint. This was for the Palace building only and is based on quite limited data gathering.

Slide 9

Mark: So you can see we measured a footprint of just over 3,000 tonnes of carbon that year. Over half of which came from our mains gas for our heating and hot water, most of the rest from electricity. And this footprint is equivalent to the annual emissions of about 250 UK homes. And this year has been set as our baseline. And it was around this time that our Energy Performance Certificate showed us to be one of the largest carbon emitters in the borough.
So the carbon team from Haringey even got in touch to offer their support because they've obviously got borough-wide carbon reduction plans, and us, along with Tottenham Hotspur on the other side of the borough, were kind of a couple of their targets with the biggest emissions that they wanted to support and help us tackle. So we created our baseline.

Slide 10

Mark: What next? How should we reduce our carbon emissions? And we started at the very beginning and created a sustainability policy and a strategy. So the policy statements are on the left, 5 broad ideas, and then the strategy expands each one. We got these documents approved by the board because, as you know, sort of senior buy-in to these kind of issues is essential to start to get anywhere.
We also adopted a target of reaching net zero by 2041, which aligns with the target set by Haringey Council Haringey Council is also our corporate trustee, so they do have some skin in the game, and yeah, we want to work together with them as far as we can. So once we had our policy and strategy in place, we needed to create an action plan.

Slide 11

Mark: So this slide represents a nice clear set of actions, and it looks like they've all been ticked off, it's quite sanitised. But the reality was really, when I started on this, I think our ambition overtook our capability. You know, I've described the organisation with all those facilities, PARC, ICERES programme, lots going on, all wrapped up. In a 150-year-old Victorian palace and the 40 years of underinvestment, it was quite easy to get carried away and sort of stick everything that we wanted down in the action plan.

The Chief Executive enthusiastically helped me to create a spreadsheet of actions which ended up, you know, it was well over 100 actions on there, everything from induction hobs in the kitchens, LED lighting, green roofs, staff training, and a huge aspiration to go off-grid for energy. And of course, as it turns out, a huge spreadsheet with over 100 actions is pretty clunky and pretty overwhelming.
And despite the sign-off of the strategy and the policy at board level, there was no budget identified to deliver any of these actions specifically. I had to rely on existing budgets and the goodwill of my colleagues across many other departments. I'm sure it's a common problem for many, but with multiple departments responsible for different aspects, it's difficult to pin some people down, and in other cases there's diffuse ownership where nobody owns anything, so it's impossible to pin some issues down.

So managing all of that, trying to keep on top of a list of 100 sustainability actions was pretty challenging, to say the least. Many buildings have some low, low-hanging fruit to improve their sustainability, insulation improvements, draft-proofing, lighting, and air handling. But at the scale of Alipali, over the 7 acres is just the floor area. We've got— we go up to 7 levels from the basement in some parts of the palace, so it's a huge, huge building.

So the scale of it is huge, and we have to fit it around our live events program, finding windows between film shoots and live events, which are all vital for our, for our income. So when we can progress projects in these small windows, they do move forward, but very slowly. But it's not all doom and gloom. So I've got some successes from the last few years.

Slide 12

Mark: During the pandemic, we secured a loan from the Salix scheme to upgrade our outdated lighting in some of our halls, the West Hall and the ice rink and some other areas. Much of the building closed during the pandemic for obvious reasons, so we were able to do a large-scale project. So we've now got modern, low-energy, multi-coloured, programmable super lighting. Which has kind of uplifted a lot of our live events.

Slide 13

Mark: Over in the ice rink, we already had a low emissivity ceiling. You can see on the top of the silver foil on the top of those pictures, which reduces the energy radiated from the hot roof on sunny days.
Then in 2022, We reprogrammed the plant, which was basically calling for the rink to work at -7 degrees all day, every day, but we've reprogrammed it so overnight it only calls for -4, so it doesn't work as hard, which uses less energy. But still, that wasn't easy. The ice rink can be in use for 21 hours in a day, and the different user groups for figure skaters and hockey players have different requirements for ice temperature and conditions, so even that was tricky.

And you can just make out on the bottom of the photo on the right-hand side a new plexiglass barrier which replaced some 30-year-old moth-eaten nets which are to prevent the pucks from ice hockey. And the plexiglass actually had an extra benefit of holding a bigger pool of cold air over the ice pad and keeping things cooler. And between the reprogramming and the plexiglass, we actually reduced the rink itself by 23%, so that was quite positive changes there.

Slide 14

Mark: We've also had that support from Harrogate Council through their community Carbon Fund, some small grants there to install more low-energy lighting outside the Palace, and we've installed— we're installing some secondary glazing in some of the park buildings to make them more thermally efficient. And this support from the council has been essential, helping us take some well, small steps forward, but moving forward.

There's another project in the pipeline funded by the same scheme, which is to install solar panels on the roof of one of our park cafes, which— that's currently in the planning stage. But yeah, all of those things are helping us make small incremental changes and nipping away, if you like, at our carbon footprint.

Slide 15

Mark: So if we look at the progress since we had that baseline figure drawn up for 2019-2020, you can see a drop in the second bar, which was when we were kind of closed for the lockdown, and a jump back up when everything got going again. And then some of those improvements start to kick in, so I'm kind of seeing a downward trend there, which is good news.

