TV's George Clarke: I am single for the first time since I was about 18

He can build you a house or take you on a culture crawl of the capital — ladies, form an orderly queue for TV’s George Clarke. He tells Nick Curtis about cancer, affordable architecture and what makes him well jealous
Master builder: Clarke at the Charing Cross Hospital Maggie’s Centre (Picture: Matt Writtle)

George Clarke, the architect and TV presenter, is telling me that he would love to create a Maggie’s Centre. These havens for cancer patients are individually designed by big names and built on neglected land in hospitals by the charity set up by architectural theorist Charles Jencks in memory of his wife Maggie, who died of breast cancer in 1995. Being asked to design one is “like winning an Oscar for architects”, says Clarke, 40, in his matey Sunderland accent.

In the absence of that invitation, Clarke is promoting the charity’s Culture Crawl, a 15-mile nocturnal ramble through London on September 19 taking in buildings as diverse as the Foreign Office, Fulham Palace, Zaha Hadid’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery and the Maggie’s Centre designed by Richard Rogers for Charing Cross Hospital, where we meet. “I’m doing it!” says Clarke. “I love walking the city but I’ve never done it at night apart from staggering back from the pub, and I’ve not seen the Serpentine yet. It’s a really cool idea. My kids once got to have a sleepover in the Science Museum — I was well jealous. So I’ve cleared me diary.”

This is no mean feat since Clarke is a lecturer, author and Government adviser on housing, as well as a favourite of men and women alike for his enthusiastic bounciness on TV shows Restoration Man and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces. He has three children, and since undergoing an amicable divorce from his wife Catriona last year is “single for the first time since I was about 18”. Laura, the Maggie’s representative who is sitting nearby, says: “If you write that George is single and he’s doing the Culture Crawl, we’ll sell out.” OK, Laura: consider it done.

The principles behind the Maggie’s Centres — creative use of space and the ability of a good building to lift the spirit — tie in with the ideas he promotes through all his work. The charity has been a constant presence in his life. “The first Maggie’s Centre was built in Edinburgh while I was at university,” says Clarke. “They become very well known buildings and this one” — he waves an arm — “won the Stirling Prize. I trained from 1997 with Sir Terry Farrell and he was a good friend of Charles Jencks. So it was always on the radar for me, what Maggie’s was and what they did.”

There is also a personal connection. “I’ve got quite a big family up in the North and have lost too many people through cancer,” he says. “My cousin was in her thirties when she died of a very severe bone marrow cancer and left a few kids behind. My uncle had throat cancer and passed away a few years ago.” Then in 2011 his wife’s brother and the man he describes as “my best friend in the whole world”, former Armani model Swiggy Drummond, who had a girlfriend and two lovely daughters, started suffering severe memory loss. “He had a brain tumour and in classic male fashion he brushed it under the carpet,” says Clarke. “He didn’t realise it was cancer and we didn’t realise he had any symptoms for a long time.”

By the time he was diagnosed the tumour was huge and terminal, but in his final months Drummond visited the Charing Cross Maggie’s Centre several times. “It was a very beautiful place to go to when he was going slightly crazy at home or in hospital,” says Clarke.

Unlike “sterile, alienating” wards and chemotherapy suites, the centres offer information and a chance to share experiences with those going through it. Or not: a lesser-known side effect of cancer is that one can get swamped with sympathy.

Talking to Clarke, I’m struck by his ease and his capacity for empathy. Ben Frow, the producer who gave him his first TV job presenting Build a New Home in the Country, told him: “I don’t care how good an architect you are, you are brilliant with people.” Clarke himself shrugs: “I don’t know whether that’s true. But I don’t care who I meet — whether it’s royalty or someone from a housing estate in east London, I will give them the same attention, respect them in the same way.”

The TV career, like much of his professional life, came about through a mix of happenstance and determination. He’d been looking for an agent for a book he was writing, and the agent, who also represented TV talent, realised that Clarke could be the new, younger, flatter-vowelled Kevin McCloud.

On the other hand, he had decided he wanted to be an architect when he was around 12. After his printer father died when he was young, his uncle would take him to visit his builder grandfather. “I just loved being around sites and the process of building stuff, the banter and the atmosphere,” he says. “One of my most vivid early memories was of my grandad taking me to the Portakabin on a building site where there were 40 or 50 blokes having fry-ups and smoking cigarettes. Probably the most unhealthy place in the world but I loved it.”

His grandad bought him a glossary of architectural terms, “From architrave to ziggurat, and to show you how boring I was, I tried to memorise them all.”

After school he went straight to work for a local practice, later supporting himself at Newcastle University and then UCL by renovating houses. After working for Terry Farrell he set up his own practice, clarke: desai, with Bobby Desai. One of their jobs was redesigning Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Fifteen. “We got the job through a friend of mine, though now I’m on Channel 4 everyone thinks that me and Jamie have known each other for years through telly.”

He set up Clarke + Partners in 2011, with a staff of 25. Although they design new buildings, much of their work is in renovation and refurbishment. This is a function of working in London, where there is “relatively little new built”. Clarke is passionate and lucid about the problems of the housing market, nationally and in London. He sees it as controlled by a tiny number of mass builders more interested in property speculation than affordable housing; and governments, which last only four years, lack the will to be “as revolutionary as they need to be. I sometimes feel housing should be non-political, like the NHS, ring-fenced and protected and not a political stick that’s thrown around.”

He also thinks the industry is antiquated. “We should be building houses like we build cars — controlled environment, huge amount of research and development, high levels of quality control. I often wonder what a house designed by [James] Dyson, or Paul Smith, or the head designer of Jaguar, Ian Callum, would be like. We need to build more, and build better and more efficiently, simple as that, and stop building Noddy boxes on green belt.” In London, this means smaller units in greater density, while maintaining impeccable space and design standards. “I think [my] programmes show that small can be more beautiful,” he says.

Although still passionate about the North-East, Clarke is now wholly at home in London. “It’s an amazing metropolis and one of the best human cities to live in. It’s not as difficult as New York, not as anonymous and mad as LA, not as intense as Tokyo, which is why so many people want to come here. There are beautiful parks, brilliant master planning, and it’s actually still quite a low-density city. Even though great buildings like the Shard have been built, there’s still a lot of room for London to get bigger, and I don’t mean spread, I mean go up. As Restoration Man, I am pretty obsessed by history, and the more people know about London’s history the more they’ll appreciate the place and how incredible it is.” Time to book your space on Maggie’s Culture Crawl, folks — and quick.

To find out more about Maggie’s Culture Crawl on September 19, visit maggiescentres.org/culturecrawl

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