The disappearing castle

The other day, I went to see a castle in the Surrey countryside, a few miles outside Redhill.

To reach it, I have to turn off a country lane and pick my way through a ramshackle industrial estate of converted aluminium farm sheds: body-spray shops, welders, window-fitters, that sort of thing.

And there it is: rising up incongruously in the back corner of the yard. A patch of gravel is swept up around it. The gravel apparently delineates the boundary between light industry and stately home. Outside the castle sits a yellow sports car, plus a couple of dogs. The flag on top is flying full mast, proudly indicating occupancy – defiantly, in fact, in the circumstances ...

The castle is a curious thing. The yard-facing side is a rustic manor house: a triple-gabled half-timbered upper story above a ground floor of honey-coloured brick upon a rusticated masonry base.

On nearer inspection, the thick oak timbers are well-joined, but very slightly wonky – pleasingly so, like hand-cut chips. A curvy pattern is carved into the bargeboard. The windows look like they might have been recovered as units from some place else.   In themselves they are nothing special, but they are cleverly made to meld into the facade by the simple expedient of their white-painted jambs being cased in strips of timber stained the same grey-ish colour as the rest of the woodwork. The bottom beams of the half-timbering to the right and left are supported by rows of cute wooden corbels. The bottom beam of the central section is without under-supports, apparently relying instead on the spiritual support of an inscription, carved in a cheery script: “WE THANK GOD FOR JESUS”.

The back of the building is rather different in its concept. The sides give a clue as to what that concept is.  Here you witness the end gable of the half-timbered frontage being arrested, half way down its slope, by an impressive two-storey, round tower complete with battlements. The join is nonchalant, as if being gobbled up by a defensive turret were the most natural thing to happen to an end gable.

Stroll around to the back, and the castle really reveals itself. The tower is matched with another on the other flank, and the pair dominate this aspect. The pedimented central section, between the towers, is nonetheless impressive, featuring a two-storey muntined and mullioned Tudor mansion-style window. The overall effect is like that of Penshurst Place crossed with a Henrican sea fort (say Deal or Walmer castle).

This place – Honeycrock Castle – isn't National Trust property. It isn't a listed building. It isn't mentioned in Pevsner's Buildings of England (hence my attempt at a Pevsneresque record above, for posterity....). Nor will it ever be. For one things, Pevsner only does extant structures, and by the time its Surrey volume is next updated, Honeycrock Castle will likely be long gone. In fact, it must be demolished within the next 90 days, on the order of Reigate and Banstead Borough Castle. Otherwise its owner could end up in prison.

The back-story, which I had read about in the national press, is crazier than the design itself. In short, it goes like this. The building was put up in 2002 by Robert Fidler, a farmer. Mr Fiddler kept the construction secret. Why? Because he hadn't obtained planning permission (apparently, he was in some sort of dispute with the council and surmised that there was no hope of getting consent – probably correctly, as this is Green Belt land). How did he keep it a secret? By shielding the emerging building with a curtain of 40-feet high stacks of hay bales and tarpaulin, that's how! (One doesn't like to link to the Mail Online, but their story does have a helpful picture.)  What's even more crazy is that after he'd finished the building, and indeed moved in with his family, the hay bays remained for a further four years, and the family told no-one that they were living there. This was a crucial part of the plan, because Mr Fiddler was hoping to invoke a planning rule which basically grants an amnesty for unlawful buildings that stand for long enough without anyone registering an objection.

When the building was finally “unveiled” in 2006, the local council, understandably, was not best pleased. After all, the subterfuge in keeping the building secret (surely) defeated entirely the purpose of the amnesty rule that Mr Fiddler was seeking to exploit, namely by denying anyone who might have considered objecting the necessary information to do so. At any rate, a 9-year legal battle ensued, culminating (to cut a long story short) with a decision, a few weeks ago, by Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, to back the council's original decision that the house be torn down.

Which is a shame. For this is an original, and truly beautiful building. I venture to say as much to Mr Fiddler (who looks like an ageing rocker, with his blonde mullet and weather-beaten face), when I come to see him and his doomed home.

“It is beautiful” he agrees. “Everyone who's seen it says it's beautiful. The only people who don't think so are the council, and this Eric Pickles. ... They're just jealous, I suppose.”

Hmm. Difficult to say whether jealousy is the most plausible interpretation of the authorities' motivations, as opposed to say, I don't know, their duty to uphold the integrity of the planning system and an understandable desire to ensure that the rules are not subverted. But certainly, on an aesthetic level, this guy's achievement is stunning given this was a self-build project.  It was supposedly done for £50,000 – less than some spend on kitchens these days.  There cannot have been any professional architectural input (it is a big no-no for an architect to sign off on a project without planning permission).  If anything could make a planning inspector envious it would be this.

