The More We Are Together Omnibus

Archive programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Janet Street-Porter has selected

programmes about post-war architecture.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

MUSIC PLAYS

This is a film about houses, about the kind of suburban houses

that many of us live in, and it's about the man who designs them.

It's the portrait of an architect in the context of his work

and the work is seen from three angles,

three elevations, if you like.

These viewpoints comment upon each other

and provide the counterpoint of the film.

There's the inside, the residents' angle,

the view of the people who live in the houses.

MAN: ..be related to your own personality can be exaggerated.

I mean, I don't feel that my own personality or freedom

is diminished by any control on the external appearance of my house.

And If I thought that it was dependent on such a thing,

I'd think my own individuality was pretty weak.

I mean, we must have exhausted the number of smug bastards

there are in London...

NARRATOR: There's the view of a writer and critic.

This is Ian Nairn.

And principally, of course, there's the architect's own viewpoint,

his own feelings about what he's trying to do.

First, then, the subject.

Eric Lyons. Now in his middle 50s.

Behind him, work in architecture and industrial design.

In front of him, two enormous projects -

a commuter village in Kent and an urban complex in Chelsea.

His main achievement so far - a radical alteration in the concepts

and the look of suburban housing.

Lyons' most personal work has been done in an area

rarely touched by major architects -

the area of private speculative building.

In conjunction with the development firm Span,

he's attempted to bring new standards to the business of suburban housing.

His schemes are characterised by their imaginative formal design,

by the use of landscape and, perhaps most of all,

by the way in which they make a virtue out of a necessity.

Britain is an overcrowded island. We all live close to one another.

Lyons' idea of suburban living

is that we should accept this fact

and make the most of it, not ignore it.

In fact, the more we are together

and the more we recognise we are together, the happier we shall be.

Over the years I've found myself more and more...interested in...

you know, the suburban idea, if you like.

Not for a lot of suburban values, but the potential in suburban life.

Maybe because I'm a product.

MUSIC PLAYS

I personally feel that one ought to try and identify the limits that

you can really go to in packing buildings onto the ground

without going up.

And I believe that a lot of architects' obsession at the moment

with doing this and achieving privacy,

which they believe is number-one human need,

and I question very much -

it's one human need but it isn't number one in my view.

And so that, you know,

the buildings that are produced have certainly the privacy of a jail.

They... But they don't have any more social content

or any kind of...um...

opportunities for contact with people in the more casual way.

As far as I'm concerned, we've always tried

and probably erred on the other side of exposing people too much.

But we're learning more. We...

I think we're more sensitive to some of the problems

and the need for compromise on this business of being able to see out

and yet to be able to hide when you want to hide.

I think it's the option that you want to build in.

And, in fact, option is the clue to what housing should be about.

To me, it's one of the clue words, you know,

that people should be able to make

an act of choice in their housing,

that they should opt out of being a matey neighbour

if they don't want to be.

And they can opt in on, you know, gregarious activities

when they want to, and this is what life's all about.

People should be able to choose...

not choose once and for all, they should be able to vary their choice.

And now the alternative - not the alternative, the opposite -

is, of course, the detached house in the suburbs

where the land is freehold

and "every man's home is his castle" myth perpetuated,

and the pretence that there's no-one living next door at all for miles.

And actually the other chap is only three feet away.

This manifestly doesn't work

and directly you start recognising

that you're building houses together anyhow,

the sensible thing is to design them in group terms.

This is where it all started, Parkleys at Ham Common.

I remember the estate going up 12 years ago.

I remember the delight that, for the first time,

modern architecture seemed to be something that could actually happen

on the ground,

not just be a bit of exhibition design.

But here for the first time there was someone who really seemed to

enjoy his architecture

and provide an environment that people would really like to be in.

The biggest thing about Lyons is that he has a superb visual imagination.

I'd only think of two or three other architects in the whole country

whose sensibility I would trust.

You can see it here clearly enough in the sequence of dissolving courts.

It's a masterly...play

where you suddenly go out of one place into another.

