If the foolish man builds his house upon the sand, as I was taught to sing at Sunday school, only the exhibitionist asks Kevin McCloud to come and film it happening. The usual plot of a Grand Designs episode sees a bright-eyed middle-class couple set out to turn the 3D rendering of their fantasy home into bricks and mortar, or more commonly steel and glass. McCloud bounds in to keep an eye on progress (or lack thereof) as plans run over budget and tempers fray. The programme ought to have become formulaic, yet after 21 series and more than 200 episodes it remains a ratings hit.
On a superficial level, the appeal is a voyeuristic peek into the lives of people whose access to immense amounts of money cannot buy self-awareness. There are exceptions, but a familiar Grand Designs victim has the air of someone who now spends on rolled steel joists and glass the disposable income once used for 2am deliveries of little wraps containing stimulating powders. Their vainglorious ambition fills with poured concrete a gap in their lives or relationships that others might deal with by getting a puppy. Into this maelstrom steps McCloud, architecture critic and, frequently, amateur therapist.
This is where it gets interesting. His presence is a haunting, a phantom reappearing every few years to hear of dreams and love fading in a blizzard of plywood dust. In the time between these visitations, banks crash and stop lending, people visibly age, relationships sour. The children of the central couple grow up from being little brats excited to be surrounded by diggers to slightly older brats desperate for the house to be finished so they can get their mates round to do laughing gas balloons. The viewer starts to look for hints of bitter secrets and clues of betrayal in newly dyed hair and changes to the wet room tiling. It’s Roxy Music’s In Every Dream Home A Heartache turned into primetime telly.
When the great projects are done, we never see them truly, properly lived in. McCloud himself often seems torn between seeing these houses as places of architectural merit and comfortable homes. What is it like to live in the memory of passive-aggressive rows, and months spent in the obligatory caravan floating on a muddy building site? They’re never cosy, and with white walls and everything placed just so, many of the buildings look like art galleries. You can’t help but think their owners might have saved themselves a few million quid by taking a sleeping bag to one of those “night at the museum” events at the Tate Modern extension.
It isn’t always an easy watch. My own enthusiasm for Grand Designs has largely depended on my living situation: 13 different rented flats in 15 years; being 36 and skint in a single bedroom with the plaster coming off the walls made it hard to enjoy the sight of someone cooing over their plans for a dressing room, whatever one of those is.
Despite all this, the clever part of Grand Designs’ appeal is how we viewers masochistically end up rooting for even the most privileged participant, such as the bloke who made a fortune flogging Ibiza compilations and decided to spend it on building a pretend lighthouse perched on a North Devon cliff. A decade on, he’s millions in debt, his marriage has ended, and the bones of the building howl with the full force of the salty wind sweeping in from the sea. It looks like an abandoned bunker from Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, yet you still will him on. The same goes for the descendant of the Stuart dynasty sinking millions into a subterranean house on the edge of a south London cemetery, despite his infuriating access to yet more and more easy money.
What stops Grand Designs being property porn unfit for this time of housing crisis is our own complicity, plus a canny combination of schadenfreude at the jeopardy of the super-rich and more humane moments. In the latest episode, a pub landlord converts a nondescript barn into a safe home for his immuno-compromised wife, whom he met as they both recovered from brain tumours. As Covid hits, it becomes an emotional rollercoaster.
Other episodes have visited a cooperative of families joining forces to build each other’s homes, featured structures designed to help people living with a disability, and, in my favourite, followed the progress of woodsman Ben Law’s cheaply built eco-lodge.
Grand Designs undoubtedly has something to say in the current moment, when Britain’s new housing stock is all too often an unimaginative sprawl of identikit brick boxes crammed onto out-of-town sites. It surely wouldn’t be that hard to use some of the vision and innovation displayed by the programme’s wannabe Corbusiers for the greater good? Although, this potential may be overshadowed by the fact that, as reported in August 2020, McCloud’s own housing venture was at risk of insolvency. Some investors ended up nursing big losses.
The new series of Grand Designs airs as 1990s archaeological TV show Time Team crowdfunds to make a comeback. We can’t seem to get enough of trying to understand how people build their homes, whether ancient or modern. Perhaps McCloud’s programme is really a form of living archaeology, where the secrets of how people live and what it reveals about their thoughts and behaviour are all on the surface, no digging required – for the viewers, at least.
• Luke Turner is an author. His latest book is Out of the Woods
