This weekend, Kevin McCloud will attempt to do for our town and country landscapes what Jamie Oliver has done for school dinners. He’s presenting Demolition, a series of four programmes that target the tower blocks, multistoreys and other concrete monstrosities that blight our lives. A viewers’ poll has been conducted to identify Britain’s most despised eyesores. Top of the list for the 10,000 who voted is Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, east of Glasgow — a dreadful and bewildering 1960s carbuncle once described as “visionary”.
However, given a free rein, McCloud’s choice for the dubious honour of Worst Building would go to Lodges supermarket — a derelict, yellow-brick shell that dominates the otherwise picturesque Last of the Summer Wine village of Holmfirth, Yorkshire. “There is nothing of merit about it,” he says. “It was designed without conviction, it’s shut, it’s failed and it casts a shadow over the entire place. It’s the saddest and most obvious candidate.”
Lodges comes tenth in Demolition’s “Dirty Dozen” list of most loathed constructions, which, the programme suggests, should be placed on an X-list, enabling them to be fast-tracked for either razing or radical renovation. The X-list is an inspired idea that belongs to George Ferguson, a former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba). But it is McCloud who has been able to pick it up and turn it into a people’s crusade.
Like Oliver, he possesses that rare ability to be knowledgeable without being patronising — expert and yet bloke-next-door. Crucially, he has the charisma and force of personality that is capable of capturing popular opinion and sweeping it into a cause for good.
Demolition is, in many ways, the antithesis of the show that has made McCloud’s reputation. Grand Designs, now in its sixth series, is makeover TV for the thinking man. While others focus on quick fixes and garish colour schemes, McCloud has concentrated on the high end — following the chosen few who have the time, money and flair to create what for most of us remains a domestic fantasy.
He loves Grand Designs, of course, but it is clear that he has been yearning for something grittier. “You have got to have something in life to bite into. There is no point doing lovely, warm, soggy stuff all the time,” he says. “For me to go around celebrating good architecture is fine, but there is a load of crap out there — bad, wrong, useless pieces of design that are lousy. And they need addressing.”
McCloud’s real mission — one that is unified by Grand Designs and Demolition — is to convince us that architecture is for “you and me, not academics, and not architects”. His most obvious qualification for this declaration is his negative/positive — he is not an architect. He’s not anything very definable at all and yet you have only to watch him at work to appreciate that his passion is genuine and that “jack of all trades” can be a virtue in itself.
We meet on one of his Grand Design days: each programme is made over 18 months, during which McCloud will visit the site maybe ten times to chronicle its progress. Today’s location is on the outskirts of Ely, Cambridgeshire, where carpenter Kelly Neville and his Japanese wife Masako are constructing a hexagonal-shaped, eco-friendly home using traditional building methods and no hired help.
McCloud wades in, spending a painstaking 90 minutes manoeuvring an oak beam into position using only a winch and ropes. But he also takes time to pull Masako to one side and ask after Kelly. “Do you worry that he might get depressed at the slow progress?”
McCloud loves the practical element of his work, because it gives him a sense of the energy in buildings “and by that, I don’t mean ‘soul, or feng shui, or karma’,” he says, “but the commitment and belief and ingenuity that goes into making them”. The thing he loves most, though, about his job “is the fascinating conversations I have with people”.
Now 46, McCloud is the son of a rocket scientist father who worked on military systems by day and by night disgorged machines over the kitchen table, be it the boiler, a gearbox, or a neighbour’s TV.
Kevin’s childhood memories are dominated by weekends spent with his foot on the accelerator, break or clutch of the family Wolseley while his father’s head was under the bonnet. Home in Toddington, Bedfordshire, was a 1960s detached box that his parents brought off-plan and decorated in groovy wallpapers “all very much on the cheap”.
His mother was an “extraordinarily long-suffering woman” who had to stand by as the house was trashed by four males — Kevin being the eldest of three boys. But she was also, in her way, creative. “She made all my clothes. The only things not home-made the day I started school were my shoes, tie, and possibly my underpants.” It was an upbringing that offered no great aesthetic insight, but did imbue within the young McCloud a sense of self-sufficiency.
“My wife jokes that I would be brilliant on a desert island. I could build a house, I do make furniture, decorate, and cut my own hair. I am not daunted by the physicality of the world.”
A grammar school boy, he went up to Cambridge to read languages but then switched courses: first to philosophy and later to history of art and architecture. He thinks living in 18th-century and then 14th-century halls helped him first appreciate the resonance of buildings.
He also spent a year living in Florence, “which made me more excited about architecture than art”. But he is a self-confessed “faffer”. “I didn’t settle until I was 38 or 40. I’ve never followed a linear path.” His eclectic background embraces spells as a theatrical and exhibition designer and as a lighting expert whose illuminating schemes can be seen at, among others, Ely Cathedral, Edinburgh Castle, the Savoy and Dorchester in London. He spent more than ten years running his own lighting and furniture manufacturing company before going into journalism and books on interior design in the late 1990s.