Slide 16

Mark: But let's look at the latest figure in more detail as we've been collecting background information in more detail. So that latest figure, the headline: 2,163 tons of carbon dioxide, which is 29% down from the baseline is good news, but you can see here we're actually measuring more categories. So those new categories are extra fuel for extra heating systems which aren't part of our main gas central heating. We've got some staff commuting in there. I did a big study on what it takes to maintain a park, so all the vehicles and tractor emissions, some of the Scope 3 sort of supplies, the tarmac we used.

So yes, the figure's still going, the figure appears to be going down, and we're measuring more items, so it's even more kind of bang for our buck. But still completely dominated by that gas and electricity consumption, and we've barely considered any of our Scope 3 emissions. And if I focus on that 54%, which is mains gas, that's something we're really going to have to tackle to reach net zero.
So it's a big building, as I said. We've got 4 huge boilers, almost the size— each one's almost the size of like a transit van, and they provide the heating and hot water for the whole building. And being located in London, we have access to the Mayor's Zero Carbon Accelerator scheme, which provides consultant support.

So the consultants came in 3 years ago, crunched all our numbers, and proposed that to get off gas we need to move to ground source heat pumps, which it really makes sense for us because we have the benefit of the park, we've got the space for a big array of boreholes, but the price for that, once you include the building retrofit works to improve efficiency comes to about £16 million. £16 million is a lot of money for many organisations, and it certainly is for us. We haven't got anything like that knocking around.

In fact, we can't even afford the 20% match fund that that required because we were targeting the PSDS, the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme. But unfortunately that closed. So that leaves us pretty stranded in terms of decarbonizing the heat. But we didn't give up. We renewed our support from the Zero Carbon Accelerator scheme, and we're talking to new consultants about a more incremental delivery plan, breaking everything down into smaller chunks. More achievable steps and trying to find alternative sources of funding.

And unfortunately, due to our situation, we are unable to take on loans, so we really do need grant funding that we don't have to pay back. There is one other alternative for that, which is that Hernegate Council have been working on a heat network, building it across the borough from the incinerator over in Edmonton, but that's, I think, many, many years away from reaching the Palace. So yeah, getting off gas is a big challenge.

Slide 17

Mark: So I talked about the great big action plan, and I sort of thought I'd turn to reporting. So I had over 100 actions and I was really enthusiastic. I was new in the role and I learned an awful lot in the first year or two, and I wanted to share that with anyone who would listen.
So I wrote a big report covering everything, all those categories you could think of, like water, biodiversity, energy, gas, the whole works. And this ended up really detailed and was 30 pages long. I was very proud of it, but it was too big and unwieldy to be useful. A large document like that, turns out, it's not very good for engagement and doesn't really get people excited. So I was beginning to feel like I reached a bit of a dead end.

Slide 18

Mark: And then last year I attended the How to Write a Carbon Reduction Plan webinar hosted by Historic England, and it was really useful to look at this topic again with a fresh pair of eyes. It certainly was the kick I needed and inspired me to break this all down into more— a few key issues and make it more achievable. Now, that's really obvious in hindsight. It was going to be impossible to deliver a spreadsheet of 100 actions. I certainly couldn't track them, and I really needed to prioritize.

Slide 19

Mark: So I drafted a new carbon reduction plan and just selected 4 objectives, which are there on the screen, ones which we had projects for, projects that we had in the pipeline for items where there was budget identified things that might just involve training.
So for those 4 objectives, I adopted 12 actions to deliver them, and the result, of course, is a much more manageable document. It only covers 5 pages once you include the sort of baseline carbon footprint and the latest, latest numbers. And it's suitable for— much more suitable for presenting to the staff or the board, or we have lots of our clients and potential funders as well asking about sustainability and carbon reduction plans, so instead of hitting them with this great big dissertation, it's a much more user-friendly document, much easier to track and progress, and it's adaptable. I just update it in real time if I hear something in a meeting, and I'll claim any sustainability wins that I can hear about.

Slide 20

Mark: So what are my lessons from this experience? I've had this role for sort of 4 or 5 years. Keep it simple. That's pretty obvious. Choose a few objectives with simple actions. Don't go the way I did and get overexcited and give yourself an enormous list of 100 actions. A more concise document is much easier to share. It's easier— it helps you with engagement. It's easier to report on, and it's a bit easier to be flexible, keeping your options open to update it.
Yeah, capture success, reflect on, reflect on progress, and I would definitely recommend the online workshop. I think there's a few in the diary coming up to give you some clear and simple pointers, and it really inspired me when I was kind of feeling a bit up against it last year.

Slide 21

Mark: So I've kind of got to the end. Maybe there will be a Green Palace one day in the future. And thanks for listening!

Q&A Session

Matt: Yes, thank you! We're going to move into the Q&A session now. So we've got a few questions in already, but everyone, if any other questions that you have for Mark, please type them into that Q&A window. In the middle of your screen, and hopefully Mark and Sarah can answer your questions for you. So Sarah, I'll leave the Q&A to you.

