News and Features
Kevin McCloud On the fit between eco architecture and sustainable food and why Somerset is such a good place to live
Kevin McCloud is probably most famous for Grand Designs, but his latest project, The Triangle is also attracting considerable media attention. The Triangle is a residential development on the site of the former caravan storage area in Swindon, by Hab Oakus, a joint venture between Kevin’s company, Hab and the housing group Green Square. The designs follow Hab Oakus’s fundamental principles – a strong sense of community, a belief in the importance of public space, respect for cyclists and pedestrians, and a commitment to sustainable lifestyles and outstanding contextual design. Where do you see the fit between eco architecture and sustainable food? Historically our lives have become subject to increased specialisation, over the past 100 years increasingly. Architecture is one discipline, food is another, street lighting another, card esign another etc. The interesting thing about sustainability is it brings it all back together and it’s philosophy reaches into every part of our lives. It’s about trying to reconnect with values that previous generations had which have now become remote from us. Tell us about the role of food in The Triangle? One of the big words we use a great deal is ‘sharing’. One of the most important things that encourages people to share food is to grow your own so we have community allotments we call kitchen gardens and community recycling facilties, giving the opportunity to grow their own food. We’ll have a polytunnel for communal use too. Our landscape architect is Luke Engleback, from Studio Engleback who is utterly, utterly brilliant. What Luke is doing in line with our philosophy is introducing an orchard, edible hedgerows, edible plants. There will be hawthorn leaves in spring, berries in Autumn, elder flowers and elderberries. We will look at the creation of every component in scheme in terms of how it will maximise biodiversity and self-sustaining food production. The sharing element comes in where for example one person makes elderflower cordial, another says “I can’t be bothered I’m going to sit in the sun”, but he might be growing courgettes, and they may exchange cordial for courgettes. It encourages community cohesion. I live in a village, that’s how it works here, we’re not doing anything new, we’re doing what people have been doing for centuries and still do in other cultures and did before war in Britain. What’s different is that we are trying to put it all together in one place in the 21st century in middle of a town. We are very used to sharing certain things in our society; we’re used to sharing information on the internet, we’re used to sharing library books, libraries do a fantastic sustainability service – we would have to buy all those books and they’d sit on shelves unused. So we have the principle of sharing existing in our society, we’re just not used to sharing lawnmowers, cars or even food. Another thing we are putting into our scheme is a car share club. We’ll have a community intranet, where for example if someone is going to Marlborough, they can put up a notice saying “I’m going to Marlborough for 3 hours on Saturday morning, would anyone like to come and share petrol”. They can also share real time arrival of buses. The fit between my ideals and those of www.somersetfood.org is to do with trying to reconnect with values that previous generations had which have now become remote from us. Patrick Holden, who runs the Soil Association, is coming to talk to us. We are thinking about setting up a Swindon Food Summit, my vision for Swindon, which could be applied to anywhere really, is to set up a distribution system, a mini version of what Tesco do – they buy food from all over, ship to one distribution depot and then send it out again to all the shops. This would be such a wonderful thing for the Farm Shop movement, a network of farm shops, bring in food from say a 30 mile radius to a central depot and deliver it to all those shops, so that each can have a good range. There are rural examples, but we want to do it in an urban environment. Patrick is keen on working with us, I think we have a real opportunity to start this Autumn. What are your favourite food buildings in Somerset? I love Carymoor Environmental Centre, where I am the patron. It’s on the site of Dimmer dump, three miles from Castle Cary and is an educational centre covering environmental issues such as biodiversity, which obviously has a strong food connection. They run a programme of seasonally themed open mornings, with a mixture of walks, talks and family friendly all-weather activities. The next one is Sustainable Christmas on Dec 5th. Another great building that I went to recently is owned by a friend of mine, Roger Saul, who started Mulberry. I am gluten intolerant and I like spelt. Roger produces organically grown, locally produced spelt. He showed me his amazing new mill, it’s