Grand Designs' Kevin McCloud: 'We need to place quality at the centre of our lives. Not quantity'

Since Grand Designs first hit screens in 1999, Kevin McCloud has been the best in Britain at doing that thing we all love to do: snoop inside other people’s homes. He’s chronicled the often-arduous journey of building dream mega-homes and been there to marvel at the lavish results when they are completed, describing to viewers the significance of the architecture in awe. 

It’s a far cry from the side of housing that often resides on bigissue.com: banging the drum for more affordable housing for people without a home or calling out the abject horror homes that people on low incomes endure. But McCloud’s three decades looking at homes through an analytical lens has taught him plenty about the UK housing market.

That expertise is funnelled into his new show House of the Year. It’s a run through the projects that will make the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) shortlist to find 2025’s top place to live. McCloud assures us there will be one or two “James Bond villain lairs”, as he dubs them. 

“This year there are a lot of small projects, which I like,” he says. “There’s always one big James Bond villain lair in every series. In previous years we’ve had four, five, six of them and it’s quite hard, because they are such big things, to understand them and tell their story.” 

As Grand Designs has shown over the years, some people yearn to be lord of the manor, some want to push the envelope of what you can do with concrete to create something akin to a bunker. But everyone needs it to feel like home. So how do Kevin McCloud, RIBA and co decide on a single home to define 2025? 

“The thing I bang on about a lot is: vision and ambition are not measured in pounds. They’re not measured in money. They’re measured in intelligence and imagination. 

“Every single project on the long list this year is a building which does something that I’ve never seen before. 

“It might be a really simple treatment for a window or the height of a doorway. It’s a staircase which somebody’s made themselves and is magical. It’s about imagination. 

“People say to me: This won’t go on Grand Designs, it’s not big enough, it’s not expensive enough. I say, you haven’t got it. It’s nothing to do with size or money. It’s important to make buildings relatable.” 

Read more:

• Kevin McCloud: ‘We’ve got the coldest homes in Europe – and cash-strapped families pay the price’
• Grand Designs people are not like the rest of us
• When it comes to Britain’s housing, we need to value the homes we have as much as the ones we build

Kevin McCloud makes even the most extravagant project mean something to the viewer, explaining in enthusiastic tones what it feels like to stand in the building and what sets it apart. 

It’s a task that has changed over time. Advances in drone technology have allowed House of the Year’s production staff to guide viewers through homes with slow, floaty shots.  

While snooping around other people’s homes, McCloud says he takes plenty of inspiration from what he encounters. But it’s the love of design and craftsmanship that leaves the greatest impact, not ideas for what he can do with his kitchen. 

“House of the Year and Grand Designs are both about a design process. They’re about solving problems,” he says. 

“In fact, they’re also about asking questions that nobody else has thought to ask. And that’s the most interesting thing about design: it solves problems we haven’t even thought of and it can do so in elaborate ways or it can do them really cheaply. 

“What happens when you walk into a place that is thought about like this with care and consideration is that you feel different, you feel inspired, your soul feels lifted in some way. 

“There’s a lovely quote from Louis Kahn, who was a great American architect: ‘Even a common, ordinary brick wants to be something more than it is.’ It’s the idea that even a brick has a soul. It has a desire, which is sort of not true but what it represents is that every component of the building, in the hands of skilled people, good craftspeople and makers and designers, is trying to be something more than the sum of its parts.” 

Housing on TV is often aspirational. It’s Phil and Kirsty helping the millionaire couple overcome their never-ending search for a home without the dreaded minor road noise. It’s Homes Under the Hammer following a renovation that will help a landlord squeeze a few extra quid a month out of tenants. 

It’s not really reflective of the housing market as many of us live it: overpriced, unaffordable and in poor quality. Kevin McCloud, of course, knows this and he knows Big Issue is keen to ask him about it. He’s come prepared. So what does he think about efforts to make the housing market work for more than just the mega-rich? He’s got little faith in the government’s 1.5 million home target, that’s for sure, as he launches into a takedown lasting several minutes. 

“It’s because we have a political culture which is all about numbers,” he says. “So you’ll know that last year, it was Rachel Reeves who announced the government’s housing targets. It wasn’t the housing minister. 

“It was somebody whose job it is to wrangle numbers. And I think there are a few simple, very basic facts here which elude all politicians and a lot of people in the media. One of them is that the government is focusing entirely on numbers and on targets.” 

Ruling by spreadsheet has long been a criticism levelled at the government, even when its ideas on housing have been more warmly received than its handling of other areas (see benefits and immigration). But McCloud argues that expecting commercial housebuilders to ramp up housebuilding is doomed to fail as it is not in their financial interests. 

He describes the current housing status quo as “corrupt, craven and dysfunctional”. 

“Until government understands that nobody is interested in delivering against targets, government can’t and won’t change its objectives. My frustration here is that we’re never going to see the numbers. 

“This model is hugely powerful because it uses very ancient principles of capitalism and uses them extremely well to play the system of balance sheets and profit and loss for the benefits of investors, and the government ought to be doing something else entirely. 

“This is the case in other countries. Countries like Sweden, for example. When we talk about social housing, we should be using the q-word: quality. Our targets should be all about performance. What we’ve seen is, over the last 20 years, a removal of that ambition.” 

McCloud is far from alone in being concerned about the quality of Britain’s homes. The Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017 put the issue front and centre – as well as social justice issues surrounding it – and the ensuing building safety crisis rumbles on with no sign of an end. 

“My argument is, I suppose, if you demand quality, you get better thinking, you get more architecture, you get better solutions, you get better performance, you get happier people, you get a more integrated society,” he says. 

“You get a more equitable society, where people of all tenure types, all backgrounds, all categories, all socio-economic groups, feel better for living in that place. And nobody ever talks about this. 

“We need to place quality at the centre of our lives, not quantity. This applies to so many experiences in life, doesn’t it? It applies to having one good wristwatch rather than five crap ones or one good pair of shoes.” 

RIBA and Kevin McCloud’s House of the Year will look to settle on the dwelling that defines a nation. 

Whether we can all relate to the winner no matter our housing situation is a personal quest for McCloud. 

“The only reason I have done this for 28 years is to try and change things like government policy and change the open market housing offer and to raise people’s ambitions. And frankly, it looks to me like I’ve got a lot more work to do there.” 

House of the Year begins on Channel 4 tonight (19 November) at 8pm.

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