Interview: George Clarke, celebrity architect

Man with a mission

Television was the last thing on architect George Clarke’s mind when he was starting out, but he took to it with gusto and his clear passion for good design and quality homes has made a winning champion for empty homes but, as he tells Mark Cantrell, solving the housing crisis will take nothing less than a radical overhaul of the entire system

First published in Housing magazine

FROM an early age, George Clarke aspired to become an architect but by his own admission he kind of fell into television; he’s never looked back, however, and his presence on prime-time telly has served to add clout to themes that are close to his heart.

In a sense, it all started back on the building sites of his childhood in Sunderland. “My grandfathers were both builders so when I was a kid I used to be on building sites a lot, during school holidays and weekends, always helping out,” Clarke said. “At the same time, I had a huge passion for drawing. My granddads said from the earliest age I’d just sit there drawing for ages and ages. Then I tended to start drawing buildings. I spent so much time around them so I sketched them a lot. And it just moved on from there.

“I didn’t really know what an architect was when I was seven or eight years old; once I started getting to 10, 11, 12 and started reading books about buildings, architecture was the only thing that I wanted to do. I had a huge passion for buildings on every level, the way they were built, the way they were designed, and I just enjoyed reading about them. I remember, really, being about 12 years old, thinking I want to be an architect, and never wavered from it for a second.”

That unwavering commitment took him to the university of Newcastle and then university College London, where he studied architecture. By 2000 he was working his dream, having established his first practice, Clarke: Desai, with business partner Bobby Desai. Television was the last thing on his mind.

“I just stumbled into it. I literally just stumbled in,” he said. At the time, alongside running his practice, he was teaching at Newcastle University as a visiting architect and tutor, he was also writing a book. “I didn’t realise that it was a broadcasting agent as well as a literary agent. And so I signed for them on a Thursday afternoon and on the Monday morning she called me and asked had I ever thought about television?”

The agent pitched the idea and sold him on the screen test; he went along and subsequently got the job. “So literally between the Thursday afternoon and the following Tuesday, it kind of changed everything really,” he said.

He’s been on air now since 2003, first with Channel 5 – ‘Build A New Life’ – and then with Channel 4 where he’s since become the “face of architecture”. His show reel includes ‘Property Dreams’ (2004, C5), ‘Dream Home Abroad’ (2005, C5), ‘Build A New Life In The Country’ (2005-2007, C5). For Channel 4 he’s made ‘The Homes Show’ and ‘The Restoration Man’; all told they convey his infectious enthusiasm for architecture, for buildings, for homes, and the tremendous impact they can have on our lives.

But it was ‘The Empty Homes Show’, aired in December last year, that proved Clarke’s ‘call to arms’ – and one that was answered beyond even his wildest dreams.

“When you make something like that you always worry that when it comes to something political, if you like, that the public might not buy into it, but luckily they did,” he said. “In the first week, we had 100,000 people sign up for the petition. Thousands and thousands of people used the Empty Homes app to report empty homes. The Government very quickly woke up to what I was saying.”

Indeed, in April he was asked to serve as the Government’s empty homes advisor. “Basically, I ’m sent around the country to work with different councils and different areas to try and help them bring empty homes back into use and try and minimise the amount of demolition that’s happening,” he explained. “The Government’s phrase is that I ’m there to challenge [them] regarding their housing policies and also to challenge councils to think differently about how we deal with our old housing stock.”

So, what does he think of the Government’s efforts on the issue? “The Government is heading in the right direction, there’s no doubt about it. For us to be even talking about empty homes is fantastic, because it’s never been on any previous government’s radar. We’re seeing some great changes. Is it going far enough? No. Do politicians ever go fast enough? No,” he said. Not that he’d like to find himself in their shoes, especially in these difficult times.

“So, the Government is making all the right steps, all the right noises, but I find the process quite frustrating because I just want to get on with things and get things done. I’m not very good at ticking boxes and red tape and bureaucracy but unfortunately government is all about bureaucracy, really. I’ve been moving in there and trying to throw big spanners in the works and causing lots of trouble to be perfectly honest.”

As a working architect – he established a new multi-disciplinary practice George Clarke and Partners last year – as well as a successful television broadcaster, one might wonder where he finds the time to manage all this ‘extra-curricular’ activity: essentially it’s teamwork.

