Author: business

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At the Openreach Regional Learning Centre in Bishops Stortford on a wet afternoon, I’m kitted out in safety-harness and helmet, standing in front of a thicket of telegraph poles, ready to climb. Openreach, the infrastructure arm of BT that owns and manages poles, cables and cabinets, sends its engineers on three-day climbing courses to train them to work at height. “When you’re at the top of your pole it sort of becomes your office,” says Openreach engineer Greg Jones. I put my foot on the first pole-step and, after a slow start, shimmy up in a kind of panic, afraid my courage might leave me. “Because of the nerves and lack of sleep the night before, this course is the most rewarding,” laughs Jones.

Britain’s 4.2mn telegraph poles are a largely overlooked feature of the landscape — which is much of their charm. But their quiet, diminutive power — in stark contrast with pylons, the steel towers supporting electricity lines, that can reach 68 metres in height — is perhaps due a reappraisal. Several thousand new pylons must be built to carry the 620 miles of new power lines needed for the UK government’s 2030 clean energy targets. Environmentalists are concerned and rural communities are protesting. Signs in the Scottish highland village of Brora read “Save Carrol rock and Loch Brora from giant pylons”. 

Telegraph poles were first erected in the 1840s to carry telegraph wires, and from the 1880s carried electricity. They expanded in number during the age of the telephone and — endlessly adaptable — have since remained a constant, supporting cable television and broadband services. Today, almost all are maintained by Openreach — which acts as a quasi-landlord for its poles, allowing network providers to use them. 

To many, it may come as a surprise that telegraph poles are even still in use, but digging and laying cables is energy intensive, and for crossing large tracts of land the pole remains a solid alternative and a sustainable one: they can last 50 years, while some have exceeded a century or more. 

One pole in Ingleby, Lincolnshire, was installed 131 years ago, and remains in active service, according to Openreach. In 2013, a pole dated 1894 was donated to The Orkney Museum, Scotland, where it has lain in storage-space slumber ever since. “I remember being quite exasperated with it,” says curator Ellen Pesci, “but an attached piece of paper stated its claim as the oldest telegraph pole in Britain. I realised I couldn’t just put it in the skip.” Openreach, however, dates another of its poles, now removed from the network, to 1878.

Martin Evans, founder of the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society (TPAS) follows the fate of the UK’s telegraph poles with a watchful eye, often through binoculars. He has been a superfan since childhood. “They always pleased me aesthetically,” he says. “As a boy, I used to look out the window and anthropomorphise them.” When he set up his society’s webpage in the 1990s it was an opportunity to write humorously about something he loved, but now, with his “Pole of the Month” feature, the annual TPAS calendar and Telegraph Pole Appreciation Day on September 21, he finds his passion shared, if niche. Paid members total 1,300.

For Evans, telegraph poles have a whimsical poetry. He is not alone in waxing lyrical. In “The Railway Children” poet Seamus Heaney describes their white cups and sizzling wires and how “like lovely freehand they curved for miles . . . sagging under their burden of swallows”. Eric Ravilious paid homage to them criss-crossing the rural landscape in his painting “Wiltshire Landscape”. And Australian sound artist Alan Lamb, who died in April, made field recordings of wind whistling through telegraph wires; the best known is “Night Passage” (1998), recently reissued, created on his Faraway Wind Organ — a set of 12 abandoned poles and six wires in Western Australia, which Lamb bought and reimagined as a vibrating sound world. 

Evans also has his own pole. “I bought it a few years ago for a house we lived in near Welshpool,” he says. “When we first put it up, my wife said, ‘what are you doing?’” Eventually, though, “she saw it for the beautiful thing it was”. 

Openreach has partnered with the RSPB to encourage its engineers to volunteer for the charity and help install nest boxes

And who hasn’t been struck by their beauty on long countryside walks, where they peg out fields and river banks, some carrying a multitude of wires on a brace of cross-arms, others so shaggy with ivy that they are more tree than pole, with the look of the wild?