Sarah: Thank you, Matt! Thank you, Mark! That was absolutely brilliant. And one of the takeaways I'm getting from that, and something that I'm really impressed about actually, was what you said, that you've managed to reduce your carbon by 29%, and that is despite actually measuring more, because usually I know people get a bit despondent as they do their baseline and then they start measuring, and after a couple of years they're doing really well, but they're measuring more things, so sometimes the reduction doesn't seem as much, and actually it seems like that they're emitting more carbon. So to have actually reduced it and add more to your measuring is quite an achievement.

Mark: Yeah, actually I can add something to that, which is I don't know if people know about intensity measures, which is you divide your carbon footprint by some kind of measure, and I've been doing it by footfall because if we have more events, we consume more energy, but we're having more people through the door. So when you look at how much energy we're using per person. So even where the basic figure might increase if we're having 20 more dance sessions, the actual intensity stays the same or goes down. So it just – it's a way of sort of balancing against doing more activity, which is going to increase your carbon footprint, but you might be doing it more efficiently overall.

Sarah: So yeah, so I imagine it's quite a nice way of presenting it as well so that you can tell others about it. Yeah, we've got— gosh, there's questions coming all over the place. So the first one that I'm going to do them in order just quickly. And somebody has asked, obviously somebody from Wentworth Woodhouse, which is very near me because I'm in Sheffield, who are you using to measure, to measure each scope was the question.

Mark: I'm a bit of a mug and I do it all myself which involves sort of prising information out of finance and other departments. Last year I went to the Reset Connect conference and met some guys who have an online platform, and we're just testing that. And actually, you can email them a report or an invoice and the dreaded AI calculates the emissions from the document you send them. So trying that out as a less sort of manual way of doing it, but yeah, it's just me and a big spreadsheet, another big spreadsheet.

Sarah: I know you've got some big spreadsheets going on, you showed us a while back. More questions on, are you reporting on market-based or low location-based electricity.

Mark: Wow! I don't know off the top of my head. I use the spreadsheet issued by the government. I don't know which way around that is.

Sarah: You're using the conversion factors?

Mark: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, they're online. Yeah, absolutely. We can look into that and answer that, and I'll put the answer where when we put this webinar online. Is there much cost to moving to a green tariff?

Mark: That's something we're looking at. We are locked into a long-term agreement, so we've been talking to our— I think it's Crown Commercial is our organisation— so we've been talking to them about it. I imagine there is a bit more cost but I don't know the details. But it's one of our aspirations, yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, and I love the next question because it's something that I wanted to ask, was what are the plans, and are there any plans for the 30% of the derelict elements of the Palace?

Mark: Well, there's more plans and more ideas than we've got money for, of course. Yes, we're just publishing a new strategic plan to set out where we want to be in the next 10 years, making improvements to the park and some of the, yeah, derelict elements. We've just spent nearly a million pounds putting a roof on a section of the palace which wasn't watertight before. Most of that funding came from English Heritage, and that's our target to get— convert that into a community and volunteer and archiving hub. But basically, for the past 30 years, it's had pigeons, rats, and mould in it.

Sarah: So yeah, I imagine the whole place is a bit of a rabbit warren. There's just— I can't believe how big it is. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I'm gonna put two questions together, which is really about engagement with consultants addressing the impacts on the heritage sectors— heritage, sorry, aspects of the existing building, and obviously talking with the local authority. I think we're talking, you know, about— you have a very important heritage building. Have you been working with consultants on that, and how have the local authority been responding? Haringey, I think you said it was.

Mark: It is Haringey, yeah. I think my planning and property colleagues have very good relationship with the conservation officer at the council, because we've got, you know, lots of things going on and lots of aspirations, so they do engage, they do get how important the building is, and also how sort of fast we try and move sometimes, because we get some money, and we have a short turnaround time to get things done because of our events program. In terms of engagement with the big sustainability projects like the decarbonizing the heating, we're not anywhere near those discussions yet, so it's all paper exercises and feasibility studies. No, they've been good today.

Sarah: That's good to hear. And the community and co-workers, and that's the next question, is engaging with them, how have you been doing that about your sustainability goals?

Mark: Yeah, so we've had a few different methods with the staff. I sort of, I hold a Green Team meeting every 6 weeks or so. That's self-selecting, people volunteer to join that who've obviously got an interest. We've done some other wider sessions like a staff swap shop where people donated things and we made it into a bit of a social. We obviously have staff meetings.
One project we're doing at the moment in the park is building a herb garden with some community engagement, but we opened it up to staff, so we had some biodiversity training and one of our chefs joined, which was excellent because sort of the plan for the herbs and plants we're growing is they will be feeding into the kitchens.
So when you come for your VIP dinner at the Darts, you're getting, you know, bay leaves from on-site, that kind of thing. So yeah, we try and keep the communication channels open, newsletters, that kind of thing.

Sarah: Fantastic! Yeah, it's really good. I've just noticed— so I'm just going to read this out. I based my professional diploma, Architecture Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies Design, on Alipalli and proposed fully retrofitting the Southwest Tower as a kickstarter demonstration project. Were you aware of that, Mark? You must be. Have you considered it? Somebody has said Maybe they need to get in touch with you.

