The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  The people who are after sites can rarely find them, because developers get there first. In this case, the couple who were selling the house were property developers themselves, so maybe they knew that the price they wanted to charge for the land (£500,000) was too high to make commercial development worthwhile. So they were selling through an estate agent in the hope of luring in some clueless novices. Maybe we looked clueless. We only had an indistinct sense of how much we could afford; possibly they thought they could persuade us to pay too much.

  I honestly don’t know; but I did realize that this was a chance like no other. The land was seconds away from Highbury Fields, one of the few green spaces in Islington, and the nicest, surrounded as it is by fine Georgian terraces. It was minutes’ walk from the Tube, and bus routes ran along the top of the lane. Yet you could stand in the garden and hear only birds.

  The second mystery was the history of the land. From what Sue Reynolds told me (I possibly wasn’t listening all that carefully) I somehow formed the impression that it had only been incorporated into the garden of the house in the last couple of years, subsequent to planning permission having been granted in 1999. The vendor seemed to reinforce this – implying, when I met her a few weeks later, that she and her husband had acquired the land with the idea of building a swimming pool, but that now they were moving to send their daughter to a Steiner school in Sussex.

  But it’s perfectly possible I was only half-hearing, or hearing what I wanted to hear. I also managed to absorb the information that the house that was on the site originally had been bombed in the war, and nothing had been built here since. This made sense, because it looked very like the bombsites I remembered all over the East End from my childhood, sprouting buddleia, looking as if they were struggling to recover their lost identity but didn’t know which way to turn – towards brick and buildings, or back to nature.

  ‘Would it work?’ I asked Joyce. ‘Could you build a house here? Big enough? What d’you think?’

  What Joyce privately thought, as she later told me, was that we would never build a house here, because we hadn’t seen the lane yet. It was all very well to come at the site through this splendid villa with its big south-facing garden with fancy climbing frame; actually, the approach would be down a narrow gravelled lane studded with potholes and bordered by factories on one side and wire netting on the other.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘sure’ – because how often does an architect in London get the opportunity to build a new house? What was she going to say? ‘Who wants this kind of work anyway?’ But I was surprised, because I looked at the site and had absolutely no idea whether a house would fit on to it or not. How much space did houses take up?

  Joyce suggested that we should come at the site from the other direction, so we got back in the car and bumped down the lane, over the rough ground. To the right was a former factory that had been converted into workshops and light industrial spaces. A couple of these had back entrances on to the lane, for collection and delivery; I was conscious that it was fortunate there weren’t any lorries collecting/delivering right now because if you met one, the only way out would be backwards, reversing through the potholes. To the left was a modern brick-built house, which had been constructed in 1993 and looked as though it really belonged to Surrey; and beyond our plot, a two-storey Victorian building known as The Glassworks, formerly a small factory, but now empty, after which the lane petered out in a dead end. Opposite the Surrey house was another empty site, much longer and narrower. This had recently been acquired by an architect who had designed, and got planning permission for, a modern house.

  The lane was a nightmare: narrow, with no turning points. It was lethal to tyres, and it didn’t feel remotely like the wide and elegant avenue behind; it felt like the side road to a factory. ‘I like it; it’s edgy,’ I told Joyce.

  Sue Reynolds said the address would be 1 Ivy Grove Lane. That decided it. It was too nice an address to pass up. ‘I want it,’ I said recklessly, oblivious to the first rule of house buying, i.e., don’t look too keen. Charlie hadn’t even seen it. In the sunshine, squinting at the rubble and ferns, I offered the asking price.

  2

  December 1999 was significant for something apart from the birth of Ned, though its impact was obscured for a bit by sleeplessness and the hazy cocoon of the babymoon. Earlier that year, Charlie had published a book called Living on Thin Air, which attempted to explain the growth of the knowledge economy (fewer people working in manufacturing; more and more of us spending our time juggling bits of information). The book was pretty philosophical in spirit, and about all sorts of things, including the importance of creating equitable social structures to cope with a new economic order. But its appearance coincided with the dotcoms boom, and it was taken up by some internet entrepreneurs as a sort of bible for the bubble.

  A firm of venture capitalists specializing in investments in new technology approached Charlie to work with them – which was a brave move on their part, since he knew absolutely nothing about either investments or technology.

  As far as the former were concerned, the tattered remnants of his former communism clung on as an almost principled lack of interest in ways of making money from money (as opposed to from work, to which he wasn’t opposed at all). We had a house, of course, carelessly accumulating capital, but we needed that to live in, so it didn’t count. Certainly, he wouldn’t have contemplated applying for any of the handouts disguised as share issues created by Thatcherite privatizations. And although he has worked for the Financial Times – where he’d been industrial editor, head of the Tokyo Bureau and features editor – and now writes books that are perceived as being about business, he is frankly uninterested in capitalism as a personal venture and probably, at some level, finds the notion obscurely distasteful. For our first wedding anniversary, I mischievously, and I thought rather subversively, bought him a B-class share in Warren Buffett’s investment company, mainly because I’d recently been to interview Buffett in Omaha and thought he was clever. Charlie was polite about this present, but that’s all. I think I can honestly say that he has never shown the slightest interest in the performance of this share and always throws away the letters that come about it unopened.

