How can I travel sustainably?
Worried about your carbon footprint on holiday?
This week we took a trip to world famous Kew Gardens. We’re very keen gardeners and we’re always interested in fresh ideas. On this trip we saw a big one. Inside the giant Palm House a new information board caught our eye. Titled ‘Renovating our iconic glasshouses’ it explains that Kew is about to embark on fund raising to renovate the glasshouse, built in 1847, in a quest to reduce Kew Garden’s carbon footprint.
But not only to reduce its carbon footprint, Kew aims to go even further. By 2030 Kew’s ambition is to store more carbon than it releases. It’s an ambitious target. Tropical and sub-tropical plants in the UK need heat all year round just to survive, let alone thrive. Not only heat, but water in large quantities. So the project seeks to completely renew all the heat, electricity and water systems to save energy and resources.
What has Kew Gardens got to do with my holiday?
Kew’s Palm House is enormous. Reducing our consumption of energy, water and other resources is a big ask. There are times when it’s tempting to shrug and console ourselves ‘it’s only one airplane flight’ or ‘it’s only me’. Kew might have concluded, as they grow so many carbon absorbing plants, inside and out, that they’re already doing quite a lot to reduce greenhouse gases. But they didn’t think that.
We’ve been thinking a lot about how we can make our guests holiday at North Cottage Cromer more sustainable. We’re only 1 property out of around 75,000 self catering holiday businesses in England and Wales, but that doesn’t mean our impact on the environment isn’t important, it is.
In the Autumn we travelled to South Korea where we discovered they’ve banned all single use bathroom products – for example toothbrushes and small soap bottles previously given away in hotel rooms. It’s a small action with a big impact on sustainable travel, and waste.
As accommodation hosts we’ve just been nominated as finalists in the Visit Suffolk and Norfolk Tourism Awards – Self Catering Accommodation of the Year 2025. Being nominated as among the best providers of accommodation has really got us thinking about how we might get better at everything we do. What are the small actions we can take that might make a big impact?
What can we do?
We’ve renovated all the original Victorian sash timber windows with draught exclusion and fitted double glazing. We rebuilt the decaying chimneys using the same original, cleaned Victorian bricks and traditional lime mortar, which we’ve also used for repointing the brickwork. This improves the building breathability and it’s energy efficiency. We’ve installed a new condensing boiler (a heat pump wasn’t practical for our large house) and internet enabled smart thermostats. We always choose energy efficient appliances and provide guides on how to use them. Our website lists all these measures so our guests can help do their bit too – like using the laundry line rather than the tumble dryer, or fully loading the dishwasher and selecting the eco setting.
Answer – is to the left of the photo. 2 x 210L water butts. We use recycled rain water whenever we can.
Our Carbon Footprint
We’ve just received an analysis of our carbon footprint under an initiative for businesses sponsored by North Norfolk District Council. Our biggest carbon contribution is burning natural gas. This 6 bedroom house uses more gas than the average 6 bed house (in England and Wales there are only 250,000 houses of this size). Probably because, despite our measures, we heat the house to 20-21C for guests in winter whereas if we lived in it we’d probably reduce that by around 2 degrees and we wouldn’t heat all the rooms all of the time.
To reduce our carbon footprint we aim to renovate or replace the front door as we’ve done for the original windows, install EV charging so our guests can travel more easily and sustainably, and ultimately fit solar panels to capture our own electricity. Meanwhile we’re doing all the smaller things we can – including reducing laundry by asking guests to take only towels they need, installing water butts and compost bins to make our gardening as sustainable as possible.
Holidaying in the UK can help sustainability
A report this week, the Seventh Carbon Budget from the Climate Change Committee, outlined ways we might all change our behaviour in the next 25 years to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Inevitably air travel was one of the things identified that we might all have to do a bit less of to hit that target (unless battery aircraft become a reality). For some younger people air travel is already an environmental anxiety.
By holidaying in the UK you immediately reduce your carbon footprint over taking a flight somewhere abroad. If you’re staying at North Cottage Cromer you can reduce that even more – by up to 23 times – that’s 12 guests each taking outward and return flights.
If you’d like to holiday with your family or friends at North Cottage Cromer please contact us Jerry@northcottagecromer.co.uk or visit our booking page. We’d love to welcome you, and you might be doing your bit to reduce your carbon footprint too.
We strongly recommend a visit to Kew Gardens in Richmond, London. Visiting information is here. If you know someone who lives in London an annual membership is a great gift and they can even take a guest in on the same annual pass. Memberships start from £77.
