‘Ours was inspired by the Empire State Building!' The chaotic brilliance of the UK's biggest self-build town

The Guardian

21-04-2025

What would the world look like if Kevin McCloud had his way? What if each of us had the chance to build our very own Grand Design, letting our streets be lined with personal visions, liberated from the identikit brick boxes offered by the usual big housebuilders?
A glimpse of this world exists, sort of, on the outskirts of Bicester in Oxfordshire, where the country's biggest self-build experiment has been under way for the last 10 years. Graven Hill is a place where rooftops tilt, zigzag and bulge, where windows come in circles, squares and triangles, or poke out from unexpected places. There are balconies fashioned from glass, steel and rustic timber clinging to facades of stone, brick, wood and render, along with every type of fibre-cement board available. Wandering the freshly tarmaced streets feels like walking through a building supplies catalogue. Panels of fake wood are proudly fixed next to rusted cor-ten steel and bits of slate, as if residents were fed fizzy drinks and let loose in a cladding warehouse.
There are low-slung bungalows and houses that want to be towers. Beachy timber chalets sit alongside neo-Georgian brick townhouses while puffed-up, porticoed piles stand next to angular metallic concoctions. There's even a stripy blue house with a gigantic giraffe parked outside. Why choose one style when you can have them all?
'It took us a long time to find an architect who didn't laugh when we said we wanted turrets,' says Frevisse Dearsley-Hitchcock. Her and her husband Giles's home, designed by the accommodating local practice LAPD, is one of the most striking of the lot. It stands as a bright blue New England-style house with (fibre-cement) clapboard walls flanked by two octagonal turrets, one each for their children. They are crowned with bright teal cupolas topped with weathervanes ('Tabatha chose a unicorn; Barnaby wanted a penguin reading a book'), while the eaves are punctuated by porthole windows and cutout stars. 'We've heard local kids say that a Disney princess lives here,' says Frevisse. 'I think I disappointed them one day when I came out in my hi-vis and boots.'
Their dream princess castle has been a long time coming. The couple acquired the plot in 2018 for £260,000, drawn to the fact that sites at Graven Hill come with outline planning permission and, for this particular plot, 'no limits on what we could do'. There were limits, however, on what their builders were capable of. Having lived in the US for years, the couple wanted features such as a basement, a laundry chute and pocket doors that slide back into the walls, none of which proved easy to realise.
'The concrete basement was still wonky when we had to sign it off,' says Frevisse. 'When the timber framer arrived, he didn't know where to begin. We'd already spent £400,000 in the ground before we even began the house.' Seven years later, it's still not finished, but they hope to move in by the end of the year – at a total cost of double what they planned. 'Hindsight is a wonderful thing,' says Giles. You can picture Kevin McCloud's gleefully furrowed brow.
Graven Hill may sound like a Channel 4-funded reality experiment, but this radical neighbourhood is actually the brave venture of Cherwell district council. Inspired by the famous self-built suburb of Almere in the Netherlands, the local authority bought the 188 hectare site from the MoD in 2014 and set up a council-owned development company to manage the process.
Glenn Howells Architects drew up a master plan featuring 11 different character areas, ranging from 'tree-lined boulevards' to 'urban lanes', with detailed 'plot passports' prescribing building heights and material palettes. More or less freedom would be granted depending on the character area, in an attempt to avoid total anarchy – although, in reality, these different zones are indiscernible in the resulting hodgepodge. To get things going, the first plots were released to 10 'pioneer' residents at a knockdown price of £100,000 each, with the agreement that their trials and tribulations would be broadcast in a special series of Grand Designs: The Streets.
'The whole thing just sounded amazing,' says Lynn Pratt, one of the pioneer residents, who moved here from a rural cottage in Northamptonshire, attracted to the idea of being part of a neighbourly community with nearby amenities and a bus stop. Her 'Pangolin' house, designed by local architect Adrian James, features scaly tiles that wrap around a big oast house-inspired roof. 'It was billed as 'a development like no other',' Pratt recalls, 'with all the houses to be high-spec, low-energy and forward-thinking, with no big developers allowed. They said they wanted a wide demographic, with a variety of ages and incomes, so it wasn't just fancy dream homes. I built my whole house for about £350,000, including the land.'
In Pratt and her neighbours' eyes, the built reality has now strayed from that original vision. The 2,000 homes were intended to be a mix of self-build and 'custom build', where owners could personalise elements, but the latter have often veered towards the usual cookie-cutter housebuilder fare. There are now plenty of bog standard brick houses, with some grey cladding stuck on to give a half-hearted 'custom' air.
