Breaking the suspended ceiling
‘Do you want a days money for sweeping up?’ I was asked by a friend, we were in our early twenties. With that, I spend a sporadic two years on-site with a team of ceiling fixers, delivering commercial contracts around Oxford. I am a skilled person and excelled in the trade. I worked my way up to running a job on my own with a company van. A lamppost saw an end both to the van, and my nascent career.
Where I had chosen an individual path and had left university early, my brother was graduated and was wooing for a wife at home, which left sparse room for me. Better, I considered, than my friends sofa, was the offer of a bedroom in a local squat; 14 acres of Oxford hilltop with mansions and a gatehouse, which was actually a redevelopment site with a gang of itinerant ‘blighters’ invited to advance the prospects of an ongoing planing application.
As our immediate futures depended on the outcome of the planning process, I took an interest. I made myself familiar with the paperwork, and promoted myself as representative of the residents, and built a relationship with the owners and agents that would regularly visit the site.
To support myself, I took a job in the newly christened ‘BMW Mini Plant Oxford’ testing the newly built cars. After a year, the voices of the older factory workers started to ring solemnly for the future of my life ‘I’ve been in this corner making bonnets for 40 years’. Something had to change, I was now 28 – I had no wish to be lost to indefinitely this industrial process.
My family has a history of association with the architectural profession, albeit without ever producing an architect, George Meikel Kemp, designer and builder of The Scot Monument, as an example. Having been on site as a builder, and onsite as a kind of planning liaison agent, it was natural that I should visit The Oxford School of Architecture. It was really no surprise that I was met down the end of the head of departments nose, and somewhat over his glasses; I do not have an elite education, the expression of my concern for cost management and planning processes led to the haughty pronouncement that I should ‘GO DOWNSTAIRS!”; his meaning that I go and be a Construction Manager if ‘cared about those sorts of things’.
I duly did ‘go downstairs’, with the full intention of becoming not only equivalent to an architect, but also better; by embracing technicalities, legalities, and construction management issues for more successful projects on site with better cost control and happier clients. I enrolled on the BSc Building course at Oxford Brookes University in 2005. My dog came with me, and I lived in the old van I had at the squat, parked on my parents driveway.
I graduated in 2009 with a First Class Degree, the prize for Best Student on the Course, having already received two travel scholarships, with a legacy of change initiated from my role as student representative, that shaped the Department of Real Estate and Construction to this day. After graduation I became Chairman of the Oxford Branch of the Chartered Institute of Building, having served in the committee for some time.
When I graduated I moved into a Council Flat in my hometown. Started my solo practice in 2010, placing small adverts in the local circular magazines, offering designs for extensions. I took on an extension job for one family member, and was introduced to a developer / landlord by another. It was through a lecture I gave for The Chartered Insite of Builder, that I was introduced to developer / landlord; Joe Miles, the originator of the vast majority of the work of my career.