Growing Up
When I was 7 years old, my Grandmother (pictured here with my Mother, her daughter), Great Aunt, and Uncle, moved to my hometown from near Newbury. A local builder / developer was promoting a new housing scheme to convert a local gravel-pit into a marina on the River Thames. My relatives bought a river-front detached house that was yet to be built.
The scheme; extensive mooring pontoons surrounded by waterfront character houses of a great variety and mix, was presented in the form of a large architectural model, which was in a Perspex box at the sales centre. Regularly visiting the site when I was young was a tremendously formative experience. I loved closing one eye and indulging in the perspective of the model, I climbed around scaffolding and collected scraps of lead from the building site. It all very much chimed with my Lego housebuilding set, and my Britain’s yellow road-mending toys. I have known the house since then, and designed its balcony extension as one of my first jobs. The influence of the architecture of Abingdon Marina; of pitched roofs and projecting gables in a waterfront-style, can be traced through every building I have now designed.
‘Do you want a days money for sweeping up a building site?’ I was asked by my friend James. We were in our early twenties. Yes! I replied. I felt very at home being back on a building site, so rather than sweep for just a day, I joined the independent team of suspended ceiling fixers for 2 years. We worked through a local contractor to deliver commercial contracts around Oxford, including the Peter Medawar Building for The University of Oxford, and a refurbishment of Reading Maternity Unit. I am a skilled person and excelled in the trade. I worked my way up, and was running a job on my own with a new company van, when an unseen lamppost saw an end both to the van, and my nascent career.
Where I had chosen an individualist path, and had left BSc Environmental Science at Lancaster Universtity early, my brother was graduated, and wooing for a wife back at home; this left sparse room for me. Better, I considered, than my friend’s sofa, was the offer of a bedroom in a local squat; 14 acres of Oxford hilltop with mansions and a gatehouse. In truth it was a redevelopment site with a gang of itinerant ‘blighters’ invited to advance the prospects of an ongoing planning application.
Because the security of our home depended on the progress of associated planning applications, I took an interest. I studied the paperwork, and promoted myself as the community representative of the house, vehicle, and tent-dwellers. I greeted the professionals when they came on-site, and negotiated licences to remain for the permanent residents in response to one more in a sequence of threats and evictions.
An ex-RAF Bedford Ambulance had broken-down at the site, and was immovable. Like the sword in the stone, whoever could fix it, could keep it. Each of the men of the community stood forward, and failed. Haynes Manual in hand, I reversed the timing sprocket, and started the van. Finding a fresh outlet for my talents, I insulated and fitted the van out from scratch. It would home me for the next 8 years, and confirm to me that homemaking is one of my core natural abilities.
I hatched a plan with my girlfriend; we would build a home together; my architecture, her garden. We were trying to garden the bucolic glade we had secreted ourself to, but alas, The Rabbits… A simple plan then; if I wanted to build my own house, I would learn to design houses, and by the time I knew what I was doing, I would also have the money for building. I felt personally qualified; I had grown up clambering scaffolding, worked as a builder, operated as a kind of planning liaison agent, and a homemaker. Also knowing my family’s architectural history, it was natural that I should visit my local architecture school; The Oxford School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University.
I had walked into The Oxford School of Architecture straight from the squat, presumably reeking, with grotesque hair, and perhaps a similar attitude. I was not entirely surprised to be met down the end of a senior fellow’s nose, and somewhat over his glasses. We stood briefly in the extraordinary 1970s bright-orange fibreglass reception vestibule, and looked over the undergraduate syllabus, which seemed based mostly in art history and sketching. My concern for cost management and the planning process led to the haughty pronouncement that I should “Go downstairs if cared about those sorts of things!”. He meant that I should go and study Construction Management, which at the time was beneath the planners, who were themselves beneath the architects. I took it rather personally and put the idea on the back-burner.
To support myself with my now fiancée, and earn money to fit out the van, I took a job in the newly christened BMW Mini Plant Oxford. I got to drive the cars on a rolling road for part of the time, the remainder was spent in the pit, aligning the wheels of the new cars. In the bowels of the factory, under the cars, I reached zen-like states of focus, automating my body movements almost to a dance. I was one of the very highest performing technicians in the factory, completing 16 or 17 cars an hour, in comparison with the expected 12. After a year, the voices of the older factory workers started to chime solemnly for my future; “I’ve been in this corner making bonnets for 40 years“. Something had to change; I was now 28, and I had no wish to be lost indefinitely to an industrial process.
When our site finally came to be redeveloped, single, I returned to my childhood home. Finding myself directionless, I did eventually go downstairs and enrolled at Oxford Brookes University. I wanted to design buildings, and I had developed the intention of becoming not only equivalent to an architect, but also better; by embracing technical design, new technologies, and construction management issues, for more successful projects. I enrolled on the BSc Building course in 2005. My dog Spunkey, who I had received as a puppy from a traveller, came with me to lectures, and we lived together in my van, parked on my parents’ driveway.