The full version of the article published in The Sunday Times, 11.11.01, as “Fashion hits home”
Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway are, I suspect, about to run into a lot of sneery criticism - much of it from jealous architects. These wealthy ex-fashion designers have done what architects have mostly failed to do for decades. They have persuaded one of Britain’s leading mass housebuilders - Wimpey Homes - to rethink its product and invest in good design. On a grand scale.
Wayne Hemingway has long been an outspoken critic of what he calls “the Barrattification of Britain” - by which he means not just the output of that particular company, but all of the mass housebuilders. He is not alone. Recently, everyone from Sir Terence Conran to the government’s active new buildings watchdog, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, have been weighing in. But the Hemingways, and Wimpey, have stolen a march on everyone. The “Staiths South Bank” on the Tyne riverside at Dunston in Gateshead, will be Wimpey’s biggest UK housing development. They intend it to be a blueprint for a better kind of housing. The designs will be launched later this week.
Wayne believes that Britain’s housebuilders all complacently turn out the same old product - upgraded to meet new building regulations, but otherwise scarcely changed in appearance or materials for a century - without bothering to innovate. They do this on the grounds that the stuff sells - so people must like it. But, he warns, that was what Marks and Spencer, or C&A, used to think. And they found themselves overtaken by a changing market with frightening speed. “Marks and Sparks was a British institution that people thought was inviolable, and it reduced by a third almost overnight. It could happen anywhere. That’s a wake-up call to companies like Wimpey.”