Mark: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the southwest tower, for people who don't know, was gutted by the fire, and they just put the bricks back and left it as an empty shell. And it's next to a big area with no roof, which had a temporary tent put in it in 1990, which is still there. And we're just about to tear that tent down and put in a new up-to-date temporary modular building which will be much more efficient. The current building is a tent where we're pouring thousands of litres of diesel into heaters to keep the building, to keep that tent warm in the winter.
So yeah, the new building will be much more efficient. But in terms of Kickstarter, someone's got to fund it. Basically, we don't have any capital to carry out some of these large projects that we'd love to do. You know, so many ideas, there is a lot of potential, but nobody ever….

Sarah: You've got your list of 100 ideas, haven't you, to work on? Well, one of the next questions actually is which part of delivering your plan are you most excited about? So I think that leads on, you've whittled it down to those 4 or 5, but it might not be one of those that you're most excited about trying to take forward.

Mark: I mean, it's such a big, it's such a big challenge. I think getting anything done is a bonus. Seeing the carbon footprint come down and our Energy Performance Certificate improved as well. So getting any of it done, I think, is excellent. You know, we're a small team. It's just half of my job, sustainability, and that's all we've got with no budget.
So yeah, even the smallest things, just getting the catering team to realize that we don't have a compostable waste stream, so compostable crisp packets going to general waste.

Sarah: Yeah, there's a lot, and actually that speaks to a question that has also come in about measuring carbon for different events, but also putting pressure on organisers and suppliers to be greener. You know, you're talking about catering, but you have external people coming in and doing stuff, so are you in discussion with them?

Mark: Yeah, that goes both ways because some of the clients are really proactive and have been measuring themselves and their sort of visitor footprint and all of that kind of stuff. Lots of the productions, the TV, are working to the Albert, whatever that is, criteria. So they come to us saying, oh, you want a green tariff? And we have to go say no, we're not, but we're hoping to be.
Yeah, that one's a work in progress. The clients have different experiences and different aspirations. You know, some of them are all for it and providing us with lots of information that's really useful, and others are not quite so open to it just yet.

Sarah: So you are asking them? Your organisers and suppliers?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's going into our new enquiries form, which just used to be, what would you want to do and when? It now has sustainability questions in there as well, so to get everybody thinking about it. But it's definitely— the pressure's coming on us from people who want to hire us as well, so it's, yeah, it's essential for the business going forward, I think.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's good that it's going both ways and that both are asking. Has your monitoring reviewed travel to work, or do you just do staff use and local transport and cycle to work? Yeah, so is this….

Mark: So yeah, we did a staff commuting survey. So we're in North London and we have a lot of younger members of staff, so actually I can't remember the top of my head, but the kind of active travel, walking, cycling, and public transport figures were quite high. And compared to those massive gas and electricity emissions, it's actually quite a small percentage.
So yeah, we have— if you buy a ticket, you get encouraged to come by public transport. Some of our outdoor events there are— there is no parking on site, so you have to make your own way here. Yeah, but no, lots of them— we've got, oh, e-bike, Lime bike, and Forest Bike sort of parking spots as well around the palace to try and make that run more efficiently rather than the bikes being chucked all over, all over our 200 acres.

Sarah: Not having parking, I think it makes a big difference. It will encourage people to use active travel, which is brilliant. I'm just scrolling through the questions because we have got quite a lot. Have energy upgrades been undertaken to the windows of the building? I imagine you have acres and acres of windows and glass— well, glass, more to the point.

Mark: Yeah, we do. So this is a mixed bag. So the Great Hall, which is 7,000 square meters, is a glass roof put on in the '80s with warped and cracked— warped frames, cracked glass, things that don't shut. So there's a constant program of replacing those which are literally leak— leak heat in the winter.
When the theater was re-refurbished and the local authority conservation officer, having said we get on well with them, wouldn't permit double glazing to go in because it still had the Victorian sash windows, so they couldn't be improved. Yeah, basically it's an aspiration on the property team, you know, whenever they undertake a project, they will try and make an incremental improvement, slowly but surely.

Sarah: Yeah, that's the way to do it, isn't it? Definitely. Somebody's just actually popped in: do tickets to events have a building preservation tariff, like a pound to go directly to building restoration, which some charities do? Do you have that?

Mark: Yeah, the restoration levy. Yeah, yeah, it's an important part of our income now to keep us afloat, like everybody. Insurance costs have gone up, and those energy bills have gone up, and it, you know, humongous in the energy bills we have. So yeah, it just keeps us going, definitely.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And a question about biodiversity, because you've got the park, all those acres: how do you manage potential damage for outside events like fireworks?

Mark: So we looked at this a few years ago and basically identified different zones in the park. So the outdoor events happen in some in particular zones, and we've got a red, amber, green kind of scheme. So if a new event, activity, or film shoot, or whatever it is, approach us and say, can we do this, this particular thing in this particular location, we can go back with a— if it's a green area, yeah, it's fine, but if it's one of the more important wildlife conservation areas, then we can say no, and that's all set out. The programming team know those areas.
Obviously it's a heavily used park anyway, and actually I tend to wonder during the summer events when we have certain areas closed off for quite a long time, is it actually keeps the public out and dogs and reduces disturbance in a different way. So there's a kind of a buffer zone around the main event area, but it is a challenge, obviously there's more people, more kit, more vehicles on site.

