Gabion: Toyota in Suburbia 1/5

There is something about Surrey. It is, perhaps, the most perfectly realised English state of living. It looks a bit like the countryside, but it isn't really the countryside. There are lots of trees and green bits, but lots of buildings sprinkled in among them. It has identifiable towns, but they tend to blur together. It is not a city, but it is close to the city. It is the most homey of all the Home Counties, and possibly the one with the lowest profile. It is one huge garden suburb, an ad-hoc realisation of the dreams of Ebenezer Howard. Garden suburbs must provide employment, and this, Surrey duly does. Look at the new Toyota building outside Epsom. It knows what it's all about. It knows that Surrey is M25 corridor, business-park land. But it tries a little bit harder.

Surrey has its moments - J.G. Ballard's golden vision of Shepperton, developed through a whole sequence of novels, is one of them. Michael Frayn and John Osborne were brought up in Ewell. Punk rebels like Sham 69 came from Surrey. It has its Lutyens houses and its Jekyll gardens, often together. There are - let's be fair - some agreeably rural bits, out beyond the motorway. It has a slightly sinister Edward Maufe cathedral in Guildford. It has a quite reasonable Nick Grimshaw building at the nearby University of Surrey. Epsom Racecourse has its Richard Horden Queen's Stand, which for all its modernity is a positively Shakespearian inhabited wall of a building. So there are good things to be found, and we're getting close, for Epsom is where Toyota GB chose to relocate its headquarters. What's more, they ran a competition for it. A kosher, Royal Institute of British Architects-administered contest.

The result is interesting, because it shows that these days there's not nearly such a divide between "commercial" and "personality" firms of architects as there used to be. The personality firms are now as commercial as anyone else, while the commercial firms have upped their game, recruited fresh talent and learned quite a few tricks from - usually - the high-tech pioneers. Thus it was that the competition for Toyota GB included a mix of both types - in the final cut Grimshaw, Nick Hare, Aukett and Sheppard Robson were represented and the winner was - Sheppard Robson.