Meet Mr Mew

When they approach the age of 80, most people are content to rest a little, look back on their past successes and do their best to forget their failures. Not so John Mew.

John, who becomes an octogenarian this September, is famed (some would say infamous) among the self-build community. He is the man who battled with the planners to build an authentic replica of a fortified mediaeval manor house on an island in a lake he created himself in a breathtakingly beautiful corner of south-east England.

Every Wednesday afternoon he drives from his home at Braylsham Castle in East Sussex to run a specialist orthodontics clinic, seeing children and their parents to advise them on how to deal with the problems of crooked teeth. Every Thursday he spends the entire day at a clinic in South London doing similar work.

During the rest of his time John, who in 2001 became the first (and so far only) recipient of the H&R Murray Armor Award for outstanding effort, undertakes a lot of charity work, is writing two books, and is just completing the two-year total renovation of a section of a 14th century former open hall house in Mayfield. In addition, he is organising what looks dangerously like a frantic 2008 itinerary that encompasses lecture tours of Jordan, Australia, Japan and probably parts of the USA.

During his packed – and often eccentric – life, John has been an inventor, an aviator, a sailor, an amateur Formula One racing driver, one-time garage owner, visiting orthodontics professor, social anthropologist, philosopher and the first person to import Japanese cars into the UK. He is, in his own words, ‘restless’, a ‘maverick’ and a ‘risk taker’.

His enthusiasms are manifold, but towards the very top of the list is the art of discussion. He also adores conversation — as long as it is brisk, stimulating and changes rapidly from topic to topic. Start talking about self-build, however, and he will very soon turn the conversation towards a host of other things, and inevitably his profession of dentistry, and his approach to his speciality — orthodontics, the branch of dentistry concerned with the growth of the teeth, jaws and face.

To those that know him well (and not so well) this constant flitting from subject to subject is infuriating. To Jo, his long-suffering wife, self-build partner and mother of his three grown-up children, it is why she married him. She smiles indulgently and says, “I married him because I knew I’d never be bored.”

Clearly the orthodontics establishment numbers among the infuriating – or rather infuriated – category. On the day I visited him John had just heard that he had been thrown out of The British Orthodontic Society. He was overtly indignant but there was an inward streak of glee. Perhaps this was because after 30 years of sniping he had at last achieved his never-declared objective of being ejected. Had the unorthodox orthodontist been goading them to expel him for all this time? Characteristically, there was no straight answer.

Amongst his many other qualities, John describes himself as ambitious. Fair enough — one somewhat perverse ambition achieved here; but what about the failures?

As an inventor John agrees that his career has been colourful, but far from illustrious. One of his very few inventions that was actually manufactured is the ‘Pelvic Thruster’ — a device to counteract distortion of the curvature of the spine when seated. I drove home to Oxfordshire from Braylsham Castle with a Pelvic Thruster between my back and the car seat. I can report that it seems very effective. John has half a shed full should you wish to buy one…

His career as an amateur racing driver was more successful. At Brands Hatch in the early 1960s he raced with such famous names as John Surtees and Jim Clark. He drove Lotus Ford 1100cc unsupercharged single seaters and still holds the lap record there for this type of racer. The reason for this is that a few days after he set up this record, the rules were changed.

His racing career finally ended when Jo and others had to pull him out of the wreckage of his car during a club race in 1966 at Snetterton circuit near Norwich and, defying the medics, drove him to Sussex lying on his back. He was checked out at East Grinstead hospital, where Jo worked as a physiotherapist at the time. Apart from a few bruises, all they could find wrong with him were two impacted wisdom teeth.

Jo loves to point out that the biggest joke of all was that as a 38-year-old dentist practising in Harley Street, he had not realised he had impacted wisdom teeth.

His mediaeval jousting career was more short-lived. He survived…

His skiing career is longer-lived. He still goes every February.

All this seems a long way away from social anthropology. John has no qualifications in this subject at all – his only qualification is in dentistry – but it has become a passion and he has completed seven chapters of a book on the subject provisionally entitled Let’s Behave Like Animals.

He is also part-way through a book on orthotropics, his approach to orthodontics which involves starting work on patients when young and using no surgery.

And so to self-build and Braylsham Castle. But first to his current project on a house dating from 1380 in the centre of Mayfield. I met John there early one February day in the crowded high street, trying to photograph it — his long lean professorial frame supporting a shock of tousled grey hair billowing in the hilltop breeze. A lightning tour, with a manic wave of a long arm here and there explained the total internal reorganisation of the three storey building, a lot of which he has carried out single-handedly.

John and Jo bought the building, which has wonderful views to the rear, in 2000. For many years it had been used as a shop and their task has been to convert the building back into a house. There is a possibility that he will eventually retire (not generally a word in John’s vocabulary) here when, as he puts it, “We are too ancient to continue living at the castle.”

This was followed by a brief diatribe about the local planning authority. It took me straight back to what was probably John’s most famous eccentricity at Braylsham — trying to persuade architect, builder and Building Control officer that there was no harm in building in a heavy list to one side. Along with the drawbridge it is probably Braylsham’s most famous feature. John refers to it as his “squiffy roof”.

Fifteen minutes later, having negotiated John and Jo’s extremely rough-approach road, we were inside Braylsham Castle, four miles to the south. It was my third visit and I still found it impossible not to stop as I followed John’s car through the gate, to gaze, wonder and reach for my camera.

To me the funniest of the many hilarious stories about Braylsham Castle and its eccentric builder rebounded rather unflatteringly on John. In April 2000, having completed the castle and attracted much press comment, he had an idea. Like most of John’s ideas, it was simple and bold. Prospective self-builders were invited, through advertisements, to spend a day, or part of a day, or even a whole weekend – at a cost – at the castle, gaining John’s advice and views on their self-build projects, and in particular, their renovations. In his literature, entitled John Mew, Exterior Designer, he pulls no punches. “John Mew,” it states “is confident that… any scheme he recommended would increase the value of your home by at least twice the amount it cost, and failing this his fee would be returned.”

To this day he has had no takers for the scheme — to Jo’s intense relief.

We discussed this and other failures over lunch. As a self-confessed ambitious man, how does John regard failures such as this? Naturally there was no convenient answer to hand. Instead the conversation moved on to the definition of a ‘crank’ and whether the word has any current meaning. John was holding forth on this when I interrupted him to ask whether people on occasions find him intimidating.

John conceded this, and rapidly explained why. The reason, he explained, lies in his philosophy of ‘Conceptualising’.

“I start with the basis that there is a reason for everything,” he says. “Many years ago I began applying this piece of logic to everything around me. I had only to see two related incidents and would form a theory. On the third occurrence I would test the fit and then form a hypothesis. Often they did not fit and the theory would require adaptation, but on other occasions they provided a good base for further rationalisation. This process led me to believe that the underlying rules of nature were relatively straightforward and the truth, in retrospect, was usually simple.”

He admits this form of verbal shorthand can infuriate people because it leads to his flitting from subject to subject. Right or wrong, this approach has failed so far to help him and Jo to solve their current dilemma:

If you build a mediaeval-style castle on an island in a lake for £350,000, discover seven years later that it is worth several million, take the decision to leave it to the nation and then find the process impossibly complicated, what do you do? Even John Mew can’t crack that one — at present.

And the social anthropology bit? “Ah well,” he says. “We are attracted to old buildings because they make us feel secure, so if you are going to build new, make it look ancient.”

Read more about Braylsham Castle...

Further reading:

• An Arts & Crafts House Built using Reclaimed Materials
• Rebuilding with Recalimed Materials
• The Traditional Self-build That Took 35 YearsM