“A lot of hours,” he said, laughing. “I’ve got a great team behind me, some great people in the office who manage the day-to-day when I’m filming,” he said. “Genuinely, it’s an enormous amount of work, from when I get up in the morning to the minute I go to bed at night; it’s not a lot of me time, put it that way.”

Clarke clearly relishes all his roles, and is currently working on a follow up to last year’s empty homes show, catching up with some of the stories from the last programme, and reporting back the successes that have been achieved since then. Obviously, the content is rather ‘hush hush’, but not so his enthusiasm for the project and the “inspirational” stories it will reveal.

Some of the shine is lost from his palpable enthusiasm, it must be said, when considering the wider housing crisis: “I’m pretty miserable about it, unfortunately. Normally, I’m forever the optimist, but talking about the housing crisis generally, I think it’s pretty bad. It’s something that has gradually got worse and worse and worse over the last 30 years,” he said.

“We’re not building enough affordable homes at all. The Government needs to take full responsibility for that: they have neglected the affordable housing needs of Britain... We haven’t got anywhere near enough council housing in this country.

“Unfortunately, there’s too many big developers. We’re very different to Europe. If you go to places like Germany and through Scandinavia, there are many many many small scale developers, rather than the big beasts we’ve got. They dominate the industry, and they control the industry, and they drip feed the market to basically control pricing.

It’s simple supply and demand. If you’ve got very few houses being built then the houses that are there are going to be at high value; there’s always a demand and if you then reduce the supply it keeps the individual unit prices up.”

Planning, banks, architects, building quality, the whole system, it all comes in for a critical appraisal; Clarke clearly isn’t afraid to risk upsetting people, as those who saw him speak at the CIH event in Manchester will have gathered.

“The whole system is a complete mess and needs a radical overhaul... I’m not saying all the things I recommend are right, but I think we should be talking about it, we should be debating it, and we should try to move things on because we can’t carry on as we are,” he said.

“We need to be building between 350,000 and 500,000 homes per year to make the system affordable. My God, we’re not even building 100,000 of them at the minute. Year on year, the situation is getting worse and worse and worse and that’s why I think the entire system needs a massive kick up the backside.”


This interview first appeared in the September 2012 edition of Housing magazine and was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 2 October 2012.

The Glaswegian approach to violence

Violence is a disease – and it can be cured

By treating violence as a public health issue, Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) broke ranks from the conventional law and order model to create a proactive multi-agency approach that has clear lessons for those tackling the anti-social behavior, writes Mark Cantrell 

 First published in the September 2012 edition of Housing

“THE sin is ignorance,” said Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan; a phrase that perhaps cuts both ways as we contemplate the malignancy of violence and anti social behaviour (ASB). As a society, we can bang on about law and order, take a macho stance and demand tougher penalties, but as Carnochan pointed out, it takes us no further forward.

At the end of the day, the criminal justice system can only mop up the mess, not resolve its root causes; that’s society’s job but all too often, society shrugs it off as somebody else’s problem, or retreats with the defeatist perception that violence will always be with us. This isn’t a view that’s finding favour north of the border: attitudes can and must change.

Using the image of an iceberg, he said: “The top end, the bit that we see, is where most of us work. We chip away at that – new legislation, new laws, lock more people up – but it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the size of the iceberg. It just keeps bobbing up a little. if we want to shrink that iceberg, we need to raise the temperature of the water. And that’s the big stuff. That’s stuff like equality. The societies in the world that are the least violent are the most equal.”

And challenging social inequalities and deprivation is not something that the police, or the courts, or the prison service is geared up to do. Carnochan is co-director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) and since 2005 it has been leading efforts to actively demonstrate that there is nothing inevitable about violence. In June he was in Manchester to take this message to delegates at the CIH conference; that he was speaking in the session on ‘housing as a determinant of public health’ ought to indicate that he’s not your average tough-talking copper.

“Violence is a public health issue. It’s not a criminal justice issue,” he said. “We’re the service of last resort. If you leave it to us, we’re really good at it: check your prisons, they’re full. [It costs] £42,000 a year for someone in jail, and I don’t come cheap either. We’re an expensive outfit, and we’re the last resort – but we seem to be taken as the first resort all the time.”