There's always something around the corner.

It's not all laid out statically.

You can see it in the landscaping and...

Lyons' landscaping and buildings are all part of one thing.

Again, before this happened,

we just didn't think that it could happen in England.

And...he had so much fun with his material. This tile hanging.

which was the...

I think the first attempt after the war,

except for one or two tiny private houses, to revive it.

The coloured panels, the little balconies.

All these have been done elsewhere and done badly,

but here and in most of the other schemes, all the...

what you might call the fancy tricks have come off.

He's a natural fancy designer, and that's a very rare thing.

No house is an island and you can't pretend there isn't one next door.

And while it didn't matter at all where houses were widely scattered,

if this chap painted his house red, white and blue stripes,

or did it gothic, and this one something else,

it didn't matter.

In fact, it was rather fascinating,

because space between the houses,

was large enough to carry, you know, forest trees and so on.

But once the buildings come together

you can't just pretend that there isn't a relationship.

There is a real relationship.

And we don't seek to make things uniform.

It's a peculiar 20th-century idea that your house has to represent you.

And as far as ordinary men are concerned,

it never has occurred in history before. It's a novel notion.

And I don't... And I think it's been rather unfortunate.

People often say Eric Lyons is a pretty-pretty architect.

Well, the cedars here at this estate in Templemere

in Weybridge disprove that

because they are something like three times the height of the houses.

They were part of the original landscape,

and he's had the, yeah, genius

to really get hold of it, seize them, make a grand gesture here.

This man, in many ways, combines the decorative knack of a Nash

and the landscape knack of a Repton.

Pretty high words, but I think it's justified.

LYONS: We seek to,

and I've attempted even on our Templemere scheme at Weybridge,

to create a purposefully fragmented

and differential appearance on the general collection of small houses.

But my idea there was to try and get a larger scale

by obscuring the small elements.

Because of the complication that I've achieved by recession and movement

to get a larger scale,

it does make the space have a lot of elegance that it wouldn't have had.

It means that things like the big cedar trees can have their own scale

and don't look as though they're dwarfing little houses,

and so there is a relationship between all the parts.

But what does worry me at Templemere is this uneasy business.

You know, you don't know, walking as I am

whether it's quite public or quite private. It's a borderline.

It's another of these contradictions,

like the contradiction between urban and suburban.

Because if you are doing something you don't want the neighbours to see,

you're a bit stuck in a place like this.

You can't do it with an open window.

If you close the curtains, they know you're doing it anyway.

MUSIC PLAYS

Well...

I'm for planning.

Um, and I suppose you are for planning.

But I don't suppose either of us have seen much of it.

NARRATOR: Mullioned windows, stockbroker Tudor gables,

all the paraphernalia of conventional, tasteful suburbia.

This is the context in which Lyons' work has to exist,

and it's hardly surprising if he doubts the standards

and the qualifications of the planners who preside over this mess.

Most of them live in houses.

Er, and therefore they regard themselves as experts on houses.

They do know something about them.

And when it comes to putting up a scheme for a crematorium,

they're a bit out of their depth, and other kinds of specialised buildings.

But houses, that's something they know all about,

so everybody can have a bash,

and what they really want the house to look like is Aunt Fanny's

and, or, you know, the new one that's coming,

or what goes on in the Ideal Home, and so on.

Many of Lyons's schemes have run foul of the planning authorities,

and it's often taken years to win approval to even begin building.

The opposition of the planners is curious,

for Lyons is much more of a traditionalist than a revolutionary.

His estates specialise in curving lines

and landscaping.

These are ideas which derive directly

from the 18th-century tradition of town building.

The serpentine motifs of Lyons' work have their counterpart

in the rhythm and elegance of the crescents of Bath.

And it's possible to see in the layout of his Templemere scheme

a kind of visual variation on that masterpiece

of 18th-century architecture, The Paragon at Blackheath.

But even here Lyons had his problems.

