Next Level
In 2025, I relocated to Cumbria with Artie, to find space for our creative missions; Artie’s own project campervan, and my boat Arwyn. I’m also enjoying some rural peace and quiet for my Architectural Practice, which has somewhat emerged from it’s post-Covid torpor.
Now, in 2026, I have two buildings; Fanny Street, and Backsideans, shortly to start on site, and North Street in the final stages before another pre-application. As I prepare these jobs, that I started years ago, I am finding that I now have a significantly elevated level of skill. The architectural solutions that I can now envisage and implement are more elegant and spacious, and my process less arduous. Even though I took a substantial break, I have improved. Thinking of what Niall McLaughlin had said; I had experience, perhaps I now have appreciation too.
My path through architecture has been fruitful; buildings stand, homes are lived in. As for my ambition to be better than an architect; my work was preferred for prime sites in historic Oxford, and Wargrave. The blind striving, and youthful resistance that carried me through my early career, though, has been tempered by a growing realisation; that I made it already. I have built the complete architectural service; From Mud to Mansion – with a construction experienced, management trained, technically expert, professionally qualified designer.
No matter which way I cut it though, even though I have great ability, to harness it for architecture has been at the cost of my nervous health to a debilitating extent. Perhaps, with a new sense of being comfortably housed and accompanied, and with an awareness of how Autism Spectrum Condition affects me, I will find things less overwhelming. For now, I am investing the last chunks of cash from my remaining projects into a broadcast capable digital filming setup; The craft of boatbuilding, and my accompanying art of filmmaking, is work I enjoy more than the designing of buildings, wrought in fires of self-destruction, that I have rarely ever seen after completion.