Strathclyde Police established the VRU with the explicit aim of tackling all forms of violence, especially knife crime and the carrying of weapons by young men in and around Glasgow. In April 2006, the unit’s remit was extended across Scotland to create a national centre of expertise on tackling violent crime. One crucial aspect to its approach is that it doesn’t work alone – it can’t work alone – to tackle the problems of violence, which are said to be chronic in Scotland.

“We think of deterrence; we think about prevention,” Carnochan added.

The organisation took its lead from the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) report on violence and health published in 2002 and adopted the public health model. The aims are to reduce violent crime and behavior by “working with partner agencies to achieve long-term societal and attitudinal change”. Enforcement – the criminal justice side of things – isn’t abandoned, but the VRU seeks out best practice to develop solutions to the issues. in a sense, the public health approach treats violence as akin to a disease.

“Violence is an infection that has crept through society to the extent that it is viewed today in much the same way as the common cold – something that is both incurable and inevitable,” the organisation says on its website. it takes the view that there is nothing inevitable or incurable about it.

Karyn McCluskey, co-director of the VRU, provided the impetus for its inception, having moved from the West Mercia force to Strathclyde in 2002, she told Housing she was “absolutely shocked by the level of anti-social behaviour and violence”. The traditional methods, to her mind, just weren’t working, and so she took three weeks holiday and spent it writing a report arguing for a different approach.

“This is not just a policing problem. If everybody thinks that this is up to the police then we are never going to help them, we’re never going to solve it,” she said. “We’ll put loads of people in jail, that’s great, but you have to jail those you’re afraid of, not those you’re mad at, and you have to do something different.”

That something was the shift towards the public health model; more holistic and pro-active, it takes in a whole host of considerations and agencies, to identify, isolate and intervene to address the factors that, well, breed the infection of violence and propagate it down the generations. By identifying risk factors, then preventative efforts can be put into place. In terms of violence, typical factors include: deprivation, poor parenting, education issues, and members of peer groups who are already engaged in violence.

“It allows us to look at things like primary prevention: parenting, early years, housing design, and a whole range of things like that,” McCluskey said. Secondary prevention then targets those who are at risk. Housing organisations and professionals are crucial allies, but interventions can also take place in what seem – at first glance – the unlikeliest of places.

“We do interventions in dental clinics now,” she added. “Because if I punch you in the face, the first things you’ll lose are your teeth.”

They found that dentists weren’t addressing the causes of these injuries. The VRU helped establish a charity Medics Against Violence, which has recruited around 300 consultants and dentists to push the anti-violence message. “Intervene at every teachable moment in someone’s life and they might be motivated to change,” McCluskey said.

Back to Carnochan and his hard-hitting presentation on gang violence, just one example of the VRU’s approach in action; in 2008 the VRU set up the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) in Glasgow’s east end. The initiative drew upon the best practice established in the United States to combat gang violence in cities such as Boston and Cincinnati. In Glasgow, the ‘diagnosis’ revealed 55 separate gangs that were “highly territorialised”, “obsessed with respect” and “resistant to change”. In effect, a life of violence was all they knew.

The process starts at an early age. As Carnochan explained, he put the question to Professor Richard Tremblay of Montreal University, a child psychiatrist, ‘how do young men learn to be violent?’ the answer was to turn the question on its head: how do we learn not to be violent?

“What we do in those early years, those first four years of life, are the most important and what we learn is to negotiate, to communicate, to compromise, to empathise, to problem solve, to resolve conflict, so that the violence option gets pushed down the menu, so it becomes the last resort. For lots of young men, they never learn these skills so the only option they have is aggression and violence. It’s not a deliberate thing, the sin is ignorance, they don’t know any better,” said Carnochan.

What this means, he added, is that they can learn. With the right approach, the interventions, education and support, they are capable of change, and that’s what CIRV is all about. The initiative involves a wide-range of partners working together, from the justice system, social work, housing, health services, education, and the community, and former gang members themselves, all working on a shared strategy to target at-risk gang members. It’s as much about prevention as it is about enforcement.