His TV career began with appearances on Home Front, a programme that was too superficial a vehicle for him. But he is proud to have been part of what he sees as the makeover evolution. “We could not have made Grand Designs without Home Front, and we could not have made Demolition without Grand Designs. It’s been a progression from the interior to the exterior to the street.”
He does not want people to start demolishing buildings at random, “but I do want them to start talking about their towns and shopping centres and public spaces as though they own them. That is the point: they belong to us, not to councils, or banks, or pension funds — they are our spaces and we should be determining how they look.”
That said, there is only so far that he is prepared to extend the democratic process. Eighth on the list of Demolition’s “Dirty Dozen” is the £431 million Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, which this year won the coveted Riba Stirling Prize. McCloud admits he has been taken aback by the vehemence of the public’s antipathy. “I am in love with it, and I think in 20 years’ time the Scottish people will be, too. But it will take 20 years.”
Is that because the public are philistines who don’t understand the finer points of architecture? “No, it’s because the Scottish media have taken against the building. They can’t bear the idea of it. But it is a beautiful jewel — exciting and different — a once-in-a-lifetime building.” I wonder whether there are some grand designs that he secretly thinks are hideous, but luckily for him, there is nothing particularly democratic about that either. “I tend to like most of them, because we choose them, and if we don’t like them, we don’t pick them.”
His own home is a 500-year-old farmhouse in Somerset, where he lives with his wife Zani and four children aged between 4 and 17. It has a modern extension and an oak-framed studio but he is not an open-plan fan. “I don’t knock through walls, because at heart I am a conservationist. So our house has stone floors laid onto the earth and old stone windows and no double glazing — it is not the modern dream. I am much more interested in the layering of histories.
“I do find that the way in which people take period houses and then rip the heart out of them has become rather arrogant.” He’s not a fan either of minimalism or over-the-top plasma screens. Interiors, he believes, should be autobiographical — telling the story of the lives of the people who live in them.
His own is a “mixture of old and new and stuff we like, stuff we get given” and although he is, by nature, a detail man, family life precludes living in a showcase. “If you were coming round, we’d have a bit of a tidy up, but I’m not interested in having our house photographed for newspapers or magazines, because it is our home.”
Intriguing though it might be to cast an eye over his decor, he is probably wise to ring-fence his own domestic tableau. “One of the depressing things about the success of the programme is that people want to talk to you about what you do when they come for dinner. Isn’t that dull? One friend said, ‘I can’t have you round because the house isn’t finished’. For God’s sake, I can’t have my friendships being judged by the work that I do.”
McCloud is not a natural celebrity, but he is a born campaigner. “Buildings are not art objects,” he says. “They are not pure expressions of an individual: they have to function and contribute and enhance — their role is to make our lives better. If they detract and make us feel less civilised, then that is criminal.”
Second and third in Demolition’s “Dirty Dozen” are Bournemouth’s Imax Cinema, which closed three years after it was built on the seafront, and Northampton’s Bus Station, a dinosaur of a building topped by an empty office block. Both, says McCloud, are like “neighbourhood bullies terrorising their towns”. He proposes architectural ASBOs for buildings that are not just ugly, but which damage the way we live by becoming magnets for drug users, graffiti and vandals.
There is, it has to be said, something rather thrilling about the idea of blowing up or bulldozing through several storeys of concrete, but, interestingly, demolition is not that simple. The programme films the beginning of the dismantling of Westgate House, a drab 1970s block in Newcastle, which has been five years in the planning, and is going to take nine months and £2 million to complete.
Demolition can never be about pandering to people’s kneejerk reactions, says McCloud. “Whether a building should be saved or demolished has to be argued intellectually and justified on a case-by-case basis.” But by contemplating what we want to knock down, perhaps we’ll also better understand what makes a building work. McCloud reels off a list: natural light, space, good sound quality, ventilation. “High density is OK, we’re social creatures, but big rooms are also a good thing.”
Which brings us onto his next project — a Grand Designs for everyone. “I’m going to put my neck on the line. I’m going to build 25 affordable, yet beautiful homes. It’s my next big thing. I’m on a bandwagon,” he says. And with that, he laces up his steel-capped boots, dons his fleecy hat and heads back to where he is most at home: the building site.
- Demolition can be seen on Channel 4 from December 17-20 at 8pm
EYESORES WE'D DEMOLISH
TOM DYCKHOFF
Times architecture correspondent
The Holiday Inn at King’s Cross in London — a perfect example of postmodern façadist wallpaper architecture of the worst possible kind. Some developers think it perfectly reasonable to build a honking great lump in the middle of a city, wrap it in “tasteful”, “vernacular” columns and pitched roofs and think we’ll not notice.
JOAN BAKEWELL
Broadcaster
The Co-operative Bank in Stockport. It’s just hideous — a pyramid of blue glass plonked down next to a Victorian viaduct that is the pride of Stockport.
ANDREW MARR
Political journalist
Millbank Tower — a gross, charmless digit with absolutely no redeeming features. It's on such an important site in the heart of London, yet in scale, in quality of design, in almost every way, it's grotesque.