The telegraph pole’s story begins in a Nordic forest. According to Openreach, every year, the UK imports around 75,000 Scots pine poles from Norway, Sweden and Finland; the trees are already some 200 years’ old by the time they are harvested to replace ones that have been removed from the Openreach network. The coldness of the Nordic winters — as low as -25 degrees — slows the trees’ growth to one metre every 10 years, which makes the wood densely packed and highly durable. 

Once they arrive in the UK, the pole is checked by a pole-tester, an eccentric sounding job, with an eccentric piece of kit. “They use a Resistograph, which looks like something out of Ghostbusters,” says Shayne Addington, regional learning manager for Openreach in London and Essex. “It inserts a metal needle into the wood that can detect decay”. Other times, engineers test the wood by hitting the pole with a 1lb hammer. “A non-decayed pole will sound metallic, whereas decay will be more of a thud,” says Addington.

Already, I’m imagining a soundscape of pole-tapping engineers, enhanced by woodpecker accompaniment, as these birds have a particular taste for telegraph poles. The synergy between birds and poles is embraced by the aptly named Abby Chicken, head of sustainability at Openreach. Last year, Openreach created a partnership with the RSPB conservation unit to encourage its engineers to volunteer for the charity and help install nest boxes. 

Evans’s favourite telegraph pole is in Gwynedd, Wales, which he calls “The Lost Pole of Bala Leisure Centre”, and features on the July page of this year’s calendar. “It doesn’t sound very romantic, does it?” he admits of the redundant pole, shorn of its wires, overgrown and tagged with a red “D” plate (meaning defective but not necessarily decayed). “It’s not the Lost Sands of Kalahari, is it?” But Evans is drawn to its whiskery charisma and its well-endowed stave of wooden arms.

Back at the summit of my own pole, I can understand his obsession. I stand, arms outstretched, with the wireless words of “Wichita Lineman” breezing through my head.

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Maria Speake was approaching the end of her degree at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, part of the Glasgow School of Art, when she informed her tutors that she wanted to create a salvage yard for her final year dissertation. It was the early 1990s.

“That went down like a lead balloon,” she recalls, perched on a long, sleek sofa in her airy Kensal Green studio. “They couldn’t understand how that might make a building, or how fragments of buildings are important enough in themselves.” She’d even found the perfect site for the project, next to the city’s 37-acre Victorian cemetery: “I was totally in love with the Necropolis. I love the architecture of death.” 

That particular project may have been doomed, but it was just part of her quest to breathe new life into old and discarded materials — decades before upcycling would come to have the caché and understanding it does today. With her fellow student Adam Hills she was skip-diving to rescue furniture, lighting and fixtures cast off from renovations and demolitions, to restore his Victorian flat in Glasgow’s West End. The pair had already developed a business plan to conserve the architectural materials that were routinely being dumped and destroyed with breathtaking gusto across the city.

Their pioneering firm Retrouvius was founded in 1993 — the name is a portmanteau of “retro” and “Vitruvius”, the Roman architect, engineer and author of the 12-volume treatise De architectura. 

Over the past three decades, it has become arguably the most high-profile purveyor of — and flag-bearer for — architectural salvage. Today it is both a retail business and an interior design studio, headed up by Speake, that reimagines how reclaimed materials can be used.

Now she has written a book, Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage, bringing together 14 interiors projects — from elegant London town houses to a 16th-century Umbrian farmhouse and a harbourside home in the Hebrides — along with essays that chart the company’s evolution and influence.

Actress Helena Bonham Carter, a client, who wrote the foreword for the book, describes Speake as a “white witch”. Others call her a “house doula” or “shaman” for her ability to reimagine, rebirth and reconfigure architectural spaces.

“I don’t ever believe there’s one solution or two solutions,” says the warm, endlessly inquisitive Speake. “So I quite enjoy the bit where you turn everything on its head again and go, ‘OK, that’s just not working at the moment. Let’s completely have a rethink. Let’s step back.’”