But there’s a flipside to this culture of sin and ignorance. “The world that we live in and operate in is all about professionals – we have silos. I’ve got a two-hour leadership lecture on gangs and I never mention a street gang once,” Carnochan said. “The gangs I speak about will be universities, it’ll be health, it’ll be education, it’ll be social work, it’ll be housing, it’ll be the police – those territorial gangs are the most corrosive, the most pernicious, and cause the most damage to our society than any street gang ever did – and we need to tackle that. Think beyond the profession, the job title. You’ll be a father, a son, a mother, a brother, an aunt, an uncle, a wife – you need to think of your whole self.”

There’s more to the VRU than gangs. In its latest phase it focused on weapons-related violence and alcohol-related violence, while later this year its next phase will be to tackle domestic abuse and violence against women. regardless of the particular focus of its overall mission to reduce violence, at the core of the VRU is the firm stance that violence is everybody’s problem, and so we all have to work together to solve it.

“We have to change public attitudes because it’s everybody’s issue. No one is safe until everybody is safe,” said McCluskey. “They can’t draw their curtains in Knightsbridge and just say ‘that’s the bad boys in Tower Hamlets or Mosside or Easterhouse’ – it’s everybody’s issue. And that’s what we’ve tried to do; you know when they point the finger and say what are the police doing about it? We say here’s what we’re doing; now there’s three fingers pointing back at you when you’re pointing at me – so what are you doing about it?”


This feature first appeared in the September 2012 edition of Housing magazine, and was subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 16 October 2012.

Book Review: Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster

Not just a pretty face

Review: ‘Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster’ the authorised biography by Stephen Jacobs

As Frankenstein’s Monster, Boris Karloff has become a cultural icon encapsulating the ‘golden era’ of movie horror, writes Mark Cantrell. Beneath the make-up and the macabre roles, however, was a thoroughly nice chap who earned the affection and respect of his peers, as this detailed but sometimes heavy-going biography reveals

First published on Cheshire Today 

FOR horror aficionados, Boris Karloff needs no introductions; he is the face of movie horror’s ‘golden age’, although admittedly that face is usually smothered in the prosthetics that transformed him into the Monster that made his name.

Frankenstein (1931) propelled the then jobbing film actor onto the world stage of international stardom, but by the time this ‘big break’ landed him on his lead-weighted feet, he already had a solid 20-year career as an actor behind him. Ironically, the role of the Monster was never expected to be anything more than a ‘throwaway’ part, but Karloff’s acting shone through to create an iconic screen presence. A star was born; the product of a long apprenticeship one might say.

Karloff’s career spanned almost 50 years and over 150 movies, ranging from the silent picture era through to the days of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. His roles in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’, ‘The Mummy’, ‘The Black Cat’, and many others – most now considered classics of the genre – ensured his reputation as ‘The King of Horror’.

There was more – much more – to Karloff than this iconic role, however, as Stephen Jacobs’ biography makes clear in compelling detail. 

The biography is a solid tome; a heavy read and not just in terms of the book’s physical weight, but the sheer wealth of information it assembles. The book is without doubt a labour of love and can be very heavy-going given the amount of material packed into its 568 pages, but it offers a fascinating and almost encyclopaedic insight into Karloff the man as much as Karloff the master of the macabre.

Having not read any rival biographies of Boris Karloff, it’s impossible to say how Jacobs’ labours compare against its competitors, but his work scooped a Rondo Award for best book earlier this year, so it is hardly a slacker in its exploration of the man. It has also been endorsed by Karloff’s daughter Sara, making it an authorised account of her father’s life and work. By all accounts, it’s proved an eye-opener for her: “[I]t is such a learning experience for me. I never knew about my father’s family, about his early life, how old he was when his mother died, and on and on and on.”

The biographer’s craft is not an easy one; sourcing the material, be it letters or press cuttings, from decades gone, chasing down friends and acquaintances, interviews, assembling the wealth of material from such a variety of sources, is certainly no easy task. Jacobs’ research was made all the harder by his subject’s itinerant lifestyle as a jobbing thespian with a number of touring companies. 

He was also rather fond of his privacy, and tended to play up the mystique of his Karloff stage name, regaling people with its Russian origins and playing down his own Anglo-Indian heritage. In part, there’s the actor no doubt creating the brand, but as Jacobs’ work takes us back in time to less racially-enlightened times, if it can be put that way, there was also an element of diverting attention away from his own mixed-race ancestry.

