The Handmade House Read online

  By October 2000, Joyce and Ferhan were presenting the drawings they wanted to send to the Planning Department. These showed shutters on some of the windows (from the roof to the ground at three points along the garden side of the building) and included elevations that suggested that the walls at either end, including the one on to the lane, were to be made of pre-cast concrete panels, with a big timber doorway at the front. I imagined these walls rendered a pristine white, symbol of my new White World.

  By 23 October Joyce and Ferhan were ready to despatch a bundle of computer-generated images, site photos and investigations, plans, elevations and an application for conservation area consent to Islington Council’s Planning Department. We all congratulated ourselves on not having done badly: it had taken a little under four months – including everyone’s summer holidays – to design the outline of the house.

  We received a letter from the Department acknowledging our application and informing us that we should receive a decision by 21 December. If we hadn’t, we could appeal to the Secretary of State for the Environment in accordance with sections 78 and 79 of the Town and Country Planning Act.

  A few weeks before Christmas, Charlie and I went to a party thrown by Atlas Venture, dinner in a private room at the Hempel Hotel. It was our second Atlas party of the year: the first had been at the Oxfordshire home of one of the senior partners, a manor house of honey-coloured stone surrounded by water. The sun had shone as we strolled in the garden, played tennis and eaten strawberries, and the sunshiny, movie-backdrop mood seemed buoyed on a tide of money that it was hard to believe would ever stop rolling for these people, even though, at that point, the Nasdaq had already collapsed.

  By Christmas, Atlas was restructuring. There were at least three people at dinner who were on the point of leaving, some to return to an academic life cushioned by affluence, others with barely concealed bitterness. As we made our way back east at the end of the evening, Charlie and I wondered whether we’d be there the following year.

  I can’t say the anxiety troubled me as much as it perhaps should have done. I found the people at Atlas urbane, charming, witty, clever, and mad. It was difficult getting my head around their wealth, but more especially around their interest in wealth. They were delightful, except that they thought about money all the time. And the money-madness seemed to me like a growth on the soul: it distorted everything else.

  December 21 passed without a whisper from the Planning Department.

  I called Joyce. ‘What about this appeal? Are we supposed to activate it?’

  She laughed. ‘Of course not. If you did, it would take a year for the case to be heard, and you still wouldn’t have a decision. It’s just a formality. No one ever does it.’

  Things took a while to gear up again in January since, increasingly, Britain seems to lose about six weeks’ work in the winter, which is fine in theory, is something I would support, in theory, being in tune with the rhythms of the year and the natural desire to bed down through the winter solstice, but is bloody annoying when you are losing £87 a day.

  By February, things had got going again sufficiently for us to be allotted a new Planning Officer and for him to ask for a change to the drawings. The front door was to have been concealed in a little indentation or cubbyhole on the front wall, so that you would effectively step into a porch and turn left to enter the building. Mr Armsby was concerned that muggers could lurk here and jump out on passers-by, or vagrants take up residence. So we put the front door on the face of the wall (we might get wet while we fumbled for our keys, but at least we wouldn’t be tripping over tramps). For similar security reasons, we were also asked to add a couple of windows to the front of the building. And the ‘two-car garage’ had to be replaced with a one-car garage. A somewhat truncated space for Charlie’s office was now labelled ‘garden store’. And then, once we’d done all this, we were finally given a date for a hearing in front of the Planning Committee: 27 March. By then we would have spent £21,141 on the bridging loan.

  5

  Islington Town Hall is plonked down heedlessly amongst the jostle of bars and boutiques along Upper Street: a slug of white classicism displaying too much frontage, it leers over the long stretch of pavement that it has somehow managed to turn into wasteland, its forecourt littered with green and white corporate identity signs designed to communicate user-friendliness but somehow redolent of underfunding. The logo-loud placards sit awkwardly against self-important pillars and pediments, carved to proclaim that the building was completed in MCMXXV.

  The Town Hall is made of stern stuff, constructed at a time when it was necessary to hang on to certainty. There are more steps inside, marble this time, with brass handrails, taking you up steeply to the heavy wooden doors of the Council Chamber, all the grave flummery of the materials designed to make the point that local government matters – which of course to us, on the evening of Tuesday, 27 March 2001, it very much did.

  Ferhan, who was to speak, was ushered to a forward seat in the tiered Council Chamber, while Joyce, Charlie and I were shunted to somewhere near the back. Joyce and Ferhan had explained the format. Around thirty schemes would be discussed that night. Each project would be announced and the case officer responsible for it – the local government official – identified. The Planning Committee, elected politicians who would already have visited the site and received a recommendation from the Planning Officer, would then ask whether there were any objections, which would be registered with a show of hands. The objectors had to nominate someone to sum up their reservations; this person would be allowed to address the meeting for a maximum of five minutes. Then someone from our side could respond, again for five minutes. Since Joyce was managing our project, she should have done it, but in fact Ferhan would speak for us because Joyce believed Mr Armsby didn’t like her (something to do with a dispute over the house that she and Bill had built for themselves; I never really got to the bottom of this, because the discussion would always get sidetracked into what Ferhan should wear. She favoured low-cut).