According to the articles I read, it seems that much of the material is reclaimed.  The reclaimed material includes, most impressively of all, the two towers, which were reported to be made from of old grain silos from the farm and dragged in position. I half didn't believe this, so I asked Mr Fiddler. But he confirmed that it was true, and, moreover, pointed out a couple of other grain silos on the site, which, thrillingly, do correspond to the towers (see their distinctive tin roofs):

It's this sort of inspired leap – here a dramatic re-purposing – that is the difference between a merely inoffensive design and design that causes positive delight. As Will Wiles points out in a particularly perceptive blog piece about Poundbury (the famously creepy-feeling traditionalist estate in Dorset built by the Prince of Wales) the charm of old English villages, the charm that Poundbury tries but conspicuously fails to recreate, comes from a sense of “adaptation, evolution, improvisation and development … local people problem-solving and expanding over time”. Well, Honeycrock Castle has been around less than 15 years but has that kind of charm in spades, with its bodged, borrowed and beautiful appearance. You can sort of see how it is put together – it is intelligible; it makes sense.

It's also an incredibly well-handled design. Sure, it's in a non-contemporary style. If that alone makes it a “pastiche” (and I'm not sure, strictly-speaking, that it does, but anyway...), it's a pastiche. Fine. But it's far from unoriginal. You could ask 10,000 architects to do a “mock-Tudor” family home, and none would look anything like this. And yet – and this is the genius of the building – it doesn't achieve that level of individuality by being simply wacky, a series of arbitrary design decisions linked together by nothing more than their sheer proximity in physical space.

One bit flows naturally, logically on to the next. As earlier mentioned, the join between the rustic house to the front and the fort to the back looks serenely natural. This is achieved partly by the sensible decision to continue the yellow-brick of the front around the tower and the back, partly by sensitive balancing of the mass of the two parts, and partly, possibly crucially, by the clever way in which the side-gable is notionally buried in the tower and a section of the tower is, reciprocatingly, absorbed by the bulk of the house, literally fusing the two. The use of similar casement windows around both sides also helps.

There are neat tie-ins like this on all scales. I particularly like the mellifluous flourish, in the big double-height window at the back, of the top two central units being taller, by just half a pane, than the two flanking units, subtly reflecting the incline of the pediment above. At a more detailed level, there is a consistent programme right around the building of creating lintels with the short end of bricks, laid vertically, in a straight, horizontal row across the doorways, as flattened arches across the windows.

The overall appearance is, throughout, fun, engaging without being domineering, and pleasing to the eye.

What would I have done if I were Eric Pickles? Apart from, that is (... insert joke about trying to lose a lot of weight here). Ask my cabinet colleague the Culture Secretary to list it straight away, that's what. Sure, it's not a historic building. But that's not an invariable requirement. According to government guidelines“buildings of less than 30 years old are normally listed only if they are of outstanding quality and under threat”. This is a building that is of genuinely outstanding quality, and very much under threat. As an instance of English eclecticism, Honeycrock Castle is the equal, in my opinion, of some of the work of Norman Shaw, say, and quite a bit better than a lot of stuff by the bewilderingly feted Edwin Lutyens. It has become in/famous as a result of the press coverage surrounding the affair, and has seemingly wormed its way into people's affections in the process (I recall an appreciative piece in Private Eye a few years back during an earlier stage of the legal battle; there are also a lot of appreciative comments below the recent news articles). If something as inspiring, original and as well-loved can be torn down that makes a mockery of the Listed Buildings scheme. Or do only buildings by professional architects count?

Is saving an "illegal" building on grounds of its architectural worth to condone wrongdoing? Sometimes, indeed, the crimes associated with the genesis of a work are so heinous that they obliterate all possible consideration of its intrinsic merit. Albert Speer comes to mind. (Although one must point out that at least one person tried even in his case: Leon Krier, Prince Charles's mate, mentioned above, wrote an appreciative book about him, which you might wish to pick up on Amazon so long as you are, like Krier, prepared to overlook the fact all of that particular war criminal's oeuvre was banal, monumental shit, quite apart from it quite literally forming the backdrop to a horrific, genocidal regime). Robert Fiddler is not, repeat not, Albert Speer. What he did in building without obtaining planning consent, together with his silly attempt to deceive the authorities, is not really justifiable, but lacking justification is not the same as being despicable. His wrongdoing – breach of the Town and Country Planning Act - is not so serious, so morally dumbfounding, that we can't separate the crime from the art, and be moved to want to save the later.

The other argument against is that this would set a bad precedent. Mr Fiddler would walk away with a windfall. People would be encouraged to build in breach of the rules in the hope of a similar redemption. This fear doesn't really add up though. The long and the short of the matter is that in building without permission, Mr Fiddler took a massive risk. Unless his house turned out to be an architectural triumph – as, improbably enough, it did – it was liable to end being condemned. Others starting out would be facing the same risk, and I doubt that many would be prepared to run it. The combination of talent and foolhardiness that exists in Mr Fiddler is not a common one.

Why did indeed Mr Fiddler carry out his loopy plan to hide his castle? Did he really think it would work? I didn't push my luck in the very brief, impromptu 'interview' I had with him by asking this (I had just turned up completely unannounced, after all).

I did ask, though, what he planned to do next. He'd have to comply with the order and take the building down, he said.

He also told me that the government, “... ironically enough” given what he had done with the grain silos, had recently brought in new rules allowing for the conversion of agricultural buildings into dwellings. So now he was applying to convert the other pair of silos across the yard in situ into a new house. If he was allowed to do that, he said, at least he might then be able re-use some of the materials from the castle.

I wished him luck.