Mark: And hopefully we've got nearly 200 acres to kind of soak that up.

Sarah: Yeah, moving things around.

Mark: It's essential that our program continues so we've got the income to carry on, you know, maintaining this site as we can and improving, improving biodiversity through other projects whenever we can.

Sarah: We mentioned earlier that it's Grade II listed. Somebody has asked, does building protection laws, have they affected your sustainability efforts? I mean, you mentioned the council and the windows, is there anything else?

Mark: I don't think we've got too many projects sort of big enough yet, I suppose. We got, yeah, they've agreed to the secondary glazing, which is actually in the old railway station, which is a community center. That's a Victorian building, and they've— the planning and listed building people have passed that.
So good to hear. So far so good, but we haven't had a massive intervention like you know, the ground source heat pumps yet, or big retrofit. But I imagine there's a pragmatic, you know, a pragmatic solution to these things.

Sarah: Absolutely, yeah. And like you say, you have got a lot of land for that ground source heat pumps, if you can raise the money, when you can raise the money. Let's say when you can raise the money. Excellent! What had the biggest impact on reducing your carbon, do you think?

Mark: The biggest surprise was that ice rink, and in a way it's a shame that the reprogramming and the plexiglass happened at the same time, so we couldn't tell which, you know, what, how they shared the effect. But yeah, that 23% year-on-year reduction was a huge surprise that it made that much.

Sarah: Fantastic. Yeah. And we have a question about AI because you did mention you were trialing using AI to look at your scopes, but how often is that used? And somebody's asked whether you're offsetting the consumption. Have you thought about the use of the data centers for AI?

Mark: Well, I thought about it and it does weigh on my conscience, but I haven't looked into it yet. Definitely, the kind of digital impact and digital cleanups on our list, with the theatre team we've been looking at the Theatre Green Book and that has a digital section which, yeah, we need to get to grips with in the next kind of 12 months. Just moved to SharePoint from old-fashioned clunky servers, but of course they just duplicated it.
So now we've got double the data, some on servers and some on the cloud, and we need— I need to find out when we're going to, you know, delete those servers and shut them down for good. But I think there's some old finance applications that sit there and all sorts, and probably don't run on anything else. Yeah, that is a potential issue, isn't it? Is that— does it use less than the time it takes me to sit at a laptop and process it? It's— who knows. And the closer you look at all of these topics, the more complicated they become as well, I seem to find.

Sarah: Oh yes, yes. Unless anybody else has any more questions they want to pop in the chat, that actually leads me on quite nicely to our next webinar, which is on the 18th June, and the title is Digital Emissions: Should Heritage Organisations Worry About Them and How Can We Lower Them? So Claire Marchetti, who is actually Historic England's Carbon and Sustainability Manager, is going to come and talk about that. So that led quite well, didn't it? It wasn't even planned!
But that might be something that you want to come along to, Mark, and anybody else who wants wants to. We will have the links at the end, but I am actually just going to put a link in the chat so you can find— and that link in the chat actually has— is where you'll find you're able to sign up for the two workshops, the How to Measure Your Carbon Footprint and How to Write a Carbon Reduction Plan, which Mark mentioned.

Mark: One question.

Sarah: Yeah, have any of your feasibility reports suggested use of the lake or pond, yes, for water source heat pump?

Mark: No, we did ask them to look, they also looked at the New River and the reservoirs which are on the corner of our site, and I think the heat demand at the Palace is just too big for the sort of scale So, yeah, they just said, no, you've got the space, go for the ground source.

Sarah: One last question is actually about offsetting using the park and tree planning and landscape measures. I mean, something that we would definitely say, and you know from coming on our workshop, is that offsetting is definitely a last resort, and you're nowhere near getting to the last resort. You've got lots more plans, but has that popped up for you?

Mark: So my study into the park, which was part of a Master's, I wanted to sort of settle the question is, you know, we've got a great big park, surely we're offsetting everything. But the conclusion I came to was that the park habitats are in a steady state, so they're absorbing as much carbon as they're emitting as they, you know, trees grow and die. For land use, the big change is going from intensive agriculture to woodland. That would absorb a lot of carbon. But as you know, a grassland that's been a grassland for over— well, it was a dairy farm before it was a park, so it's been grassland for, you know, 500 years or 300 years or something.
Yeah. And what I found was that the carbon emissions produced in maintaining the park at best are offset by the park absorbing carbon. Yeah.

Sarah: So looking after the park is, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, looking after the park absorbs as much carbon as it produces, and because of the heritage of the park being, you know, there's a racecourse and the open views from that, I don't think we would ever just have a large-scale reforestation or anything like that because of the people and the heritage side. Of the site, it wouldn't go down very well, so.

Sarah: Brilliant, thank you for that! I think we'll close up here, but it's been absolutely fascinating, Mark, and I need to get down and visit sometime soon.

Matt: Yes, thank you! We're going to move into the Q&A session now. So we've got a few questions in already, but everyone, if any other questions that you have for Mark, please type them into that Q&A window. In the middle of your screen, and hopefully Mark and Sarah can answer your questions for you. So Sarah, I'll leave the Q&A to you.

