What happens when Grand Designs takes over a whole street?
On a patch of old MOD land, 10 households set out on a journey to create a self-built community. Guy Kelly finds out how it went
It has somehow been 20 years since Grand Designs took up residence in Channel 4’s midweek schedule, and in that time we’ve met an awful lot of home-builders. Some have been as meek as their plans are wild. Others every bit as eccentric and structurally unsound as their dream dwelling. But no matter how different or difficult they’ve seemed, they have at least had one saving grace: they’ve never had to deal with another “build” going on next door at the same time. Until now.
For the past five years, Kevin Mccloud and his hard-hatted team have been following the progress of a whole street of grand designs on a quiet patch of old Ministry of Defence land near Bicester Village in Oxfordshire. There, 10 households have engaged in what will eventually be Britain’s largest self-build project, all starting and – nearly – finishing at the same time.
The land that forms Graven Hill, the new street, came from Cherwell District Council, which decided to sell
plots to individuals or families looking to build their own homes. Each patch of land, all about the same size, went for £100,000 and came with utility connections pre-established. Besides that, applicants were invited to be as ambitious as they pleased.
The gaggle of houses now lined up in some fields beside the A41 currently looks a little incongruous – a wider development totalling 2,000 homes, including some self-build and some council, will be built around them. But, bathed in spring sunshine, Graven Hill also looks like a fine place to live. The grass is lush and inviting; over the railway track, trains get to London in under an hour; the letters T-E-S-C-O peek over a tree line like the Hollywood sign. Commuter-belt heaven.
The house-builders themselves, who range in age from 24 to 72, have certainly delivered on the challenge of being inventive, even if the properties aren’t of the usual ridiculous Grand Designs scale. Roofs slope this way and that, almost every home appears to be made from a different material, and several bizarre little tumours poke out from improbable places.
According to Mccloud, who visited a self-build town near Amsterdam in 2010 and had been looking to find a British project ever since, constructing your own house means “you get a highly bespoke home that’s suited to your needs and reflects who you are”. If that’s so, they’re an eccentric bunch.
At plot two is retired teacher Lynn, 65, who used to live in an 18th-century cottage in Northamptonshire. She decided to apply for the scheme with her neighbours, Terry and Olwen, and luckily both their homes were accepted. Each building looks starkly different: the latter’s looks like a white, giant ramp, while Lynn’s is made from Siberian larch and clay tiles, with an oast house-inspired roundel. Inside, huge windows fill it with light.
“Every day, I come down and can’t stop smiling that this is where I live,” she says. “I wanted to build a forever home before someone puts me in one.”
Viewers of Grand Designs will know that certain things seem to happen in every episode – the participants wildly underestimate both scale and cost, something important isn’t delivered on time, someone gets pregnant, it rains before the roof is on, they all lose the will to live, then everything is fine and dandy and Kevin is astonished – but this series has new tensions.
One is the interplay between the builders such as Lynn and Terry, who agreed to help one another when they started in April 2017, but fell out when Terry spent too long on Lynn’s underfloor heating and had to call in help for his own house. All’s fair in love and war and Grand Designs, of course, so they’re all back on good terms now.
Up the road at plot six are Paul, 43, Blanka, 35, and their two children, who built the cheapest, most sustainable house. Before this project, they were renting a cottage in Oxford, but to buy the same standard of property would have set them back £700,000. When they were gifted some money, they decided to build one themselves.
“I just thought, ‘How hard can it be to build a house?’” says Paul, a human rights lawyer, over a custard tart. He and Blanka don’t own a television or watch Grand Designs, which may explain the naivety. Building a house in fact proved quite difficult, not least because their “crazy” budget was just £60,000 (their neighbours’ ranged from £200,000 to £500,000). Mccloud, never one to hold back, especially in a voiceover, gleefully called it “ridiculous – you cannot build a family home for £60,000!” Paul now admits that it would have needed to be made from straw to get close.
As it is, the four-bedroom house is made from Hempcrete, a biocomposite mixture of hemp hurds and lime that’s environmentally friendly, cheap and a good insulator.
Paul, who taught himself how to build by taking a few courses, watching Youtube tutorials and befriending “a fun community” of other self-build enthusiasts online, did much of the work himself. At one point, he slept in the attic for five months and showered under a hose in the garden, while Blanka – a teaching assistant – and the children lived at his father’s in Gloucestershire.
“At the time, we didn’t really think about it, but afterwards we realised how hard it was,” Blanka says. They now estimate they’ve spent around £300,000, part-funded by Paul cashing in a £10,000 investment in Bitcoin for around 10 times that. But the house now looks great and, to my untrained eye, is the most characterful on the street: homely, modern but without resorting to tech, filled with tasteful recycled furniture (including a church door found on Gumtree) and entirely heated by a wood-burner.
One of their favourite things is having neighbours they know. All the residents are now friends, bound by their individual tribulations. Next door, in a still unfinished house inspired by agricultural steel-framed barns, is James, a 32-year-old quantity surveyor whose girlfriend left him shortly before filming. He doesn’t regret embarking on the project, but concedes he would “make sure I was in a good place emotionally – happy, healthy and motivated – and take a year off work” if he did it again. But he feels he’s found “an extended family” in the other builders.
For all of them, self-building their dream home has been an epic drama, rather than a straightforward fairy tale. After all he’s been through, what would Paul’s advice be to anybody thinking of following suit?
“Oh easy,” he says. “Just go for it.”
Grand Designs: The Street is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm
‘I can’t stop smiling. I wanted to build a forever home before I’m put in one’