When Speake and Hills started out, their clients were often, like them, restoring homes and needed period pieces — doors, shutters, fireplaces, cast iron baths (they supplied the loo for the infamous scene in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting — sourced from the demolition of a tax office in East Kilbride). Back then, salvaging was about sourcing materials cheaply, but also about conservation and a sense of history — a sentiment that still drives them. “People have always loved the story, the narrative,” says Speake. 

One of their earliest big salvage operations was in March 1998 at the Townhead Library in Glasgow. At the start of the 20th century the grand Italianate building was gifted to the city, along with 13 other libraries, by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Back in blissfully red-tape free days, Hills had organised a road closure, hired articulated lorries, employed a team of specialists and a crane and worked through the night to save as much as he could. The following day the building was razed to the ground.

The Retrouvius look that Speake has developed is hard to define — each project is stylistically distinct, but all of them are multi-layered, highly textured, elegant and characterful in their own ways. As Hills says, “when they’re newly finished, they do not look brand new.” 

Speake grew up in Oxfordshire with a sharpened appreciation of history and storytelling. Her mother, Birgitte, worked as head of conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum of natural history, while her father, George Speake, an art historian and archaeologist, would take her on childhood visits to country churches and manor houses. When she was 15, a trip to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge — where the merging of old cottages and a new extension provides a backdrop to a collection of furniture, art, and textiles — made her realise she wanted to pursue architecture as a career, playing on those childhood values. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to take the reclaimed option, but often it’s surprisingly easy and we try and show that through design

“People always talk about tactility,” adds Speake. “They just want to touch stuff. There’s this material quality; you just want to go ‘what is that?’ Or ‘what have they done on the walls here?’” In her work, materials are spliced, flipped and reconfigured so that it is frequently difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s salvaged and what’s not. Some of her favourite materials are used over and over, but in different ways. 

Fossilised Derbyshire limestone is one example — 200 tonnes were lifted from Frederick Gibberd’s 1955 Heathrow Terminal 2 concourse when it was demolished in 2010, and it appears in multiple Retrouvius projects, including an imposing fire surround for designer Bella Freud’s west London flat. Sections of patterned mirror, rescued from the art deco Unilever building on London’s Victoria embankment, were cut and assembled into a glamorous bathroom splashback in another project for Freud. 

Fluted terrazzo columns, salvaged from Liverpool department store Lewis’s, are reimagined as a spectacular backdrop in a 1960s St John’s Wood apartment. Speake describes her approach as “a carpet bomb of rich, unusual, rescued materials to build up texture; tactile and sensual; a jewel box of details.” 

Retrouvius HQ is spread across two sites in Kensal Green, north London. The pair first bought an old stable here in 1999, but they have expanded through a warren of rooms that now serve as a store-meets-warehouse. Speake’s design studio is just up the road. Hidden behind a row of Victorian terraces and entered through a garage door, the two-storey courtyard studio is built in a patchwork of materials that are densely interwoven in a sort of architectural game of Tetris. There are metal railings from the London School of Economics (with sections reshaped to make them more playful and contemporary); travertine columns sit among warm teak and sapele timber on the exterior walls; rusty panels are fixed with visible bolts; and huge windows (rescued from their children’s primary school) are flipped on their sides.

The playground for experimentation continues inside. In a deeply glamorous shower room, those travertine columns appear again, with a rich green marble floor. But here Speake contrasts both with contemporary wall tiles. “I need to keep it a bit calm,” she says.

There are walls in textural clay, clad in pitch pine reclaimed from old shutters, or covered in rich brown suede salvaged from leather panels in Old Marylebone Town Hall. “We’d had them for years and years, and no one wanted them,” says Speake. One day Hills decided to open them up, revealing a far more alluring suede on the reverse side. 