Sarah: Thank you, Matt! Thank you, Mark! That was absolutely brilliant. And one of the takeaways I'm getting from that, and something that I'm really impressed about actually, was what you said, that you've managed to reduce your carbon by 29%, and that is despite actually measuring more, because usually I know people get a bit despondent as they do their baseline and then they start measuring, and after a couple of years they're doing really well, but they're measuring more things, so sometimes the reduction doesn't seem as much, and actually it seems like that they're emitting more carbon. So to have actually reduced it and add more to your measuring is quite an achievement.

Mark: Yeah, actually I can add something to that, which is I don't know if people know about intensity measures, which is you divide your carbon footprint by some kind of measure, and I've been doing it by footfall because if we have more events, we consume more energy, but we're having more people through the door. So when you look at how much energy we're using per person. So even where the basic figure might increase if we're having 20 more dance sessions, the actual intensity stays the same or goes down. So it just – it's a way of sort of balancing against doing more activity, which is going to increase your carbon footprint, but you might be doing it more efficiently overall.

Sarah: So yeah, so I imagine it's quite a nice way of presenting it as well so that you can tell others about it. Yeah, we've got— gosh, there's questions coming all over the place. So the first one that I'm going to do them in order just quickly. And somebody has asked, obviously somebody from Wentworth Woodhouse, which is very near me because I'm in Sheffield, who are you using to measure, to measure each scope was the question.

Mark: I'm a bit of a mug and I do it all myself which involves sort of prising information out of finance and other departments. Last year I went to the Reset Connect conference and met some guys who have an online platform, and we're just testing that. And actually, you can email them a report or an invoice and the dreaded AI calculates the emissions from the document you send them. So trying that out as a less sort of manual way of doing it, but yeah, it's just me and a big spreadsheet, another big spreadsheet.

Sarah: I know you've got some big spreadsheets going on, you showed us a while back. More questions on, are you reporting on market-based or low location-based electricity.

Mark: Wow! I don't know off the top of my head. I use the spreadsheet issued by the government. I don't know which way around that is.

Sarah: You're using the conversion factors?

Mark: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, they're online. Yeah, absolutely. We can look into that and answer that, and I'll put the answer where when we put this webinar online. Is there much cost to moving to a green tariff?

Mark: That's something we're looking at. We are locked into a long-term agreement, so we've been talking to our— I think it's Crown Commercial is our organisation— so we've been talking to them about it. I imagine there is a bit more cost but I don't know the details. But it's one of our aspirations, yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, and I love the next question because it's something that I wanted to ask, was what are the plans, and are there any plans for the 30% of the derelict elements of the Palace?

Mark: Well, there's more plans and more ideas than we've got money for, of course. Yes, we're just publishing a new strategic plan to set out where we want to be in the next 10 years, making improvements to the park and some of the, yeah, derelict elements. We've just spent nearly a million pounds putting a roof on a section of the palace which wasn't watertight before. Most of that funding came from English Heritage, and that's our target to get— convert that into a community and volunteer and archiving hub. But basically, for the past 30 years, it's had pigeons, rats, and mould in it.

Sarah: So yeah, I imagine the whole place is a bit of a rabbit warren. There's just— I can't believe how big it is. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I'm gonna put two questions together, which is really about engagement with consultants addressing the impacts on the heritage sectors— heritage, sorry, aspects of the existing building, and obviously talking with the local authority. I think we're talking, you know, about— you have a very important heritage building. Have you been working with consultants on that, and how have the local authority been responding? Haringey, I think you said it was.

Mark: It is Haringey, yeah. I think my planning and property colleagues have very good relationship with the conservation officer at the council, because we've got, you know, lots of things going on and lots of aspirations, so they do engage, they do get how important the building is, and also how sort of fast we try and move sometimes, because we get some money, and we have a short turnaround time to get things done because of our events program. In terms of engagement with the big sustainability projects like the decarbonizing the heating, we're not anywhere near those discussions yet, so it's all paper exercises and feasibility studies. No, they've been good today.

Sarah: That's good to hear. And the community and co-workers, and that's the next question, is engaging with them, how have you been doing that about your sustainability goals?

Mark: Yeah, so we've had a few different methods with the staff. I sort of, I hold a Green Team meeting every 6 weeks or so. That's self-selecting, people volunteer to join that who've obviously got an interest. We've done some other wider sessions like a staff swap shop where people donated things and we made it into a bit of a social. We obviously have staff meetings.
One project we're doing at the moment in the park is building a herb garden with some community engagement, but we opened it up to staff, so we had some biodiversity training and one of our chefs joined, which was excellent because sort of the plan for the herbs and plants we're growing is they will be feeding into the kitchens.
So when you come for your VIP dinner at the Darts, you're getting, you know, bay leaves from on-site, that kind of thing. So yeah, we try and keep the communication channels open, newsletters, that kind of thing.

Sarah: Fantastic! Yeah, it's really good. I've just noticed— so I'm just going to read this out. I based my professional diploma, Architecture Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies Design, on Alipalli and proposed fully retrofitting the Southwest Tower as a kickstarter demonstration project. Were you aware of that, Mark? You must be. Have you considered it? Somebody has said Maybe they need to get in touch with you.

