If neighbours object to your ugly grand design, let them eat cake
The power of a Victoria sponge is amazing. Not merely a mainstay of the nation’s viewing thanks to Bake Off, it can also bring calm and co- operation to London’s strife-ridden streets.
Take hackney, east London, where among the pretty terrace villas a hideous chunk of misshapen architecture has erupted.
The brainchild of a ‘ conceptual artist’ called Jess, the house looks like a stack of giant ice cubes coated in grey mould.
The walls are rendered in Tarmac, and there appear to be no windows on the ground floor. It’s so ugly that Kevin McCloud featured it on Grand Designs: House Of The Year (C4), a show strictly for monstrosities.
Jess’s earlier artworks include filling a supermarket freezer cabinet with concrete bricks. She’s applied the same delicate artistic sensibility to her home, which has low ceilings and walls 2ft thick. her aim, Jess said, was to make it feel not too much like a prison.
She hasn’t altogether succeeded, though it does look more like a derelict multi-storey car park, after an earthquake.
The neighbours, understandably, loathe it. One described it as ‘gulag chic’, which is being unfair to Stalin’s labour camps. You’d imagine the planning department was inundated with protests. But as the hackney horror went up, there wasn’t a single complaint. That’s because Jess also runs the outstanding cafe next door, where she wooed the locals with her cakes.
Bad architecture is regrettable, but a cup of tea and a nice piece of jam sponge is beyond price.
On the banks of the Thames in genteel henley, another deranged piece of concrete deformity was meeting rather more resistance. Retired couple Dick and Judith planned an S-shaped home beside a pond, so that the water reflected their flat-roofed eyesore.
Neighbours compared it to a World War II pillbox. It would certainly repel Nazi paratroopers — they’d run screaming from the sight of it. Of special note was the eight-ton cantilevered carport, made from pre-rusted metal.
The planning battle lasted 14 years and went all the way to the high Court. Dick and Judith should have tried placating their opponents with cake.
Much of the pleasure of Grand Designs lies in knowing you’ll never have to live in these houses. It’s fun, too, seeing how much Kevin loves them. he went into raptures over an upside-down home with a glass panel looking down into the basement bathroom, and an infill house on the site of a derelict garage, now painted the colour of broiled lobster.
It’s a reminder that we all have different tastes. except where cake is concerned, of course. everyone loves a bit of Victoria sponge.
No one expects good taste from the floundering novices on The Apprentice (BBC1), and they excelled themselves when challenged to invent a new look for a budget airline.
One group made a TV advert for cut- price flights with AC-DC’s highway To hell for the soundtrack. The others drew a logo with a cartoon explosion at the centre: ‘It’s an explosion of fun,’ offered one candidate.
Business hopefuls Jackie and Camilla came up with a uniform for cabin crew that consisted of a boob tube secured by a bikini string. even Alan Sugar, whose ideas about sexual equality would have been old-fashioned in the Jurassic era, said he’d be uncomfortable asking female employees to wear that.
The Apprentice has become the Ryanair of television: it’s cheap and it offers next to nothing by way of entertainment during each joyless hour. Somehow, though, it’s still airborne.