A council in Oxfordshire set out to challenge mediocre mass housing by creating a self-build haven. But is it losing its way? Ella Jessel visits Graven Hill. Photography by Anthony Coleman
A white mansion with imposing pillars stands grandly next to a row of brick terraces. Nearby there is a Poundbury-style traditional cottage, a black house and a smattering of modern chalets with big glass windows. Someone even has their own green wall.
On any other new housing development, such an architectural jumble would be discouraged, if not prohibited. But Graven Hill in Oxfordshire – the UK’s largest self and custom build site – is a giant petri dish for design. It’s an audacious bid by Cherwell District Council to turn an ex-army base near Bicester into a community of 1,900 homes.
Since the first ‘pioneers’ arrived in a bare field in 2015, their tumultuous journeys documented on the Grand Designs spin-off The Street, hundreds of brave builders have moved to Graven Hill to have a crack at building their ‘dream homes’. Inspired by the Dutch self-build village of Almere, the development set out to be an antidote to the UK’s swathes of ‘cookie cutter’ homes built by volume housebuilders.
Today, 400 homes have been completed. As entire streets rise from the rubble, the development offers plenty of fodder for the ongoing national debate over what constitutes ‘good’ design, not to mention insight into the innate human desire to ‘build big’ (even if it means losing your own garden). It is eye-popping, bizarre and in places – as popular Graven Hill designer Charlie Luxton puts it – utterly ‘joyous’.
But as with all experiments, there are stumbling blocks. Some residents and architects fear Graven Hill’s latest new-build homes veer sharply away from its original experimental ethos. There is concern, too, over the build quality of its affordable housing, consigned to rows of small terraced houses, as well as frustration at the lack of community facilities.
Graven Hill is being seen as a test case for self-build in the UK. Unlike countries such as Austria and Germany, where over half of all homes are custom built, the sector accounts for just 13,000 homes a year in Britain. Amid calls for the government to help scale up the industry, what lessons can be learned from Graven Hill?
The first of many striking things about the site is its sheer size. Cherwell Council bought the 188ha plot from the Ministry of Defence in 2014. A short drive from Bicester Village, it has its own wetland, a wooded hill formerly used for cross-country training and is surrounded by farmland.
Unsurprisingly, the self-build bonanza is a magnet for architects keen to fulfil ambitions to design their own homes
After deciding to dedicate the site to self-build, Cherwell drew up a business case and set up the wholly-owned Graven Hill Village Development Company (GHVDC) to run it. In 2015, Glenn Howells Architects drew up a masterplan that included a primary school, to be designed by Architype, a nursery and a community centre as well as shops, cafés and a pub.
It had design codes for 11 character areas, such as ‘tree-lined boulevards’ and ‘urban lanes’, and detailed ‘plot passports’ including roof and façade material palettes, as well as maximum build heights and parking space requirements. An early batch of 10 plots was released to the 10 ‘pioneer’ residents at a cut price of £100,000 each.
Walking around the self-build streets, the houses have far more variation than a standard housing development. But while there are zany moments – a stripey beach-hut house with a giraffe model lying in the driveway – most people have played it safer with muted colour palettes of greys and blues, oversized windows and a rash of garages.
Unsurprisingly, the self-build bonanza is a magnet for architects keen to fulfil ambitions to design their own homes. After the ‘pioneers’, Justin Metcalfe, an associate at Purcell, and his wife Catherine were first to sign up, reserving a three-to-four bed plot in a ‘rural lanes’ character area near the site entrance for £139,000.
‘We looked locally around Bicester and found a limited choice of three or four-bed homes around £400,000 to £500,000,’ he says. ‘Graven Hill provided a trade-off between affordability and taking on the risk of an untested housing delivery model.’
Justin and Catherine Metcalfe outside their self‑build home with a Charlie Luxton-designed self-build on the right
Metcalfe designed a tall detached family home with timber-clad façade, an open-plan living and kitchen area and a large top-floor master bedroom. Planning permission was ‘relatively straightforward’, he says, as a local development order for the site means designs are usually waved through in 28 days. Under its ‘Golden Brick’ set-up, Graven Hill built the foundations at a cost of £37,000 and then the couple project managed the build themselves with help from friends and family. In total, it cost them £435,000.