a beautiful timber building, all covered in Douglas Fir. To find an industrial building, built in a vernacular style, with an agricultural purpose is to me such an expression confidence. It was wonderful to see, it lifted the spirits! Roger’s no longer in fashion, he’s in spelt, he’s obsessed by it, it’s great! [Spelt is a distant cousin of wheat with a deep nut like flavour and can be used in all the same ways as wheat, so it is very versatile – we hope to run a full feature on Sharpham Park Spelt soon]. Why do you think we should shop locally? Tristram Stuart who wrote the book Waste, says we could be recycling one third of the world’s food production and that we should be using that to feed the world’s people and to feed animals. One of the best ways to cut our environmental impact is to look at food, food production and food transport and buying local food locally immediately cuts that in several ways. It cuts it by reducing food miles and also importantly reduces the waste through the de-industrialisation of food. Simply, if a person goes and buys some local pork from a local supplier he’ll probably eat it all; you won’t look at the sell-by-date on the plastic cellophane wrapper because it hasn’t got a plastic cellophane wrapper, you’ll talk to the producer and he’ll tell you about how to look after their meat and cook it, the best way to cook it and if you say I don’t want quite that much, he’ll cut a piece off or find a smaller piece. It’s like in the 1950’s when you’d walk into the local butcher and say I want 3 sausages, not 4 and you’d get 3. If you go to the supermarket you have to buy 8 or even 10. So I think shopping locally saves waste, is good for local economy, good for foodmiles and you’ll probably get a better product. As you sit around the table you’ll get tremendous satisfaction from knowing that you’re eating food from the land on which you live. You have an orchard don’t you? Yes, we planted it ourselves in 1996 with help of a grant from Mendip District Council. We have about 80 trees and a nuttery as well, for biodiversity as much as anything else. I’ve got about 30 varieties of apples, all of them traditional, all standard Somerset varieties. Things like Golden Knob and Sops in Wine. We have Tom Putt, a traditional cider variety widely used until 1900’s and Beauty of Bath, a sharp, but sweet eater with red speckles. My favourite has a very unglamorous name - Improved Lambrook Pippin. It’s very versatile and can be used for cooking, eating and cider. We have 4 trees and should plant more, it is disease resistant, suits our altitude and is extremely hardy. It’s not a huge apple, and is beautiful to look at; yellow with splashes of magenta, and deep red on bottom. We’ve got a barn where we make the cider, we produce about 50 gallons. I’ve never been to a cider house, I’m always too busy making! But I’d like to go to Sheppy’s, where they make Bullfinch cider, which I love. I like sparkling cider. Ours is sparkling and clear, by process of filtration and lots of waiting. I also love Brothers range of pear ciders made in Shepton Mallet, by the family who started Showerings, who are of course really passionate about cider and made Babycham, the original perry. What is your kitchen like, and do you have any tips on kitchen design? We are big foodies at home, our kitchen is arranged very, very simply, it’s that magic triangle, larder (or fridge), sink and cooker. It’s one or at most two paces from any one of those to the other. In fact the ancillary services, for food preparation, storage, crockery etc don’t need to be in that space. I’ve always been struck at how professional chefs need very small kitchens. You don’t need a large kitchen, but what you do need to do is keep those things really close to each other. I mention larder because increasingly in Grand Designs we have people who are putting in larders, rooms which have an air brick to the outside, rooms which are insulated from the rest of the house, and which have an insulated door, so they’re rooms which are much cooler, people keep meat butter and vegetables and as a result they have tiny fridges, I’m not a big fan of these stupid walk in American fridges! At home we have a very small fridge. If limited for space would you recommend a dining room or an eat-in kitchen? I’d always go for an eat-in kitchen rather than dining room, the way we live now is more relaxed, can eat and talk while cooking. We used to have a room in our house which we used to keep as a dining room which was a good few paces from our kitchen, but it didn’t do anything, it’s now our pink sitting room! I once did a terraced house for a client where we knocked through the sitting room and the dining room into one big room, made it a kitchen, put a sofa in it and a telly; it was all in there, in one big room. Then the room that used to be the kitchen, at the back of the house, we turned into a sittng room, it had no TV in it and it was lovely because it overlooked the garden and was