A History of Self Build - Part One

It’s not often that a seemingly minor and, at the time, largely unreported passage in a Government Finance Bill has such an impact on the lives of 10,000s of people. It’s even more remarkable to put across that the man who is the reason that self-build is what it is today is not Kevin McCloud – more of him later – but that other less-celebrated object of housewifely desire, Edward Heath, the Prime Minister of the time, and his Chancellor, Anthony Barber. Because, if any one moment could be viewed as the point at which self-building really became a realistic and attractive option for ordinary people, it was the rather humbly named ‘Clause 3’ of the 1972 Finance Act.

The Clause, introduced as part of a raft of changes to kickstart the UK housing market out of a previous crisis, for the first time recognised a growing group of individuals who were building houses for themselves to live in. The clause, now known as Notice 719, outlined details for ‘‘Do It Yourself ’ Builders and Converters’ to enjoy the same VAT refund on labour and materials that mainstream housing developers would enjoy. Finally there was a level playing field and, with this seemingly minor piece of Government legislation, the modern self-build movement that we know today was born. The story of individual homebuilding, of course, goes back much further.

ABOVE: The first issue of Individual Homes (it changed its name to Homebuilding & Renovating in 1997) featured great building plots for £25,000 and build costs well under £80,000

The history of housebuilding is the history of individual homebuilding, with the commercial housebuilding developers that we all love to hate only really forming in the period after the wars. Of course, local small-scale development was responsible for many of the Georgian and Victorian estates of the 18th and 19th century as well as those built in the great housebuilding booms of the 1930s and postwar periods. But it was individual commission – a hands-off, high-end strand of self-build that still exists to this day – that was responsible for many of the great homes of the 18th and 19th centuries.

While this form of ‘self-building’ continues, the average citizen found it very difficult to consider building their own home for the majority of the 20th century. Builders’ merchants were very different beasts to the (relatively) welcoming places they are today, and individuals wishing to build their own home were excluded from many of the channels that they tried to go down. Architects were not really trained to help people build their own homes and would view commissions as their chance to create something that they, rather than the client, would appreciate (some might argue nothing much has changed!) The fine tradition of individual homebuilding was slowly fading away.

ABOVE: Renovators are very much part of the selfbuild community, and are responsible for some of the most impressive projects we’ve covered

Enter, stage left, a man who was determined to change all this. Murray Armor’s life story is remarkable and has been told recently in this magazine but, in short, Murray and his wife were lucky enough to win a significant amount of money on a 1960s TV game show on their honeymoon in the United States and came back determined to build their own home, investing their winnings in an overgrown orchard in Nottinghamshire. Murray’s experiences of frustration at the lack of advice and information to the would-be selfbuilder led him to form a company with associate Len Rees called Rationalised Building Systems — the UK’s first self-build package company. From then on, he set up several more package companies (including one that still operates today with great success, Design & Materials) and wrote the seminal Building Your Own Home, now in its 18th edition and continued – and improved – by his close friend David Snell, Contri - buting Editor to Homebuilding & Renovating.

Murray was much more than an entrepreneur and author, however. He was above all a passionate advocate of self-build and lobbied hard for legislation and infrastructure to make life easier for today’s self-builders — which resulted directly in the VAT changes being introduced in 1994.

At the same time, self-building was beginning to gain interest on a more national scale. One of today’s best-known package companies, Potton, produced a centrepiece showhouse at an Ideal Home Show in the late 1970s; but it was in fact a notorious World in Action programme of 1983, which claimed to show that the new ‘timber frame homes’ were in fact fire risks, that ended up pushing self-build into the minds of timber frame manufacturers. The programme led to a catastrophic fall in the number of commercial developers using timber frame for fear of public opinion, leading timber frame suppliers to hunt out new markets to sell their wares. Self-builders – fervently independent and always insistent on using evidence to form their own opinions – were just the market to help the timber frame industry out — again, a relationship that has continued to this day, despite the reappraisal of timber on the part of the commercial housebuilding industry.

The Changing Face of Homebuilding & Renovating

We take a look at some of our evolving covers that have graced the magazine over the years:

Read Part Two