'I don't know if it was Brexit or Covid,' says Pratt, 'but suddenly things changed. I know costs have gone up, but the vision now feels very different. There's very little self-build now – they've priced most people out.' She is also still waiting for the grocery shop and bus stop to arrive, while the pioneer homes remain cut off, stranded from the rest of the development across a field.
Another major bone of contention has been the affordable housing. Graven Hill is required to provide 30% such homes, but many feel they have been designed in a way that has created an 'us and them' division between self-builders and renters. The housing association properties stand as incongruous rows of long brick terraces, as if airlifted here from a 1980s council estate.
'It's the weakest part of the whole development,' says John McCormack, a retired architect and fellow pioneer resident, who used to work in housing. 'All of the different tenures were supposed to be integrated, but it's ended up feeling like a series of ghettoes. Good design doesn't have to cost more, but the design quality of the affordable housing is almost zero.'
Residents of some of the shared ownership homes have complained of black mould and freezing rooms, arguing that their properties don't live up to their eco claims (Graven Hill says tests carried out met environmental performance standards). There have also been grumblings about the lack of promised amenities. Despite 600 homes now being occupied, there is still no mini supermarket or community centre, and the planned pub looks unlikely to materialise.
'We have faced significant challenges,' says Adrian Unitt, managing director of the Graven Hill Village Development Company. 'You can build a shop unit, but getting someone to lease it is a different story.' He is standing in the sales suite of what is known as the 'village centre', which turns out to be an apartment block clad in the trademark busy variety of materials, with a coffee shop, wine bar and dentist on the ground floor.
Across the road stands a primary school designed by Architype architects, crowned with clunky rooftop railings that make it look like the scaffolding has been left up. A site nearby, formerly earmarked for a health centre, will now become a care home, after the GP provider pulled out, while residents are still awaiting a community centre where they can hold parties and events.
What does Unitt make of the criticisms that Graven Hill has drifted from its original vision? 'It's a very difficult model to make stack up,' he says. 'If I'm selling the land, with foundations and services, I'm getting about a third of the income that a usual developer would get. But I'm still delivering all the roads, the amenities, and the Section 106 affordable housing obligations.'
It's also very slow. If it stuck to the self-build route, the company has said, the development wouldn't be completed until 2050. Compounding the issue, says Unitt, is ongoing damage caused by the fact that the neighbourhood is a permanent building site, with plot owners each building to their own schedules. The council asked for the infrastructure and amenities to be built first, but Unitt estimates the company has spent more than £2m rectifying kerbs, green space and play areas that have been damaged by construction crews, and 'trashed by people parking all over the place'.
Parking is one of the things, along with where to keep the bins, that it is hoped will be improved in the next phase of the masterplan, currently being reworked by consultants Lambert Smith Hampton, after an outcry from residents over claims of increased density and lack of green space. Unitt says there will be 'more rigidity' in the design code, after feedback from the council, but residents fear a slide towards business-as-usual after sites that were once allocated for self-builders are now being built by the developer, due to apparent lack of demand. Looking at the plans, there is no indication of how many self-build plots there will be in the next phase.
By any standards, Graven Hill is a chaotic jumble. Homes are scattered with abandon, designed with little concern for making a coherent place, or how they meet the street, with stretches of wall, fence, hedge and tarmac pasted at will, and parking all over the place. But it has its curious charms. It is a very English vision of individual ambition. Of people's determination to build their own little castles, despite the expense and trauma of it all. And of how some people, given freedom, will actually opt to build something quite conventional.
'To be honest, I don't know if I would recommend self-build,' says Frevisse Dearsley-Hitchcock. 'Other people have had a smoother ride than us, but you've got to be in it for the long haul.' Still, they've had plenty of fun along the way. Most recently, Giles has been busy fitting LED striplights to their blue house's gables. 'We were inspired by the Empire State Building in New York,' he says. 'It's lit up with different colours every night!'