Ugly? That's my uncle Roy's old house!!

My mother, 93 last Sunday, has been staying with us for the past few days.

Yesterday I took her to see her brother Roy in West Mersea in Essex where he lives with his wife Sarah.

I’ve written about Uncle Roy before. Like my grandfather before him, he was a GP with a keen interest in boxing that led, eventually, to him becoming chairman of the British Olympic Association Medical Committee.

In his younger days he was also an amateur racing driving whose luck eventually ran out when he rolled his Mk1 Lola-Climax once too often and my aunt ‘suggested’ he quit for the sake of his young family.

Anyway, back in the Sixties, before my family moved to Scotland, we would visit them in Colchester, where Roy and Sarah had moved shortly after getting married.

It helped that my grandparents on my mother’s side had also moved to Colchester, following my grandfather's retirement a few years later, because that enabled us to see them at the same time.

In fact, we could see the back of Roy and Sarah’s house from my grandparents’ house, which brings me to the point of this post.

I was chatting to Sarah over lunch yesterday when she mentioned that their old architect-designed house (above) had featured in a Channel 4 TV programme a few years ago, and not in a good way.

Ugly House to Lovely House with George Clarke features leading architects transforming ‘some of Britain's most unloved homes’.

Ugly house? Unloved homes?!!

It’s true, says Sarah (who wasn’t the least bit bothered by their old home being traduced in this way), that the house looked dated and had a slightly strange layout, but that was because it was designed in 1962 as a family home and doctor’s surgery, with two rooms being allocated for use as a surgery and waiting room.

I imagine there was also a separate entrance for patients.

By today’s standards, the original house certainly looks ‘of its time’ but when it was built it was considered extremely modern, and I remember it reasonably well.

Thanks to the large windows it was very bright. The sitting room, on the first floor above what I think must have been the surgery, seemed enormous, and there was a modern, open plan feel to the place.

Subsequent owners seem to have built a two-storey extension at the side of the house and knocked down an internal wall creating an even larger kitchen/diner/living room.

The major crime, however, was adding a horrible boxed porch to the front of the house.

I remember going there for Christmas lunch one year and that was an eye-opener because it was the first year I discovered that other families have different traditions on Christmas Day.

I was surprised, for example, that we had to wait until late afternoon for ‘lunch’. (I believe it was because Roy had to visit patients on Christmas Day. Can you imagine GPs doing that today?)

At home Christmas lunch was normally done and dusted in time for the Queen’s Speech at 3.00.

But the bigger surprise was that my cousins weren’t allowed to open their presents until 5.00pm because my sister and I always opened our presents at 7.00am sharp.

But I digress.

From Ugly House to Lovely House is available on the Channel 4 app and I have to say it’s extraordinarily rude about the original building which is described as looking like a ‘block of flats’.

The original architect is invited to comment and he is remarkably gracious - on screen at least - about the criticism of his work.

According to the programme (first broadcast in 2017), the budget for modernising the house was £150,000, but the final cost of reburbishment, which included an impressive new extension at the back, was nearer £250,000.

The irony is that while the re-fashioned house does look better and more practical to modern eyes, from the front it could easily pass for a small modern office and my guess is that in another 50 or 60 years it will look just as dated as the original building does now.

Below: Trailer for Ugly House to Lovely House: 60s house transformed into modern home. The full progamme, Colchester Revisit – is on the Channel 4 app.