LYONS: Because the building had as a general context

a number of 18th-century buildings nearby -

this is on Blackheath on the heath itself -

the LCC redesigned the building in Georgian style for me,

and not a very good pastiche at that.

If I had to do a Georgian building, you know,

a phoney one, I could have done a bit better, but they did it.

And we had an appeal against that.

And, of course, the amusing thing about it all is that

when you have these appeals and you have all this anguish

and enormous effort and money, at the end of it all -

and it all takes a year or two years or whatever -

and then eventually someone sends you a letter

and you fire the gun and say, "Yes, we can build this damn thing,"

well, very often you think,

"Well, I wish I could start again designing anyhow,

"not for their reasons, but for my own reasons."

But anyhow you go on and you get the building built.

And then one day a chap comes along and gives you a medal, you see.

The Ministry distributed medals in large numbers on our shoulders here.

And it's marvellous to have, from the same ministry, you know,

refusals and medals. It's a fascinating experience.

They come out of different doors, of course.

NARRATOR: The design of housing is a creative activity

and Lyons believes that this creative activity is hampered

by slide-rule dictation from the town hall.

This dictation is based on false abstractions, like density,

how many people can be housed to the acre.

Rigid rules grind down the originality

and the imagination of the architect.

The worst densities of all, of course,

are things like four houses to the acre,

which is a favourite Esher number, and a few other places as well,

I suppose, though there's no place like Esher.

This is a place that I have actually refused to build in all the years.

I've done my best not to build in Esher.

This is where I pay my rates, of course.

MUSIC PLAYS

My feeling is that...um...

first of all, we have...architects generally,

particularly in, um, the developed countries,

where there are large urban areas and large urban conurbations,

have of recent years developed skills

in higher density or medium density buildings.

And so we have responded to a new situation.

MUSIC PLAYS

And what we've sought to do,

and I think at times have striven probably too hard to do,

is to create a positive entity of a place.

And we've done this very often in the general context

of rather poor environment in purely visual terms - uncoordinated, anyhow.

And so we've tended to make schemes which were introverted,

where the buildings looked to each other rather than,

if you like, to the neighbours that already exist.

But, nevertheless, the purpose has been to make the spaces useful

and related to the buildings,

to bring the buildings together by the handling of the space.

This is why I don't think it's just a landscape architect's job.

It isn't a matter of making a nice garden.

And though that's a marvellous thing and it's a skill on its own,

but this is not our job. Ours...

I call it building landscape as distinct from any other kind.

At Parkleys, they are all flats.

Here in The Priory at Blackheath, they are houses.

But it's the same magical mixture

of what Lyons calls "fluffy landscaping",

and this very pretty tile hanging and crosswalk construction.

It looks marvellous. I've got no reservations at all about this place.

I think Lyons himself may have now. I think that is a pity.

I think he's...

..sort of eschewing this tile hanging a bit...

..against his own natural wishes.

You know, if he'd carried on with the tile hanging,

never mind who copied him, and then had fun with it...

I can see all sorts of fun you can get out of this.

After you've done a few and you knew its trademark, you could...

I don't know, tile-hung floors, tile-hung lavatory seat...

You could start playing with it.

You could have deliberately missed one out like Giulio Romano at Mantua

to really get a bit of wit into it.

As I say, I think it looks super.

MUSIC PLAYS

Lyons and Span have worked together for years.

Their schemes are characterised by a high degree of formal organisation

and by the provision of extensive communal services.

But how can such a carefully conceived layout be maintained

intact over the years?

On most of the estates the answer has been found in special covenants

or leasehold tenure.

This sets limits on any alteration to the external appearance of the houses

and gives the responsibility for the maintenance of the communal property

to the residents themselves.

Each housing scheme becomes a kind of self-governing unit

electing from among its members a management committee.

This committee then looks after all the communal business -

the maintenance of gardens, paths and play areas,

the redecoration of houses,

in fact, the running of the estate.

And I think if we had a slightly larger team,

we'd have a slightly keener sort of atmosphere, really.