A constant curiosity propels her. “You’ve got to keep learning and responding. With every project, I think ‘what am I going to learn from this? What are we all going to gain from this?’” says Speake. Each project is “a big commitment”, taking “a minimum of two or three years of your life. So that’s why they all look quite distinct; we choose different projects with different challenges. It just makes it more interesting.” 

Over the past 10 years the focus on reuse has taken on a new urgency, as we all carefully consider the impact of what we buy and consume. In construction, those concerns are at scale. Even if her entire career has been focused on showing people the potential of discarded materials — which can often be far better quality than anything sourced new — interior design projects still present an ethical conundrum. “Every single one of our projects has to go through a process of stripping out, and there is a moment where I think ‘are we part of the problem as well?’ And you genuinely start to worry about that,” she says. “But at the same time, I do think that change is a human thing.” 

She used to describe their work as parasitic, feeding off a world of fragments from the past. “I don’t feel like that anymore,” she admits. “Sometimes it’s difficult to take the reclaimed option, but often it’s surprisingly easy and we try and show that through design. It has always been about encouraging and empowering.”

“Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage: Designing Homes from a Philosophy of Re-use” by Maria Speake (Rizzoli)

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Birmingham-born Laurie Baker had served as an anaesthetist in China during the second world war, but it was a stop off on his way home that came to define his career. Baker — who had completed a degree in architecture in 1937 — was stranded for three months waiting for a boat in what was then called Bombay, now Mumbai, and it was there that he met Mahatma Gandhi. They discussed the need for hands-on architecture in the context of India’s widespread deprivation, and Gandhi urged him to return as soon as possible. In 1945 he did so. Over the next fifty years he designed and constructed more than a thousand buildings.

Many of those were created in Trivandrum, now Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern, tropical state of Kerala, where he settled in 1969. Kerala is a region beautiful to behold, yet subject to extreme heat and monsoonal downpours. Isavasyam — a giant helical coil — was completed in 1998 and was the last house Baker designed before his death in 2007 at the age of 90. “He was much more than just an architect,” says Suresh, who commissioned the house with his wife Neerada. “He was a master builder, he understood engineering, he understood the climate and he knew everything about creating spaces and using materials.” 

Although nearly 30 years old, the innovative construction of their home is a template for contemporary architects looking at how people might live in our era of changing climate, while allowing the natural environment to thrive.

Isavasyam consists of four levels, with an internal courtyard and a sculpted roof that channels rainwater into storage wells in the garden. The walls use a “rat trap bond” system, where bricks are laid to create a three-inch cavity — a buffer zone for cooling and insulation. As Suresh, a civil engineer, says: “The house is one big exhaust fan: hot air escapes through venting chimneys and natural draughts enter through jali [latticed] openings and windows.” 

It was completed for one-third of the cost of conventional construction at the time. “It was our dream house, and it was all done so that the house could breathe,” says Suresh.

All Baker’s works were predicated on financial and structural frugality. “I learn my architecture by watching what ordinary people do,” he wrote, maintaining that this approach was always “the cheapest and simplest”. Baker’s houses relied on the most efficient and affordable systems for environmental control, today referred to as passive design. In terms of what we now call sustainability, he was decades ahead of his time.

Tropical Asia — stretching roughly from western India to eastern Indonesia — was a relative latecomer to industrialisation and urban sprawl, but from the mid-20th century the region’s rapid expansion, in tandem with global warming, has dramatically affected its own ecosystems.

The region is warming at nearly twice the global average and is increasingly subject to heatwaves and flooding. With the UN attributing 37 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions to the buildings and construction sector, the region is particularly sensitive to a cycle of building, demolishing and rebuilding. The populations of large urban areas in tropical Asia have more or less tripled since 1990 — and architecture and city planning must aim to minimise the environmental impact. 

The Labri House, completed in 2021 in the central Vietnamese city of Huế, is immersed in a verdant environment, one that was embraced — and aided — by its architecture. Not that you can see much architecture: the house is tiny, set on a pocket of land hidden away on a tranquil lakefront. It is built from glass panels supported by a slender steel framework. Four transparent single-room volumes and their connecting corridors are curtained by vines.