  But the fact that Atlas Venture thought he was insightful and brilliant counted in their favour, and Charlie negotiated a one-day-a-week contract, which left him the rest of the week to do other things.

  By May 2000, when I first took Charlie to see the land, the day after I’d seen it myself, the benefits of this slug of money from Atlas hitting the joint account every month were beginning to tell. The telling took the form of a general sense of there being some slack; of not waking up in the night rearranging figures in our heads in an effort to make them come out less frighteningly. We were already better off than we’d been when we started house-hunting six months earlier, and that gave us the confidence to believe that we could borrow enough to build, even after paying as much for the land as we’d originally intended to pay for a house that was already standing. Quite where the money would come from wasn’t clear: someone, presumably, would lend it to us. I had a recollection that Kevin had confidently asserted in the course of one of his programmes that a main contractor’s quote of £60 a square metre was reasonable. This meant that a 2,500-square-metre house (I had no idea how big this was, but it sounded pretty large) would cost only £150,000 to build. In some parts of London, people think that’s cheap for a conservatory.

  The Elektra House in Stepney, which was then in the process of construction and has subsequently been shortlisted for all sorts of architecture prizes, was completed for a grand total of £70,000; the brief stipulated that it should be no more expensive, metre for metre, than a standard Barratt home. More than one couple on Grand Designs had built their own houses because they couldn’t afford any that were already standing.

  Plus – the reasons to pursue this were positively piling up – there was the business of not having to pay VAT on n
ew build. So we ignored the fact that the only people we’d ever met who actually had built their own house were richer than us: richer, in fact, than we could ever imagine being. Their – presumably very expensive – house was perched on a cliff overlooking the sea and featured a glass dining-room wall that dropped down into the cliff, so that you could eat inside while feeling you were outside, floating over the water. We’d visited once or twice, when we were staying in bed and breakfasts nearby, and I’d driven away awed by the idea of being able to build something so fabulous, so individual and apparently enduring. Now I casually elided that house with the £100,000 houses off Grand Designs and assumed that we could have something similar.

  Immediately Charlie had seen the land and agreed with me that we should go for it, we approached Lloyds Bank. This seemed the obvious thing to do: they’d arranged our current mortgage and Charlie had banked there since he was at university. We thought, naively, that this might count for something; but if there ever was a time when bank managers knew their clients, when they made decisions influenced by the duration and stability of relationships, that time is long gone. For most people, the non-fantastically rich, banking decisions are a matter of rules, not individual judgements. If you can get past the automated telephone systems with their multiple choices designed to encourage you to give up, the human beings you encounter are all reading from scripts. Pathetically grateful to have got through to a person, you accept that it would be asking too much to expect them to know anything about you.

  The rules according to which Lloyds ran their business didn’t permit lending money to individuals for the purpose of buying land. The best they could offer us was an extension of the mortgage in Hackney, so that we could withdraw some capital.

  A friend of a friend suggested that we should approach a mortgage broker, who might have more options. She recommended someone she knew. I called this man, Peter, and he listened to my gabbled account of how much we earned and what we wanted to do, said it sounded reasonable enough, and promised to talk to his contacts. In the meantime, he urged us to prepare our accounts, because we’d need to prove we were really earning the money that we claimed. I am a person who instinctively hides bills underneath piles of newspapers in the hope someone else will accidentally throw them away and I can forget they ever arrived. It is almost a point of principle not to send in my accounts until my accountant has threatened to fire me. But on this occasion, I took the Nurofen upfront and got down on the floor with the till receipts.

  By now, though, someone else had seen the land and offered even more than the already hefty asking price: £525,000. We raised our bid to £550,000 – still without actually having any money – but emphasized that this was absolutely as high as we could go. Then we were told there would be sealed bids, due by noon the following Tuesday.

  But hey, conversations with Peter were always upbeat. At different hours on different succeeding days, he mentioned (always with the same levels of excitement) negotiations with Northern Rock, the Halifax and Barclays. Then Barclays got mentioned again. And again and again. He was bowling us along with his enthusiasm for the deal, glissading over the details. We consented to be bowled, aware that we were all in the business of boosting each other’s confidence. This was a high-wire act and looking down could be dangerous. Anyway, no need to worry, because the deal Peter had cooked up was great, great, and only dependent on the production of our accounts and the planning permission.

  The accounts. Still suffering from a headache, I drove through the heavy traffic that was clogging the early summer air with pollution, carrying boxes of till receipts, remittance advices and bank statements – now roughly sorted and vaguely understood – to our accountant in Finchley. I staggered into her office through the fumes that were masking the other summer smells of mown grass and blown roses, dumped the unwieldy pile on her desk and pleaded with her to make sense of it in three days.

  That, then, left only the planning permission. Now and again, I’d mumble incoherently to Charlie something along the lines of did he not think that it might be a problem, this planning permission thing? He had now largely taken over the Peter-discussions, because he could remember numbers whereas I am a kind of numbers-dyslexic, and he swatted these anxieties away. We had planning permission for the two developer’s houses. We knew Islington Council and all the neighbours who had objected last time would look more favourably on a single family house. The land was good for building, therefore was valuable. It could hardly matter to the lender what shape our building would eventually take.