Mark: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the southwest tower, for people who don't know, was gutted by the fire, and they just put the bricks back and left it as an empty shell. And it's next to a big area with no roof, which had a temporary tent put in it in 1990, which is still there. And we're just about to tear that tent down and put in a new up-to-date temporary modular building which will be much more efficient. The current building is a tent where we're pouring thousands of litres of diesel into heaters to keep the building, to keep that tent warm in the winter.
So yeah, the new building will be much more efficient. But in terms of Kickstarter, someone's got to fund it. Basically, we don't have any capital to carry out some of these large projects that we'd love to do. You know, so many ideas, there is a lot of potential, but nobody ever….

Sarah: You've got your list of 100 ideas, haven't you, to work on? Well, one of the next questions actually is which part of delivering your plan are you most excited about? So I think that leads on, you've whittled it down to those 4 or 5, but it might not be one of those that you're most excited about trying to take forward.

Mark: I mean, it's such a big, it's such a big challenge. I think getting anything done is a bonus. Seeing the carbon footprint come down and our Energy Performance Certificate improved as well. So getting any of it done, I think, is excellent. You know, we're a small team. It's just half of my job, sustainability, and that's all we've got with no budget.
So yeah, even the smallest things, just getting the catering team to realize that we don't have a compostable waste stream, so compostable crisp packets going to general waste.

Sarah: Yeah, there's a lot, and actually that speaks to a question that has also come in about measuring carbon for different events, but also putting pressure on organisers and suppliers to be greener. You know, you're talking about catering, but you have external people coming in and doing stuff, so are you in discussion with them?

Mark: Yeah, that goes both ways because some of the clients are really proactive and have been measuring themselves and their sort of visitor footprint and all of that kind of stuff. Lots of the productions, the TV, are working to the Albert, whatever that is, criteria. So they come to us saying, oh, you want a green tariff? And we have to go say no, we're not, but we're hoping to be.
Yeah, that one's a work in progress. The clients have different experiences and different aspirations. You know, some of them are all for it and providing us with lots of information that's really useful, and others are not quite so open to it just yet.

Sarah: So you are asking them? Your organisers and suppliers?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's going into our new enquiries form, which just used to be, what would you want to do and when? It now has sustainability questions in there as well, so to get everybody thinking about it. But it's definitely— the pressure's coming on us from people who want to hire us as well, so it's, yeah, it's essential for the business going forward, I think.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's good that it's going both ways and that both are asking. Has your monitoring reviewed travel to work, or do you just do staff use and local transport and cycle to work? Yeah, so is this….

Mark: So yeah, we did a staff commuting survey. So we're in North London and we have a lot of younger members of staff, so actually I can't remember the top of my head, but the kind of active travel, walking, cycling, and public transport figures were quite high. And compared to those massive gas and electricity emissions, it's actually quite a small percentage.
So yeah, we have— if you buy a ticket, you get encouraged to come by public transport. Some of our outdoor events there are— there is no parking on site, so you have to make your own way here. Yeah, but no, lots of them— we've got, oh, e-bike, Lime bike, and Forest Bike sort of parking spots as well around the palace to try and make that run more efficiently rather than the bikes being chucked all over, all over our 200 acres.

Sarah: Not having parking, I think it makes a big difference. It will encourage people to use active travel, which is brilliant. I'm just scrolling through the questions because we have got quite a lot. Have energy upgrades been undertaken to the windows of the building? I imagine you have acres and acres of windows and glass— well, glass, more to the point.

Mark: Yeah, we do. So this is a mixed bag. So the Great Hall, which is 7,000 square meters, is a glass roof put on in the '80s with warped and cracked— warped frames, cracked glass, things that don't shut. So there's a constant program of replacing those which are literally leak— leak heat in the winter.
When the theater was re-refurbished and the local authority conservation officer, having said we get on well with them, wouldn't permit double glazing to go in because it still had the Victorian sash windows, so they couldn't be improved. Yeah, basically it's an aspiration on the property team, you know, whenever they undertake a project, they will try and make an incremental improvement, slowly but surely.

Sarah: Yeah, that's the way to do it, isn't it? Definitely. Somebody's just actually popped in: do tickets to events have a building preservation tariff, like a pound to go directly to building restoration, which some charities do? Do you have that?

Mark: Yeah, the restoration levy. Yeah, yeah, it's an important part of our income now to keep us afloat, like everybody. Insurance costs have gone up, and those energy bills have gone up, and it, you know, humongous in the energy bills we have. So yeah, it just keeps us going, definitely.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And a question about biodiversity, because you've got the park, all those acres: how do you manage potential damage for outside events like fireworks?

Mark: So we looked at this a few years ago and basically identified different zones in the park. So the outdoor events happen in some in particular zones, and we've got a red, amber, green kind of scheme. So if a new event, activity, or film shoot, or whatever it is, approach us and say, can we do this, this particular thing in this particular location, we can go back with a— if it's a green area, yeah, it's fine, but if it's one of the more important wildlife conservation areas, then we can say no, and that's all set out. The programming team know those areas.
Obviously it's a heavily used park anyway, and actually I tend to wonder during the summer events when we have certain areas closed off for quite a long time, is it actually keeps the public out and dogs and reduces disturbance in a different way. So there's a kind of a buffer zone around the main event area, but it is a challenge, obviously there's more people, more kit, more vehicles on site.