Robert DuNoyer, another architect, has realised his teenage dream of building himself a house, and used an insulated concrete formwork system clad in different materials. With his brother and a neighbour he spent two and a half years building; even pouring the concrete.
He enjoyed it so much, he is now picking up design work from other self-builders on site. ‘I’m getting work through word of mouth and carving out a niche,’ he says. ‘I like trying to make the client happy. I get a kick out of helping self-builders.’
There are still no amenities on site. The shops remain boarded up and the pub is now uncertain
But self-build is not easy and the slow pace of delivery has led Graven Hill to ‘evolve’ its original approach. ‘Even delivering the first 10 “pioneers” didn’t happen the way we expected it to,’ says GHVDC managing director Karen Curtin (one is still not yet finished). ‘It became very clear that if we were going to stick to just doing self-build, we would be waiting till 2050 to deliver the site.’
There are still no amenities on site. The community centre is a planning obligation only triggered once the development reaches a certain number of occupations. The shops remain boarded up (though a licensed café has just been announced) and the pub is now uncertain, with GHVDC saying it has struggled to find an operator given the challenges of the pandemic. It is now proposing changes to the masterplan.
Metcalfe says tenants are desperately needed to ensure the local centre becomes a thriving hub and believes GHVDC has added responsibility to be ‘custodians for the community’, especially as self-builders are preoccupied with their self-build plots.
To keep the development on track, the company opted to ‘diversify’ its product offer and began delivering its own custom-build homes. But this put it on a collision course with some of the self-builders, who say it is building exactly the type of ‘identikit’ housing they were seeking to escape.
‘You can make some changes to the internal layout, but the [GHVDC] homes are not really custom-build,’ says Paul Troop, a lawyer and one of the ‘pioneer’ builders who made his own house from scratch with sustainable materials such as hempcrete. He and most of his neighbours objected to a row of GHVDC-designed houses being built on plots originally designated as self-build.
He says Graven Hill was created to offer an ‘alternative way of building’ but instead it is now building ‘standard’ homes. ‘It’s a real missed opportunity because there is much that is really good about Graven Hill, and it’s much better than most developments,’ he remarks.
Troop’s neighbour Lynn Pratt had a tumultuous journey building her ‘Pangolin’ home with an oast house-inspired roundel, designed by Oxford-based Adrian James Architects. She loves her home but says the frustrations over Graven Hill’s new direction have left her feeling as if she ‘bought into a dream that now isn’t happening’. Pratt adds that prices are out of reach for most people, now that the larger plots cost £245,000 without foundations, and that the smaller plots are no longer available.
Tom Bennett, an associate at London practice Studio Bark, says in the early stages it was exciting to be involved in a ‘democratic’ project that confronted the ‘banality and mediocrity’ of so many new housing estates. Studio Bark’s black box house next to Pratt’s – dubbed the ‘Marmite house’ by its neighbours – was a chance to flex the practice’s creative skills and was the first project to use its U-Build modular system, designed with circular-economy principles.
A street of self-build homes on the Graven Hill development
But Bennett says it appears the experimental ethos has ‘gone by the wayside’ and that self-build is no longer front and centre. ‘Many of the more generic homes that have sprung up in the time since would not be out of place on a conventional estate of the type that Graven Hill was supposed to be challenging,’ he argues.
Curtin insists the houses it is building are ‘custom-build’ and do not all look the same. She is sympathetic to the self-builders, who, she says, have been up in the ‘wilderness’ on their own (an access road to the main site has still not been built) but argues that if the development isn’t built, the amenities won’t arrive. ‘What some of our self-builders would like – and this is where you get the tensions – is for every house to be different,’ she says.
These are issues elsewhere on site, including its affordable housing element, where little effort has been made to make it tenure-blind. The first phase of 93 affordable homes are in small terraces that contrast starkly with the blingy self-builds. Residents there say it has led to a palpable sense of socio-economic divide across the scheme.
There are also concerns over the build quality of the homes built by GHVDC. Residents in some of the shared ownership units, who wished to remain anonymous, are challenging the company over air-tightness which, they say, is causing top-floor bedrooms to be freezing in winter and boiling in summer. They claim independent tests show air leakage is significantly in excess of the rate given on their energy performance certificates.