They may be too young. They may be a little bit young.

- Are they too young? - Well, I think they are, obviously.

You know. I feel that they are collecting perhaps half.

You know, they spot the large pieces and, you know,

it means that I have to walk around the estate and point out, you know...

NARRATOR: The theory is that by involving the residents

in the responsibility of management,

a genuine sense of community can be forged,

a community not out of goodwill but out of necessity.

I live in one of these leasehold things myself.

I'm on the Grosvenor estate.

But this is impersonal control. It's not trying to involve you.

And I think they make a virtue of trying to involve you

in your environment

I myself think it's the exact opposite.

But how is the control exercised, then?

Well, the estate just tells you,

and if you don't like it, you can go off and find a flat somewhere else.

I don't mind that.

Or if you feel very strongly about it you form a residents' association,

then, you know, go up to them and say something.

But I don't like this business of residents being involved.

The actual residents themselves being involved and doing it?

Communally, yeah.

I don't know. It's democratic, isn't it? Particularly if they're elected.

Yeah...

In a way, it's more democratic than the one that you have in mind.

Yeah, it's more... Hm...

You have a ready-made community already there,

so you've got a small village atmosphere already existing.

Um, and it's marvellous for kids, which is a big advantage.

We thought it would be very nice.

The first thing that really strikes is the architecture.

It was the novelty more than anything else.

And you have this problem of being a miserable married woman

because you're tied to the sink, etc, etc.

Well, here I don't think you feel that nearly so much.

At least, I didn't. I enjoyed being at home.

I think that...there is a philosophy behind it.

Oh, the price was good for the amenities.

But I'd never lived here.

Most of that probably is simply because I'm a real city dweller.

My idea of a home is a very small flat and no possessions much

and the whole of the city to use as my drawing room or dining room.

That's just difference in temperament.

But even trying to think myself in the position of a householder

and a family man -

it's...it takes a lot to think myself into that position -

I'm still a worried by some of the things that happen in Span,

or some of the things that happened that Span developed.

Because, you see, at Parkleys, there was no notice outside the entrance,

no "keep off" notice.

Here there's one saying please keep off the private landscaping,

that we're in at the moment. I think that's fair enough.

That's quite a fair division.

But in the next estate at Blackheath, The Hall,

there's a notice right at the beginning of the estate saying,

"Residents only."

And it's got worse and worse.

And now at Weybridge we've got things saying,

"Residents only, trespassers will be prosecuted, no parking, no turning,"

God knows what.

And when things get as bad as this,

I think there's something seriously wrong.

Just...point of fact,

I doubt if you can be sued for simple trespass.

From another point of fact, a more important one,

a public footpath runs through here anyway.

This seems to me like folie de grandeur.

It's making a special way of life out of what is, after all,

no more than a collection of very pleasantly designed houses.

One of the other big builders in Britain just said recently,

"The one thing we know our customers don't want it any cosy kibbutz."

And a cosy kibbutz, I reckon, is just exactly what you've got here.

I just feel unhappy walking around it, I suppose.

That's as simple a way of putting it as any

because it's such a terribly inbred, inward-looking place.

And if it produces results like I saw on another estate here at Weybridge

where I was coming to have a look to make this film,

and a kid came up aged about six on a scooter, and asked me,

was I looking for a house?

I said, "No, I was just looking."

And he said, "Well, you shouldn't be here. It's private."

What kind of environment exactly is this that's producing

that kind of "keep out-ness" and prejudice at that kind of age?

And how much worse is it going to get?

I think if you've got...

established a group of identities, so to speak,

that you say these people are living together and sharing things,

they are by nature going to be exclusive, that's a fact.

And if they look around them

and see outside their particular controlled area

people don't do as well as they do,

you can't blame them for being pleased about what they're doing.

I think this is a question of pride of ownership.

And I don't see anything wrong with pride of ownership, whether it be

pictures, refrigerators, books, housing, or whatever.

I think pride of ownership is a kind of involvement in the articles,

and the more noble the articles are, the more noble,

if you like, the sentiment can be.

