Yahoo Finance Grand Designs: Kevin McCloud on how innovative DIY can help solve the housing crisis
Kevin McCloud has an idea. He wants to film future series of Channel 4’s Grand Designs with no background music. He imagines utter silence as the camera focuses on his hand running along a rough reclaimed brick wall or tapping a cool granite worktop, allowing the new house to speak for itself.
“My job is to convey quality and atmosphere,” says McCloud, who is on stage at the Grand Designs Live exhibition at the ExCeL Centre in London today. Despite the fact that we view these projects in televised 2D, he believes all senses are required to truly appreciate a building. “You don’t just see a church. You smell it, touch it and hear it too,” he says. “After all, architecture is frozen music.” But he has been spoilt.
Aside from Grand Designs, McCloud also presented the Restoration of the Year show last month, which took him to sites such as Cardigan Castle in Wales and East London’s 17th-century Wilton Music Hall.
As the face of the televised RIBA House of the Year show, the 57-year-old father of four also gets to step inside some of Britain’s most innovative architectural feats, such as Lord Rothschild’s Flint House in Buckinghamshire. The banking mogul’s experiment has rough walls made from pieces of flint and is topped by smooth chalk blocks – a nod to its surrounding landscape. McCloud describes it as “stonkingly wonderful”.
Grand designs: TV's most jaw-dropping houses
It’s no wonder, then, that he talks so dismissively of the housing being churned out by the volume housebuilders. He cites poor-quality housing as a barrier to solving the country’s housing crisis. “There are about five different designs, and proper architecture does not get a look in,” he says.
“Every year we [at Grand Designs] have the same debate: why isn’t house building happening faster and what are the impediments to this? Every year we settle on the same major factors: planning and money,” he says, before launching into another vexation, the lack of self-build mortgage products available.
Self-build projects make up just eight per cent of Britain’s new housing stock, a number that has not increased since Grand Designs first aired in 1999. Yet the Government, under former Prime Minister David Cameron, pledged to double this by 2020.
Every year we [at Grand Designs] have the same debate: why isn’t house building happening faster and what are the impediments to this? Every year we settle on the same major factors: planning and money
Kevin McCloud
But it won’t happen without funding, McCloud insists. “It seems that of the big banks and building societies, the only one who [provides self-build mortgages] is Lloyds.”
It’s a complex product, as building a house takes far longer than buying one and requires phased lending so the home owner can pay for the project in instalments. However, McCloud believes the dearth of willing lenders in the finance industry is just another example of commoditisation in the property world and its “computer says no” culture.
One of the Government’s solutions to Britain’s lack of new and affordable homes is to encourage small builders back into the market after many collapsed during the 2008 housing crisis. In his 2016 Autumn Statement, Chancellor Philip Hammond pledged that £1 billion of lending would be made available for small and custom builders.
McCloud argues, however, that the “burdensome planning system which is still glued to its 1947 values” stands in the way, as does “landbanking” by the big players. He is referring to the practice of sitting on land while it accrues market value, which delays breaking ground.
“There are lots of companies out there who just buy and sell land,” he says. “They may get outline permission to build on it to increase the value too. A site can change hands three or four times, which is no good for the market and in the end it’s the consumer that pays. It’s a cynical activity in my book. I’m interested in making and doing.”
While the debate rages on as to whether we need to encroach further into the greenbelt, national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, McCloud is already there, building sensitive and custom-made homes.
He set up the development firm HAB (Happiness, Architecture, Beauty) in 2007 to provide an alternative to Identikit building. Its latest site is on the edge of the historic village of Kings Worthy, just two miles from Winchester. The three to five-bedroom homes start from £467,000 and the vast majority are already sold. There will also be sports facilities, allotments, wildflower meadows and a village green.
“This site is outside the planning envelope and on a greenfield site, but we worked with the parish council and Fields in Trust to deliver the project sensitively,” says McCloud. “People wanted to see it happen regardless of legislation.”
While he agrees that the self-build sector is not going to solve the UK’s housing crisis, he has certainly narrated its quiet revolution. “The power and diversity of the human imagination never cease to amaze me,” he says. “We’re certainly building more adventurous homes than 20 years ago.”
Kevin McCloud is presenting at Grand Designs Live at the ExCeL Centre in London from April 29 to May 7. Book tickets at granddesignslive.com