a room for contemplation. Who cooks at home and what do you like to eat? I don’t do the cooking, I’m not very good. I love eating, my wife is a brilliant cook, her specialities are traditional Italian dishes like Tuscan soups and things. She’s good at making food go a long way using ordinary ingredients, so we don’t eat exotically but we eat good food. We’ve got a small farm, with sheep in a field, they’re not our sheep, but we trade rent for meat, so we always have lamb. We grow a lot of vegetables as well. Today for lunch we had eggs from the farm shop down the road with chips from own spuds, apple crumble from apples in our own orchard. So much of what we eat comes from directly where we are. I am not very good on lactose, I’m good on goats’ cheeses and sheep’s cheese – the press got this completely wrong! I’m a big fan of Yeo Valley yoghurt and also of Brown Cow; they produce extraordinarily high quality meat and dairy products. We’re spoilt in Somerset, with s cheeses from all kinds of small makers– you’ve got plenty of choice. What foods typify Somerset for you? Obviously cider and cheese, they are impossible to get away from. I jokingly say we should be fighting for a DOC [Denominazione Di Origine Controllata, a labelling system that protects regionally controlled cheeses, e.g. Parmesan Reggiano] for cheddar cheese. Waitrose offer Scottish and Canadian cheddar, it’s ridiculous, people are surpised to learn cheddar is actually a place! I’m also a big fan of lamb, sheep are our traditional grazers, high quality lamb and mutton is something we should eat more of. In Somerset we are blessed with so many small village and farm shops, it’s a good place to live for food and share the enthusiasm of the producers. When you meet these people it’s hard not to be infected by their enthusiasm. There is an Increasing market for real food, it’s so exciting. What is the worst food you’ve had to eat when filming Grand Designs? I was with a couple in Devon, who send their children to Steiner school, grow all their own veg and are super eco. A runner went off and came back with carrier bag full of garage sandwiches and 3 large bottles of sunny delight! To top it off he bought 40 Marlboro for himself, that was his lunch! And the best? The best food I’ve had on Grand Designs would be at Kelly Neville’s hexagonal eco house in East Anglia, eating the berries we picked in the afternoon, with vegetables from their biodynamic garden in recipes using fennel and nettles that we’d picked that day. That was unbelievable because it was about a transformation of seemingly apparently inedible items made into glorious food. I had, for the first time, tempura fritters made from comfrey the prickly, hairy, horrible thing! They were sliced into big fat slices about an inch thick, dipped in batter and fried. Where do you shop and eat out, have you any recommendations for us? We buy from Mells Village Shop and the Co-op at Coleford. We use a farm shop just outside Frome. We don’t travel very far to eat, I don’t like drinking and not being able to drive or driving and not being able to drink. Café La Strada in Frome, is my favourite café in the world because the coffee is so good. There’s a new restaurant at the Grange at Whatley, with good, locally sourced food. We occasionally use Charlton House too. My real find is a restaurant called At The Chapel, Bruton, run by friends, they were friends before they opened the restaurant. It’s great to mix business with pleasure, actually pleasure with pleasure because we’re seeing our good friends and eating great food! The food is just sublime. Matthew Norman from The guardian gave it 9 out of 10. I also really enjoy The Old Spot in Wells. Finally, what do you think Somerset could do better? I spent a morning with a family who make organic parmesan. If you turn up at farm in Somerset, or elsewhere in the UK, with a film crew, there’d be the farmer and his wife and that would be it. You’d see the product and maybe watch it being shipped off. What we had there was 3 members of the Co-operative Council representing the area, who do nothing but look after 250 parmesan makers. They realise the asset they’ve got, they have this co-operative to which they all belong which employs people to do all the PR and the marketing, they look after the press when they come, they make sure the world knows how great proper organic parmesan is and they look after the interest of the small organic farmers. What we need is a county or region wide co-operative body here, which would look after the interests of the small growers. They should just look after cider, or just look after Cheddar cheese or lamb. It’s got everything to do with pride in product and making sure that retailers and customers are aware of the importance of the original provenance. It’s a crying shame we don’t have that. Thanks so much for talking to us Kevin All power and all strength to you! I’ll get onto the website!
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