Karloff was born William Henry Pratt in Camberwell, South London, in 1887. He was born of a relatively well-to-do family, of Anglo-Indian descent, and was expected to follow in his family’s footsteps as a civil servant in the administrative machinery running the Empire. However, young Billy – as he was known – fell in love with the stage. He turned his back on the comfortable, if predictable, life of government service – and headed off for the uncertainty and poverty that was the touring actor’s lot.

In 1911, he ran off to Canada, where he joined a succession of touring theatre companies, living out of a suitcase and learning the nifty trick of frying an egg for breakfast on an iron. When stage work was not forthcoming, he took any labouring work he could find. 

Hard though the life was, he persevered. He scored worthy reviews for his performances, developed the professional and easy-going attitude that would win him much respect as a movie star, and never forgot his roots as a jobbing actor worrying where his next paycheck might come from. Eventually, he tried his hand in Hollywood, stepping back and forth between film and stage, until that breakthrough role with Frankenstein came his way.

Over the course of his life, Karloff got through five wives; he didn’t become a father until the age of 51 when his daughter Sara arrived. By then he was a Hollywood staple and also, it must be said, an active trade unionist. The founding member of the Screen Actors’ Guild was a tireless recruiter for the union, and often recruited on the sets of his movies. 

Despite his union activities, Karloff was hardly a ‘Bolshie’. What comes across clear as day from the testimonies of his fellow actors, the directors and film crews he worked with, is the very epitome of the unassuming professional actor. Even at the height of his stardom, far from being the ‘prima donna’, Karloff by all accounts remained what he was at heart – a jobbing actor dedicated to his craft. Indeed, throughout Jacobs’ book comes the strong portrait of a very nice man – a gentleman who earned the affection of his peers.

The actor kept working almost literally until the very end, and some of his last performances didn’t appear until after his death in 1968. His later years were plagued with ill-health. Indeed, in one of his final screen appearances, ‘The Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (1968), the actor was in a wheelchair – not for the sake of the role, but because his health demanded it. In pain, Karloff persevered with little complaint.

Endurance in the face of discomfort, even pain, was a common theme in Karloff’s career and his ability to grit his teeth and press on without complaint, whilst delivering a strong performance, helped earn him the respect of his peers. Some of his later ills were a legacy of the injuries and strains sustained in his earlier film roles; the make-up and prosthetics for the Monster were a heavy burden that placed a real physical strain on the actor. And that wasn’t just in the wearing of it, but in the long hours it took to apply and remove the make-up. Karloff worked some gruelling hours to give us the iconic image of Frankenstein’s unholy creation.

For modern audiences, that classic image now seems a little kitsch, we’ve see it that often, and moviemakers have since given us a gallery and more of schlock-horror to curl our toes and chill our bones. Back in the day, however, Karloff’s get-up was terrifying to behold. By all accounts, when he was made up as the Monster, he was expected to wear a bag over his head when leaving the set to avoid scaring people and he had to go around accompanied. That’s before he was banned from leaving the set altogether. Perhaps that serves to show just how desensitised we have become in this age of high-tech and CGI visual wizardry.

As for the man himself, Karloff was by all accounts more enamoured of the macabre than the gory visuals we’ve grown used to; his preference was for the subtlety of performance, for the chilling potential of suspense, to convey horror. He personally was anything but a monster, as the biography ably demonstrates, just an actor following the breaks where they would.

“I didn’t set out to chill anyone. I was just an actor willing to try anything. I had no special interest in terror subjects. My private tastes are still very Catholic,” he said. That quote occurs at the very beginning of the book, and captures in essence, the biography of the man. As Jacobs’ strives to reveal, he was a thoroughly nice bloke who got lucky playing horrific roles, but there was more to his screen and stage personae, and whether playing monsters, old-fashioned but very much human villains, or the good guys, he left them on set when he was done.

As for Jacobs and his performance with this biography, he has certainly produced an in-depth and detailed portrait of the man’s professional and personal life. At times, it might be heavy going, but he has certainly done his subject justice.

Details:

Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster

The Authorised Biography

By Stephen Jacobs

Hardback, 568 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9557670-4-3

Price: £30

Tomahawk Press

This article was first published on Cheshire Today, 11 September 2012.