Affordable housing built by GHVDC sits next to private housing by Beattie Passive
Passivhaus builder Beattie Passive, which built 49 homes for Graven Hill, is no longer working for the company. Its founder Ron Beattie told the AJ that, while he ‘took his hat off’ to Graven Hill for what it was trying to achieve, its margins were too tight and the programme was ‘pushed to the limit’.
In response, GHVDC says all contractors had determined the cost and programme to deliver works. As for the shared ownership homes, it says all tests carried out met performance standards that were significantly above Building Regulations.
Graven Hill is not getting everything right but experts in the UK’s self-build sector point out it is being held to higher standards than most developers, and that it does not have the backing of an established industry, as schemes would in mainland Europe.
‘Graven Hill is as successful as the typical average housebuilder in an environment that is still completely hostile to self-build,’ says Tory MP Richard Bacon, whose report last year urged the government to scale up the sector and give people an alternative to housing ‘designed by accountants’. He says the future of self-build is in lots of small sites dotted across the country with a ‘plot shop’ in every local planning authority.
Graven Hill’s residents – already a tight-knit group thanks to their arduous building journeys – are adamant the scheme can recapture its experimental spirit. All it needs is a little more design expertise, and to mine one of its greatest assets: the existing community’s energy and creativity.
As Troop says: ‘I’ve been blown away by the number of people who are interested in helping fix things, and getting things done. If Graven Hill harnessed it, they could do really, really well.’
Tags Cambridgeshire custom-build Grand Designs Graven Hill self-build
£100,000-250,000 per plot? The problem is right there – plots on the continent are much cheaper even when serviced. The problem with this country is someone is always on the make.
Golden brick refers to a problem in the UK tax system that remains unresolved. In simple terms new homes are Zero rated for tax so all VAT can be recovered , but sales of land is not Vatable. So to avoid a VAT charge on plot sales you must complete the build to the point where HMRC accept a house (and not for example a shop) will be constructed. If Graven Hill could get rid of this they would. This is a key recommendation of the Bacon Review.
@Andrew, ‘golden brick’ should be a relatively easy way to sidestep the 20% VAT on land transfers. But GH seem to have turned it into an obstacle to self-build by seemingly charging far more than the self-builder would be charged if they commissioned the foundations themselves. I don’t think GH make any profit from this – they have just failed to focus on bringing the foundation costs down sufficiently. It seems to be the third party contractors and consultants that GH rely on that are receiving the premium.
@Tom, yes, I’d tend to agree with you. I’m not an expert, but plot prices seem to be somewhat on the high side. Another issue that Graven Hill could look at is the foundation cost. The foundations are specified by Waterman’s and built by large contractors such as Careys. A more competitive process with alternative and smaller professionals / contractors could help to make self-build more accessible to a wider spread of people.
That foundation cost has me scratching my head. Are they building on a swamp – or what??
Maybe the ‘golden brick set-up’ refers to what the groundworker treats themselves to after finishing each job?
Golden brick refers to a problem in the UK tax system that remains unresolved. In simple terms new homes are Zero rated for tax so all VAT can be recovered , but sales of land is not Vatable. So to avoid a VAT charge on plot sales you must complete the build to the point where HMRC accept a house (and not for example a shop) will be constructed. If Graven Hill could get rid of this they would. This is a key recommendation of the Bacon Review.
@Andrew, the problem is not that there is a 20% VAT on land but not houses (as this can be avoided by the GH installing the foundations before the land transfer), but that GH seem to be charging far more than would be reasonable for the foundations, thus excluding many self-builders from the process.
Agree with the comments, I’ve looked into buying a plot, I found them overpriced, puts massive risk on the self builder, such that you need to be either an architect or builder, or happy to take the risk. The site should be completed by now but by charging such high prices it is putting off a large percentage of interested parties. Foundations prices are another problem, the single expensive contractor, despite the Oxfordshire clay is ridiculous. But because they are delaying the sales each plots foundations is done as a single project losing any economies of scale. Every time I’ve looked at the website there are hardly any plots, if any, on offer..the whole thing is just poorly managed.
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