Look beyond a town's unjust cultural-vacuum reputation - you might find a bright future and a building hotspot, says Kevin McCloud It's taken 18 months of work and a year of exploring Britain but the first housing project to be built by the company I set up, HAB, is going to happen. In - and wait for it because it's a very special place that you won't have thought of and may even have never heard of... Swindon.
*All details correct at the time of publication - 07/2007
For those of you that have truly never heard of it or have never been there, or aren't even sure where it is, Swindon commands a majestic view of the M4, about halfway between Bristol and London, in Wiltshire. In the nineteenth century it grew into a railway town, chosen for the site of the Great Western Engineering Works by Brunel. Now the old works have been restyled as a Great Western shopping centre with a Great Western car park. You can even buy a Great Western burger there.
It would be fair to say that Swindon enjoys an abundance of averageness. There are large and unremarkable swathes of housing to the north. It is the place to which, if you're Mars or Unilever, you take your prototype products to be tested.
Demographically it is Little Britain, the petrie dish of the UK consumer's DNA, and that culture is about to grow. Over the next decade or so, Swindon's population is scheduled to boom from 180,000 to 250,000.
But in a sort of high-culture retort, other interesting things are happening. English Heritage's National Monuments Record is, surprisingly, housed in Swindon. The National Trust has recently moved its headquarters there, into a striking new eco-building by architects Feilden Clegg Bradley. The Science Museum hold the Science Library and the bulk of their collection in a series of hangars at the old RAF base at Wroughton just to the south and are developing plans to convert the site into Britain's first large-scale residential science centre. Motorola, Honda, Tyco, BMW and Intel are all there.
I know this may seem like a shameless plug for HAB's first project - in partnership with Footstep Homes and the Borough Council - and it is. But it's also a plug for Swindon. Towns like it such as Reading and Slough, Harlow and Chelmsford regularly get slapped for their mediocrity or poor sense of place. They seem almost interchangeable. But let me tell you that if you travel to North Lancashire or South Yorkshire, or to the rust belt of Birmingham, you'll find town after town subsumed into a choking fug of poor-quality design and anonymity. Where the same old high-street chains that you see swamping every town centre in the south - names like Specsavers and Ask - are considered a luxury. By comparison, Swindon seems a paradise, a delight.
As indeed are the two sites we've been looking at, which are both currently very green spaces. One is a redundant allotment site with scrubland to the north, the other is greenfield agricultural land in Swindon's 'front garden'. But our interest in these sites starts with what they already have: the trees, their open space and their ecology. We know from studies that it's possible to develop a site and in fact increase the biodiversity there. Which is part of the sustainable strategy for the place. You'll know from reading this column that I think companies like Urban Splash are doing brilliant work regenerating city centres by bringing residents back into residential developments that are contemporary and which often reuse old industrial buildings.
All well and good. But I think we should be focussing harder on provincial and suburban housing projects where the standard of many current developments is particularly poor. We shouldn't be building either gated communities or ring-fenced ghettos but a healthy mix of beautifully designed, sustainable and innovative homes in communities where you can continue to find somewhere to live for the rest of your life. Of course there's no point doing that unless people really enjoy living in those communities and want to stay. Swindon is a place with hidden charms, where people come and never leave. It's a good place to be building.
Any thoughts? Email info@granddesignsmagazine.com
Are you ready to embark on a grand design? If so I would love to hear from you. Don't hide your light under a bushel: the Grand Designs TV series needs new projects to feature if we're to continue being one of the most popular homes programmes on TV. If you're about to start a residential new-build or significant conversion with a genuinely inspiring design in the next few months, and you can bear to have me and a TV camera leaning over your shoulder asking exactly when you're planning to get it finished, then get in touch. We're looking for projects that have not already been featured, are unique designs, use interesting construction methods or materials, or have an unusual location or story to tell. We know you're out there, but where exactly?
Get in touch! Contact the Grand Designs team on 01494 733 538 or email granddesigns3@talkbackthames.tv To find out more about the programme go to Grand Designs
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