US Edition 
Kevin McCloud: 'What I'd do about our terrible houses'
The TV presenter talks about his fight to improve Britain’s horrible housing – and why we should shrink our gardens and turn Royal Parks into allotments
Kevin McCloud is not happy about our houses. It’s not the gleaming modernist palaces, green-roofed eco-homes or restored historic monuments that feature on his Channel 4 show Grand Designs that are bothering him. Nor is it the downright peculiar living quarters occupied by the rat-race refugees in his new series Kevin McCloud’s Escape to the Wild.
What the 56-year-old designer, television presenter – and now property developer – is upset about are the ordinary houses, which, he says, are seriously letting the country down.
“We’re the worst in Europe. In 100 years, I don’t think we’re going to look back and say that this was a golden age for house building,” he says. “The quality of our housing provision over the past 40 or 50 years has been very poor, in terms of both architecture and design. We’ve lost the knowledge and experience to design places that fit where they are,” he says.
Kevin McCloud at the site of his company's next development near Oxford (John Lawrence)
It’s not hard to see what he’s talking about – collections of so-called executive homes squeezed into what were once back gardens or deposited in a field at the edge of a town like a giant space station, or the identikit “luxury” flats springing up around the edge of our larger towns and cities aimed at young professionals and buy-to-let investors but offer little for anyone looking to bring up a family.
He has no beef with our traditional houses – the Thirties’ semi-detached or the rows of Victorian terraces. “They weren’t always built in the best way, but they have lasted well and proved to be very adaptable.”
For him, the problems started in the Seventies and Eighties – and money is at least partly to blame.
“You can trace the mistakes of the past according to whether we were trying to build great houses rather than thinking of them as commodities. Land is expensive here, and we’re the most densely populated country in Europe.
How HAB's next development, the Acre, near Cumnor Hill, Oxford, will look
“We’ve seen land speculation as something that’s acceptable to all, and because demand is always greater than supply, builders have never had to compete on quality.
“So what we get is a lot of low-grade design with what I call high-grade twaddle, which panders to the British obsession with what things look like, rather than what they are like to live in or experience,” he says.
And it isn’t jut a matter of house prices. “You can have a mean-spirited, mean-looking building, or for the same money have something much better. Quality ideas aren’t more expensive than cheap, good ideas. We have just lost faith in design and architecture,” he says.
It was out of frustration with the state of British housebuilding that McCloud set up HAB in 2007, with the purpose of “building homes that make people happy”. He is still chairman, and by 2016, HAB, which stands for Happiness, Architecture, Beauty, hopes to have five schemes on site, with 300 homes, building up to 1,000 a year by 2021. So far the company has built 120 houses on two sites. The first was The Triangle, in Swindon, where the 42 new homes were modelled on traditional railwaymen’s cottages. The second was a 78-home development in Stroud, where prices started at £125,000. The company has planning consent for three more developments, including The Acre, Cumnor Hill, – a collection of five houses, two miles outside Oxford, starting at £1.5 million (habhousing.co.uk or 01865 269010; savills.co.uk). This is its first “custom-build” scheme, assembled from a kit of parts to create a layout that suits the location and the buyer’s needs.
One of his guiding principles is that each development needs to have a sense of community built in from the beginning. HAB’s developments are likely to come with car-sharing schemes, bike-sharing schemes, play areas or communal spaces for growing fruit and veg, with the new residents making final choices.
The Triangle, Swindon: HAB's first development
Squandering the sense of community that existed in Britain in the early part of the last century has been, he says, a cardinal sin. It is something he is determined to put right in HAB’s projects.
“It’s about social glue, how you make places that are resilient. I’m all for initiatives to encourage low-energy homes, but you don’t make viable communities by building eco-homes. They are stand-alone units. You do that by sharing and pooling resources, like we used to do. It has become normal for a household to have three cars, and to see itself as an independent, self-sustaining organism. It seems to me bonkers that just about every household in Britain owns a trampoline. Why not share one among five families, on a big, communal back garden?” he says.
Communal space is clearly a big deal for McCloud.
He has said that if he was mayor of London for a day, his first act would be to turn St James’s Park into allotments. Another of his ideas is for a whole street to split its back gardens in two, with each house keeping the front half and then combining the rest to create a giant communal space that could be a play area, allotments or whatever. He has offered to buy a shed for the first road to do it – the money is still in his account.
HAB's Applewood development, near Stroud
Given that an Englishman is encouraged to think of his home as his castle, does he think the British are sociable enough to return to the days of borrowing sugar from the neighbours?
“We did it very well between the wars and during the Second World War, and then a series of things started to grind it away. More people started to drive, roads split communities and it became impossible to get from one place to another without getting in the car. But as a country, we are naturally sociable – we invented the pub.”
After 14 series of Grand Designs, the TV show celebrating the triumphs and troubles of Britain’s boldest self-builders, McCloud admits not all the schemes are to his taste – and it’s not always easy to bite his tongue. “The thing I find hardest to keep quiet about are the projects that are a failure on every count,” he says.
This house in Ireland, made of shipping containers, is one of his favourite Grand Designs projects
He certainly has favourite schemes, too – the spectacular house built of shipping containers in Northern Ireland, and Ben Law’s handmade wooden house in West Sussex. But even when a design isn’t to his taste, he can usually find something to admire.
“In the new series we are covering a house being built in woodland south of London. It’s an exquisite, modernist dream – but there’s no sense of community. It’s a place for one person to sit and contemplate their surroundings. I’d slit my throat if they were all like that, but it is absolutely beautiful,” he says.
The next series starts in September, and after 141 episodes, it isn’t getting any easier to find new projects. The recession hasn’t helped, either – since 2010 it has taken an average of six months longer to complete. “When the good times were rolling, people could get out the chequebook and spend their way out of trouble. Now they have to be creative – which is a lot more interesting,” he says.
Kevin McCloud in one of the first episodes of Grand Designs
One advantage of his years presenting is he has picked up a few tricks which he can use in his own developments. “The reason I love the houses on Grand Designs is not because I want to live in them but because they are exemplary – they have the ideas for the next generation of ordinary three-bedroom houses. They spend a fortune on heat pumps and glazing, then you know that they’re going to work. Without these pioneers, you could never roll out affordable technology on a bigger scale,” he says.
What he won’t say is whether any of the innovations made it into his own home. Throughout his career he has managed to say very little about his 15th-century farmhouse in Somerset. It’s partly to preserve the mystique, he says, and partly because he “likes to experiment”. So don’t expect a Hello!-style “Kevin McCloud shows us around his beautiful house” feature any time soon – but if you live nearby, you could ask for a go on his trampoline.