But the facts are, that involvement by ownership is a good thing.

And on the whole, I think group ownership

is a slightly more interesting,

and socially, I would have thought, more acceptable thing

than individual personal ownership.

We never have any shabby-looking places.

The plus factor...

..um, so far, with my experience of Span living

is that most of the people living in Span estates

come from broadly, what you might say,

the same class and professional background, within a fair range -

broadly within sort of middle-income groups.

Um, and to that extent, you have a plus

in starting off living together as a group and as a community.

If they want to live with a hedge around their garden,

they should go elsewhere.

You'd do get, I think, it's true to say, the odd individual

who doesn't want to conform,

and this, I think, can probably take peculiar ways.

Perhaps they might want to make some alterations to their place

by...putting perhaps a huge name outside their house,

which destroys the whole impact,

and this has to be drawn to their attention.

You have to keep them always looking, well, fairly respectable,

otherwise you could soon make them look sort of ramshackle, I think.

The odd maverick individual who won't conform in this sense, I think,

in my experience, soon moves away.

I rather think that you are looking at this thing

very much from the outside in,

you know, in a way that a man looking at a zoo goes round

looking at the animals,

and there's a certain lack of sympathy because of this.

And...this seems to warp your attitude slightly, to me.

It's not...people's pattern of behaviour I mind.

I don't mind a lot of similar, you know,

similar kind of person being in...

Well, yes. Well, it depends, you see.

I mean, I don't mind if they're intelligent,

which is another way of saying I don't mind if they share my views...

which perhaps, again, is another way of saying, in a way,

I like to live in a ghetto.

But on the other hand, it is convenient to have people

with a similar view and attitude.

Yeah, but not make a virtue about...of living together.

I mean, not... Once you're living together, it's bad enough

without banding into specialist associations.

You wear like a badge to say you're living together.

The smugness is there. The smugness is of a smugness

of a class which you can find anywhere.

Yes, but...

It is a middle-class smugness which exists all over the country.

NARRATOR: Many people would say that Lyons was a better urban

than suburban designer.

Perhaps the point will be proved when he built his new complex

at World's End in Chelsea.

Certainly it is possible to see

in even the most unrewarding circumstances

the touches of humanism and visual flair which are his hallmark.

Lyons did a great deal of industrial design work

at the beginning of his career,

and he still prefers to be called a designer rather than an architect.

For him, the progression from designing chairs

to designing buildings is a direct and social one.

He's still concerned with the making of economic,

practical and pleasing objects -

objects which take account of human needs

rather than expecting humanity to conform to them.

This is Eric Lyons in a completely different situation -

the block of flats near the docks at Southampton.

I think, myself, he had an off day here,

though it's a difficult situation, doing an isolated block.

It's probably the worst of all. Got no chance to...

do any landscape tricks at all.

It's just the building and that's it.

But even so, I don't reckon this is much.

Fair enough picture of urban disintegration as you see anywhere.

Middle of Southampton.

Medieval walls.

Piecemeal rebuilding after the bombing.

And cars, and cars, and more cars.

It's up on the 11th floor.

And here you can see a bit more of Lyons.

I think he was almost totally absent outside.

He was perhaps crushed by the problem.

But here the way he detailed these doors, the numbers,

the fact there's a little bit of weatherboarding,

all these human touches are beginning to show.

They show much more inside the flats.

Imagine that that out there is the Thames and not Southampton Water

and you get some idea of the potentialities that might happen

at World's End in Chelsea when the Lyons scheme is built there.

I said I wouldn't like to live in some other Lyons' flats or houses.

I really would like to live here.

I think his ability to organise very tight space, a very small area,

and the variety of shapes he's got in the rooms,

and especially I like the furniture,.

the thing that, in other words, wasn't provided by Lyons.

I think that when he's operating

with an independent client like a council,

he really can give his imagination really more play

rather than less.

MUSIC PLAYS

NARRATOR: Any housing scheme

presents one basic clash of interests -

the motorist against the pedestrian.

