We were delighted that Turn End featured on Grand Designs The Streets, Series 2, Episode 3 in April 2022.
Turn End gave inspiration to self-builders Julia and John when designing and building their own home in Graven Hill, Oxfordshire. John is an architect and the couple have spent 30 years trying to build their own home. Eventually, they found a plot at Graven Hill, the UK’s largest self-build and custom build project. This is the second Grand Designs series to follow buildings at this new village near Bicester.
Peter Aldington talking with self-builders Julia & John
Filmed a year to the day before the show aired on 27 April 2022, Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud interviewed Julia and John here at Turn End about how the house and garden had inspired them. Kevin introduces Turn End as “an architectural masterpiece…a place of pilgrimage for architects and self builders”.
Kevin discusses Turn End with Julia and John in the context of architectural history. “You can probably count on maybe two hands and two feet, the number of modest, domestic buildings, one-offs, which have been designed since the Second World War and have survived the test of time and remain as inspirational as they were. They are rare”.
The programme also includes an interview with Margaret and Peter about their design and build project at Turn End, Kevin commenting that “they were way ahead of their time”. “The idea of having walls that can open into a garden, the idea of connected external spaces like internal ones….all of these ideas are commonplace now, yet here you were doing this in the mid 1960s”.
Peter and Margaret explain how they moved into a shell of a building. Margaret says “all these openings were sheeted up, we didn’t even have the back wall of the kitchen. There was sort of blanket between the bathroom and the open air”. Peter says “We had a bath in a top loading washing machine on one occasion!”
Concluding the feature, Kevin McCloud says “Peter Aldington is one of the world’s greatest architects, he’s an absolute genius”.
Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud with Peter Aldington
You can watch the episode on demand here:
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs-the-streets/on-demand/70749-003
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