  I scanned the agenda. We were item twenty-three of thirty. By item three I was already so tense I could barely swallow. The Committee swept through the construction of small flats in the backyards of pubs, attic conversions, the change of use from shops to minicab offices, school extensions. An eight-storey bank building on the corner of Finsbury Square on the edge of the City took a bit longer, owing to the existence of some architects’ models and a sense of civic importance. An attempt by a builders’ merchants to turn a green space up the Holloway Road into a car park had brought out many softly-spoken, liberal objectors, who glared, in a hurt manner, at the large contingent from the shop. The full complement of builders’ merchant staff seemed to have turned out, along with most of their friends. Louder than the protestors, and better pleased, to judge from their dress, with their bodies, they competed with their opponents’ undercurrent of ‘tsk’ and ‘peugh’ noises with a chorus of ‘Shit!’ ‘Crap!’ and ‘Bollocks!’

  So it was quite interesting, or would have been if my head hadn’t felt as if it were floating 3 feet above my body. A lot of people cleared out after the park was saved, but, by item twenty, it was obvious that there were still far too many people left in the Chamber to account for the handful of cases that were left.

  ‘I hope,’ I whispered to Charlie, ‘these aren’t all here for us.’ He was looking pale, and told me afterwards that it had simply never occurred to him until he got to the meeting that there might be objectors, nor even, really, that the Committee could say no.

  A man sitting not far away from Ferhan seemed to me particularly worrying. He looked like a lawyer, to judge from his grey suit, which was designed to draw as little attention to its wearer as possible, and the way he was clutching a large sheaf of papers (sort of professionally). That was all we needed, I thought dizzily – some brilliant advocate applying fierce forensic intelligence to our little project, inserting stilettos of reason into the soft underbelly of our fantas
ies.

  Eventually, after an interminable couple of hours of feeling as though I’d drunk about twenty cups of coffee and was buzzing all over, they called our number. And, sure enough, hands went up all over the hall, including from lawyer-man. He was their spokesman, and he launched in quickly – which was vital, because, though concentration was difficult with my head so far removed from the rest of my blood supply, I was conscious that he had an awful lot to say. There was something about the fate of the ash tree, and the noise from our washing machine in the flat in the next-door mews, and the fact that our garage would be close to his house and might damage his property. He said the Planning Committee had not taken into account a window of his that would be overlooked by our building. Plus, he got his car out by reversing down the lane; he was worried that we would do the same and collide… and on he went, and on, for so long that the Chair had to hurry him up.

  Ferhan responded in her crisp manner. She explained exactly how the tree would be protected during the building work, and about the sound insulation. She said the party-wall issues would be dealt with through the statutory procedures, that the window to which he referred was small and high, and that when he came out of his garage, she would suggest – well, looking. (With Ferhan, you can’t always tell whether she means to be rude, or is actually being perfectly polite, but in a Turkish way.)

  The Chair asked for the Committee’s comments.

  ‘I have never,’ said one, ‘heard so many petty, trivial objections – and to such an excellent scheme.’

  The Chair nodded. ‘This promises to be a house of outstanding architectural interest,’ he said, ‘If I’d known about the site, I would have tried to buy it myself. Really, my only regret about this is that it will be hidden down a little lane and very few people will see it.’

  It was scarcely believable. They loved it. They passed it unanimously.

  Outside, I threw my arms around Joyce and Ferhan. ‘Hugo will be so jealous,’ Joyce said happily. We were staggering down the steps, Ferhan congratulating herself on having chosen the right outfit, everyone else congratulating her on having been so calm and smart, when the lawyer introduced himself as our new next-door neighbour. I felt sorry for him: we were all grinning stupidly, like drunks unable to sober up, and he’d just been accused of being petty and trivial in a public place. It was decent of him, and I did, honestly, struggle to stop smiling while we exchanged embarrassed English pleasantries.

  We wandered down Upper Street looking for somewhere to eat, since we were all too excited to go home and suddenly realized we were hungry. Nowhere seemed quite special enough until we reached Granita, which was famously special as the location of a crucial, power-trading, top-level Blair–Brown meeting: it seemed appropriate, if we were to become residents of Islington, that we should eat in a restaurant so Islington that it was a cliché. (Not long before, when Charlie had told Tony Blair that he lived in London Fields, which was where the Blairs had had their first house together, Blair had responded, ‘What, still?’ as if, because he now lived at Chequers, we should too.)

  Tony Blair wasn’t in tonight; but there, at a table by the window, were Hugo and Sue, which couldn’t have been neater if we’d organized it. Hugo was indeed delightfully, gratifying, jealous, but decent enough about it to advise us on the wine.