It's typical of Lyons that he rejects such doctrinaire solutions

as total separation of cars and people.

I think it's necessary to establish priorities

in the way the building space is organised,

and the priority obviously in certain cases has to be the motorcar,

in other cases, the pedestrian.

And this is a design factor.

It's much more complicated, of course,

than saying, "Just keep them separate and it's easy."

That's a sort of... That's a bureaucratic solution.

And the people who don't design anything, it's damned easy.

So, er...

the benefits of establishing priorities

mean there will come times when the car and the pedestrian actually meet.

There's a chap who actually wants to get in the damn thing

and go for a ride.

And he may even want to, you know, show it to his auntie.

And, you know, she doesn't want

to have to go through a back yard necessarily to have a look at it,

or have to meet him in another town or something to have a look at it.

So it seems to me that you've got to accept the fact

that cars are concerned with people

and people love cars.

They don't like being run over. They do like cars.

NARRATOR: So cars and people are segregated,

but not isolated from each other.

The car is not forgotten,

but neither is it allowed to dominate the landscape.

It has its own very clearly marked areas, usually close to the houses.

In fact, it can come as far into the estate as its utility permits.

Then the business of living and recreation takes over.

This careful arrangement of practical space ensures a remarkable degree

of seclusion and tranquillity

in what is predominantly a car-owning society.

The principle is a simple one -

a housing scheme is primarily a place to live in, not to pass through.

MUSIC PLAYS

Ian Nairn deplores this seclusion.

He finds it smug. But there are not many families with small children

who would agree with him.

This is where Ian Nairn lives - Ecclestone Square.

There's no doubt it's a handsome piece of town building.

Yet the houses and the gardens are separated from each other

by a busy road, which is itself clogged with lines of parked cars.

Even if children can get across the road safely,

they still have to play in a garden which is surrounded with barbed wire

and which boasts a fine collection of fiercely restrictive notices.

From a place in which to live it has become, like most of London,

a place to pass through.

MUSIC PLAYS

And, of course, fundamentally I believe that our houses are probably

more designed from the inside than outside.

In fact, I believe that that's what planning,

looking at the bigger scene, that's what town planning ought to be,

And in as much as...in as far as we do any town planning,

it's town planning from the bathroom outwards.

NARRATOR: On this estate the houses are laid out with formal position,

and yet, inside that context,

individual taste can flourish.

Furniture and decor make these identical rooms expand and contract.

Here the resident becomes the architect.

I stood by again and watched that, on the whole,

people respond to the shape of the room much...

in various ways and with much better results

than what are predicted by, no matter how skilled, a committee

sitting down, saying what colour they ought to have

and this block ought to be that colour and this ought to be that.

I don't think there's any hope of...

anything can come out of this situation

of trying to impose taste onto people.

It's a wrong attitude altogether.

And it's an arrogant one.

NARRATOR: The ghettos of the smart professional people -

that's the charge often made against the work of Lyons and of Span.

Certainly in the past they have made their appeal through their publicity

and their price range to the young middle class.

And yet at the same time Lyons does seem aware of the dangers

of a housing policy based on rigid class lines.

The outcome is the segregation of certain classes of house users,

God help us.

The chaps who can...

who can...who have got a subsidy live separately,

which I think is monstrous.

I mean, I speak not as an architect, you know, as a social animal.

And...

And... But as an architect it has its terrible effects

upon what happens to that part of the town.

You're creating, sort of, you know, rather...

sometimes rather good-looking ghettos,

at the very best.

And I think this is rather deplorable.

Full lip service is being paid to the need for shelter,

but not for the kind of full life that new housing ought to provide.

And I don't think it can be done by class structure.

NARRATOR: The current project is an attempt at something new.

The stated aim is to break down this rigid class structure

and produce in one large settlement a diverse and fluid society.

Maybe the end of the ghetto IS in sight.

Maybe.

MUSIC PLAYS

New Ash Green near Dartford in Kent.