Mark: And hopefully we've got nearly 200 acres to kind of soak that up.

Sarah: Yeah, moving things around.

Mark: It's essential that our program continues so we've got the income to carry on, you know, maintaining this site as we can and improving, improving biodiversity through other projects whenever we can.

Sarah: We mentioned earlier that it's Grade II listed. Somebody has asked, does building protection laws, have they affected your sustainability efforts? I mean, you mentioned the council and the windows, is there anything else?

Mark: I don't think we've got too many projects sort of big enough yet, I suppose. We got, yeah, they've agreed to the secondary glazing, which is actually in the old railway station, which is a community center. That's a Victorian building, and they've— the planning and listed building people have passed that.
So good to hear. So far so good, but we haven't had a massive intervention like you know, the ground source heat pumps yet, or big retrofit. But I imagine there's a pragmatic, you know, a pragmatic solution to these things.

Sarah: Absolutely, yeah. And like you say, you have got a lot of land for that ground source heat pumps, if you can raise the money, when you can raise the money. Let's say when you can raise the money. Excellent! What had the biggest impact on reducing your carbon, do you think?

Mark: The biggest surprise was that ice rink, and in a way it's a shame that the reprogramming and the plexiglass happened at the same time, so we couldn't tell which, you know, what, how they shared the effect. But yeah, that 23% year-on-year reduction was a huge surprise that it made that much.

Sarah: Fantastic. Yeah. And we have a question about AI because you did mention you were trialing using AI to look at your scopes, but how often is that used? And somebody's asked whether you're offsetting the consumption. Have you thought about the use of the data centers for AI?

Mark: Well, I thought about it and it does weigh on my conscience, but I haven't looked into it yet. Definitely, the kind of digital impact and digital cleanups on our list, with the theatre team we've been looking at the Theatre Green Book and that has a digital section which, yeah, we need to get to grips with in the next kind of 12 months. Just moved to SharePoint from old-fashioned clunky servers, but of course they just duplicated it.
So now we've got double the data, some on servers and some on the cloud, and we need— I need to find out when we're going to, you know, delete those servers and shut them down for good. But I think there's some old finance applications that sit there and all sorts, and probably don't run on anything else. Yeah, that is a potential issue, isn't it? Is that— does it use less than the time it takes me to sit at a laptop and process it? It's— who knows. And the closer you look at all of these topics, the more complicated they become as well, I seem to find.

Sarah: Oh yes, yes. Unless anybody else has any more questions they want to pop in the chat, that actually leads me on quite nicely to our next webinar, which is on the 18th June, and the title is Digital Emissions: Should Heritage Organisations Worry About Them and How Can We Lower Them? So Claire Marchetti, who is actually Historic England's Carbon and Sustainability Manager, is going to come and talk about that. So that led quite well, didn't it? It wasn't even planned!
But that might be something that you want to come along to, Mark, and anybody else who wants wants to. We will have the links at the end, but I am actually just going to put a link in the chat so you can find— and that link in the chat actually has— is where you'll find you're able to sign up for the two workshops, the How to Measure Your Carbon Footprint and How to Write a Carbon Reduction Plan, which Mark mentioned.

Mark: One question.

Sarah: Yeah, have any of your feasibility reports suggested use of the lake or pond, yes, for water source heat pump?

Mark: No, we did ask them to look, they also looked at the New River and the reservoirs which are on the corner of our site, and I think the heat demand at the Palace is just too big for the sort of scale So, yeah, they just said, no, you've got the space, go for the ground source.

Sarah: One last question is actually about offsetting using the park and tree planning and landscape measures. I mean, something that we would definitely say, and you know from coming on our workshop, is that offsetting is definitely a last resort, and you're nowhere near getting to the last resort. You've got lots more plans, but has that popped up for you?

Mark: So my study into the park, which was part of a Master's, I wanted to sort of settle the question is, you know, we've got a great big park, surely we're offsetting everything. But the conclusion I came to was that the park habitats are in a steady state, so they're absorbing as much carbon as they're emitting as they, you know, trees grow and die. For land use, the big change is going from intensive agriculture to woodland. That would absorb a lot of carbon. But as you know, a grassland that's been a grassland for over— well, it was a dairy farm before it was a park, so it's been grassland for, you know, 500 years or 300 years or something.
Yeah. And what I found was that the carbon emissions produced in maintaining the park at best are offset by the park absorbing carbon. Yeah.

Sarah: So looking after the park is, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, looking after the park absorbs as much carbon as it produces, and because of the heritage of the park being, you know, there's a racecourse and the open views from that, I don't think we would ever just have a large-scale reforestation or anything like that because of the people and the heritage side. Of the site, it wouldn't go down very well, so.

Sarah: Brilliant, thank you for that! I think we'll close up here, but it's been absolutely fascinating, Mark, and I need to get down and visit sometime soon.