  *

  I hadn’t been to the land for months. The last time, as far as I could remember, had been on Boxing Day, in an attempt to prevent Harry and Ned from noticing that lunch was an hour later than usual. The boys couldn’t have been less interested in trailing about for a chilly half-hour on a bleak piece of land on which nothing was happening, where only the weeds seemed to be having any fun. The weeds were presumably doing even better now that the ground had warmed up, but I hadn’t been to see because once the plans were lodged with Islington Council, it felt like masochism, envisaging a house that I might not be allowed to have.

  But now that we were really and truly going to build, I wanted to imagine myself living on that little piece of land in a house with a retractable rooflight over the bath and a glass wall on to the garden, to picture myself as a woman with white mugs and Armani.

  When I drove down the lane on that Wednesday morning, the first troubling thing I noticed was a small gate in the wall to the right, bordering the factory/workshops, and beside it, a sign. ‘Rose Cottage,’ it said improbably, ‘1 Ivy Grove Lane.’ It didn’t look as though anyone used this gate, which seemed to be painted shut. It was a ridiculous name, wholly inappropriate for a bit of factory. All the same, whoever worked there quite clearly had our address.

  The second, still more troubling thing was that the lane appeared to have got shorter. Roads do not, as a rule, do this, but here there was a good reason for it: a pair of large, metal, electronic gates had been erected some way up it. When I say some way up, I mean too far. Beyond these gates, The Glassworks had been chi-chi’d up into mews houses with little balconies and fashionably industrial metal windows. The once scruffy muddy track down to the dead-end had been gravelled over and landscaped with clumps of bamboo, silver birch and alchemilla mollis. This was all perfectly nice, in its place, but its place was currently blocking off the roadway about one-third of the way up the side of our property.

  Even this might not have mattered so much, but this one-third of our property was where our house was meant to go. In other words, our projected front door, our approved front door, was beyond a pair of electronic metal gates, which, since they did not belong to us, we had no means of opening.

  I went home and called the estate agent for the name of the developer. In the stately dance that is employment in estate agencies, Sue Reynolds had moved on to a rival firm across the road. But one of her former colleagues seemed to know all about the mews. She thought the developer was a Mr Christalides ‘or something like that’ of Dome Developments in St Peter’s Street. There was no Dome Developments listed by Directory Inquiries in St Peter’s Street or, indeed, in London. There was no Christalides or something like that listed in the Business phone book. There were plenty of possibilities, similarish names, in the domestic directory (Christodalou? Christodoulides? Christodoulopolous?) but it could take weeks to get through them, what with having to work up the pronunciation.

  That evening, I insisted that Charlie come with me to the lane to inspect the gates, as if I might, myself, have been mistaken. But, no: the access to our property, our putative modernist dream, had incontrovertibly been blocked off.

  Who did this person with the complicated name beginning with C think he was? The lane was unadopted. Everyone knew that. Equally, everyone knew that its ownership was a mystery. We had a letter from Islington Council saying so. It was dated 15 June 2000, and signed by W. Barrows, Assistant Group Planning Officer. We’d needed it for the indemnity insurance. ‘You say that your architects have inspected the property file and found no evidence of a claim of ownership to the lane,’ Mr W. Barrows had written. ‘I have no reason to doubt this; my clear understanding from more than fifteen years of dealings involving the lane – and there had been a number of high-profile schemes – is that its ownership is not known.’

  The developer was not, in fact, a person beginning with C. His name was Tom Tasou. I eventually found out because some of his workmen were finishing off on the site a couple of days later when I was making one of my increasingly frequent and distracted visits (unusually, on this occasion, not merely of histrionic, but of practical value). The workmen told me that Tom Tasou did in fact trade as Dome Developments. But – and this was somehow typical of the man, of his not needing to do things the dully bureaucratic way – he didn’t see the need to put this name in the phone book. There was however, a listing for Tasou Associates, and the address was in Islington.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, when I got through, ‘I’ve been expecting your call.’

  We agreed to meet at the site the following day. I called Azman Owens, since this looked like a job for Joyce (everything, these days, looked like
a job for Joyce), and got through to Ferhan. ‘He must have put those gates up after the Planning Committee did their site visit,’ I wailed. ‘The planners hate gated developments. They were vitriolic about them at our meeting.’ (Two schemes had come up: it was very clear that Islington councillors had a strong political animus against rich people shutting out the rest of the borough’s residents.) ‘And they’d have seen that our plans were unworkable with these gates. Surely Mr Armsby would have said …’

  ‘He will have a price,’ Ferhan said briskly. ‘Everybody has a price.’

  Did they? I thought about this, and wondered if I did.

  The following morning, Joyce, Charlie and I waited nearly half an hour for Tom Tasou. When he eventually turned up, he parked his car, got out, went and stood proprietorially beside his gates and waited for us to speak. He was a small man, and something about him made me think that he had more energy for this than I did.

  ‘Look,’ I began uneasily, ‘since we bought our land and designed our house these gates have gone up. I don’t believe you can have planning permission for them.’

  (I don’t know why I was doing the talking; Charlie is much better than I am at not getting tense. And when he loses his temper it looks much less silly.)