I think there is more hope here, both for Span and for Lyons.

For Span, because New Ash Green is a big place - 6,000 people -

and they just can't be inbred on that scale.

For Lyons, because here he's got the chance to design at last

on a big enough scale the landscape he's always wanted to design.

For the first time we've got a big enough scheme.

We've got a very wide spectrum of

income and size and range of housing,

and it's been designed deliberately for this purpose.

NARRATOR: This is Lyon's most ambitious project so far -

2,000 houses to be built on a site of 430 acres.

Characteristically, half of that area will be kept as communal open space.

The village will be made up of 18 distinct living areas,

all linked by pedestrian walkways and skirted by service roads.

In the centre there'll be shops, a pub, a library, a primary school.

The aim is nothing less than a complete new community.

We hope to produce a very compact, you know, place

that yet has got something that you can't get in the average suburb,

and that is the ability to walk from your house onto, literally,

some recreation grass, space.

You certainly can't do it in the average village

in the south of England or in the Home Counties anywhere.

But here we built in the space, the recreation space,

the real release space,

so that people will have the benefits of space and yet,

the benefits of small areas of land to look after themselves

and a general, you know, village pressure,

which is the product of people living together.

This is what the village is all about, isn't it?

OK, we're going to telescope history

and we shall probably make some mistakes,

but history has made a lot of mistakes, too.

And on the whole, I suspect that we'll probably be winning,

because we are trying to anticipate the mistakes that history did make

and try and prevent them happening

It started as a good idea,

which was also part of a whole design equation,

and the landscaping

and a completely fresh look at a way of providing houses.

And gradually the idea's taken it over.

The idea has become more than the thing itself.

I think in the end, it's going to be defeated.

I mean, you can't carry it through in a place of 6,000. But...

Yes, oh, certainly.

The place is going to take over, to some extent.

But in a way, perhaps what you're complaining about

in some of the smaller things is, in fact,

the residents HAVE taken over and conveyed...

They've bought their own smugness from outside and injected it into...

No, I think Span has given them an extra dimension of smugness

that they didn't have before, they didn't know they had before.

- I think it's... - Well, I don't know about that.

I think that Kingston-bypass Tudor has a grandiose kind of smugness

which would be difficult to beat anywhere.

Fundamentally, it's a fact that science is concerned with

a body of knowledge

and the enlargement of that body of knowledge.

And art, whatever else it is and isn't,

is concerned with experience...

and human experience, and the enlargement of that human experience.

And I believe the architect's job

is involved with both aspects of this lump,

and is a kind of bridge.

And by "the architect" I mean the designer of things.

I don't think the architect's job

is some sort of compromise between these alternatives.

And he certainly isn't the sort of descendant

of the scientific lump or facet, the technologist.

And technology, as I understand,

it is concerned with reduction of human labour.

I don't think it's concerned with anything else at all.

If architects become technologists,

then we are left with no kind of humane influence,

no kind of humane influence over the products of, you know, our...

which make up our environment.

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I think all architects grapple with this problem of how much they are led

and how much they lead, and we know, really,

that it's always a mixture of both.

And an element of leadership by the architect

is involved in the sense that, as a creative artist,

he must be doing things new, you know, by definition,

and therefore unfamiliar, and therefore different.

They may be leading in terms of going forward,

but it may be a wrong move, and so one fumbles to try and...

um, respond to what you think society is doing

and which way it's going.

And this is really what I try to do.

I never like to leap in, you know, big jumps.

I like to move from one position to another.

And all my work is an attempt, really, to move from a situation

that I'm familiar with into a slightly less familiar situation.

This is the entrance to Eric Lyons' own house in East Molesey

But it's suburban living with a bit of a difference.

It's a great big Victorian castle.

I think it's the essence to the enigma of Eric Lyons -

the fact that he likes suburbia, but he's a superb urban designer.

I think when you see World's End being built,

that will be the real proof of that.

But most of all, the fact that he preaches community,

and yet lives in this great castle.

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