  That weekend, we went up to Yorkshire on a long-planned trip to see Charlie’s parents. They live in the Dales, in a small four-bedroom house in a new cul-de-sac development. The houses are build along traditional lines, i.e. with small windows to resist pre-central heating-era weather, so that, despite having some of the most magnificent views in Britain, you can’t see them. Since there’s no longer much work in the Dales, the villages are now mostly inhabited by old people. Occasionally they back their cars out of their garages a bit too hard across the narrow cul-de-sacs, accidentally into one another’s front rooms.

  We sat in Charlie’s parents’ front room, watching out for senior citizen motorists hitting the wrong pedals on their automatics, and Charlie said he thought we should decide whether we really wanted to do this, to build a house on this bit of land. And the more we thought about it, the more convinced we were that we shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to design a house around our own idiosyncrasies, rather than trying to cram ourselves into some Victorian or Edwardian notion of what a family should be. A house that we designed for ourselves would have no wrong-sized bathrooms, no alcoves you couldn’t see the point of; all the space would work for us instead of competing with us, snagging us, leaving us feeling frustrated.

  Building, rather than buying, would solve all sorts of problems. Henrietta wouldn’t have to occupy a bedroom directly above ours, meaning that every time she played a CD, or even padded about after my bedtime (10.30 p.m., but look, I had a baby), she woke me up. Plus, Charlie and I could both have offices. No more working in the sitting room. All the children could have their own bedrooms. We could have walls of glass and, if they didn’t quite drop into the ground, they’d still be lovely.

  In that case, Charlie said, it was clear that we should pay as much as we could afford. The question was: how much was that? Neither of us was clear. So we sort of thought of a number and doubled it.

  Or Charlie did. I never would have dared. But he said he thought we should bid £650,000. This was, frankly, a ridiculous sum of money. Even given our previous sorry history of competitive tendering, offering £150,000 over the asking price was an extreme gesture. Apart from a tiny fraction that we’d managed to save, mostly since Charlie’s independent career had started to pay, it would all have to be done on borrowed money. (We both conveniently overlooked the fact that, at that stage, nobody had actually come forward offering to lend us any money at all.)

  Charlie has said subsequently that he recognizes now that he was influenced by the six months he’d already spent at Atlas Venture, where people were always doing deals with absurdly large sums of money, as if millions were a minor thing, not scary and likely to end with your serving a prison sentence. He’d become infected with a certain kind of pig-headed entrepreneurialism.

  This is true, I’m sure; but it’s also true that this flash of bravado, this absolute self-belief, was entirely in character. Charlie is in many ways the most unassuming person, modest and restrained; I’ve never seen him boastful or bombastic or belligerent. His brilliance is combined with understatement and grace; he does not, I think, consider being brilliant very important. All the same, he’s capable of fixing on something and believing in himself to a degree that is close to madness. He did this when he met me. I remember us sitting in the sunshine in Gray’s Inn, in the early spring of 1992, a few months after we’d met, and Charlie telling me that he could see in my face what I must have looked like as a l
ittle girl, and how I would appear as an old woman; it was all there, in a flash, illuminated by the early sunshine, which was struggling to be fierce: it was there in my freckles and lines, what I’d been and might be. I knew he was telling me that he loved me, not in spite of my having married someone else and already having two children, but because of it, because that was who I was. And he was also telling me that he would go on loving me when I was old. He could see me as a lined and tired person, not vigorous, and he was promising me that he would feel the same then, too. It was impossible to resist (even if I’d wanted to) such clarity and certainty.

  And this was a bit similar. So, the following Tuesday morning, I took an envelope into the estate agent’s in Islington promising to pay £150,000 more than the asking price for a patch of nettles.

  All this – seeing the land, getting turned down by Lloyds, approaching the mortgage company, asking our solicitor to start a search, preparing our papers so that accounts could be drawn up, and deciding on the size of our tender – took only a week. Charlie, meanwhile, was in the middle of preparations for a trip to America, where Living on Thin Air was being launched at the Chicago Book Fair, and was spending most of his time setting up newspaper and radio interviews in the US. I was dealing with four children, the oldest of whom had just transferred schools for A-levels and started what would become a three-year relationship with her first serious boyfriend, while the youngest was just sitting up and gurgling. I also had a full-time job.

  We were pretty busy – and that, presumably, is why neither of us clarified exactly what sort of planning permission we would need to secure the loan. We found out soon enough. An hour and a half after I’d delivered the tender, Charlie called me: I was at home, he was in the departures lounge at Heathrow, waiting to board his flight to Chicago. He’d just finished a conversation with the mortgage broker, during which Peter had finally come clean, or we’d finally faced up to the truth; whatever, even with all the can-do brio that had been in the air the past week, we couldn’t go on kidding ourselves any longer. Barclays needed planning permission for the house we wanted to build. Having planning permission for two other houses that nobody now had any intention of building wasn’t going to get us any money at all.