The architect, Nguyen Khai, observes that the vines and birds and butterflies are as much at home here as the human residents. “When you see the house, you get the feeling that it has grown up randomly, so you are living in the plants and trees.”

Ng Sek San — a Malaysian landscape architect, engineer, designer and property developer — has devoted 25 years to assembling a series of houses and retreats known as “sekepings”. He adopts an approach of “reconfigure, renovate, recycle”, prioritising sustainability. 

Finding kampong (village) houses — whose passive design means they stay cool without air-conditioning — that are due to be demolished, Sek San instead spruces them up and transports them to a rainforest site, where they are bolstered with lightweight steel pavilions that leave a minimal footprint.

My architecture was expressive, but that was a manifestation of its functionality. And right from the start, I did not want to disturb the natural environment

Sek San is also dedicated to transforming rundown housing stock in Kuala Lumpur through recycling. “You can appreciate imperfection, where discarded elements become architectural features and where maximum impact [comes] from limited resources,” he says. “The only way to expand design in Asia is to make it cheap and affordable.”

In Laurie Baker’s adopted hometown of Trivandrum, Vinu Daniel founded his practice, Wallmakers. He has imbibed his forerunner’s philosophy and expressive form-making. Wallmakers has designed projects across southern India that combine architectural playfulness with a determination to reduce the carbon footprint.

The Nisarga Art Hub in semi-rural Angamaly, Kerala, was completed by Wallmakers in 2023 as both a family home and a performance venue for the musician occupants. It features unusual skylights that double as rooftop seating for a stage area, while its vast living space, looking over a paddy field, has bench-like shapes excavated from the floor. Yet it is distinguished not just by its geometric tucks and turns, but by its unusual means of construction.

Wallmakers builds through recycling — the walls of the house were created using a “shuttered debris wall” technique, where cement is mixed with all manner of waste material from the neighbourhood and soil collected on site. Daniel has been calling for a rethink in architecture in the face of the climate crisis. “In place of questions like ‘What should we build?’ we need to be asking ‘Should we build?’,” he says.

“It wasn’t called sustainable back then, I was simply being efficient and frugal,” says influential Malaysian architect Jimmy Lim. A 1992 property near Kuala Lumpur, for the brother of John F Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, is raised on stilts and combines traditional Malay construction methods with a contemporary triangular footprint. “My architecture was expressive, but that was a manifestation of its functionality. And right from the start, I did not want to disturb the natural environment,” says Lim.

A similar approach is adopted by Boonserm Premthada of Bangkok Project Studio. His own home has been built using the residue produced by coal-fired power plants, shaped into handmade bricks — the unsustainable becoming sustainable.

Premthada says that his intention for the 2023 project, Back of the House, was to create “something that is not beautiful, but interesting” — a mischievous response to the uniform homes of an overbuilt city with 11mn residents. The house is deliberately ungainly in proportion and — with exposed pipework and mortar oozing from the brickwork — defiantly rough and ready.

In Australia, Phil Harris and Adrian Welke founded Troppo Architects in 1980, having conducted research across the tropical zones of the country’s north. The practice has four energy-conserving principles: the promotion of cooling breezes; ventilation by convection; reducing heat radiation; and sheltering walls and openings.

When their client Mike Rozak, originally from Seattle, realised he could run his software development business from anywhere in the world, he bought a large patch of arid land 50 miles south of Darwin, in the sparsely populated Top End region of Australia. It was the late 1990s. As he commented, drily: “There’s a lot of space here. You don’t feel crowded in.”

Although it is far from the congestion of Asian mega-cities such as Bangkok, the weather has similar challenges: it’s either very wet or very dry, and it is always hot. Troppo built Rozak’s home on a rocky ridge, and it stands in proud isolation. With an aerodynamic profile, it has an ephemeral appearance — most of its walls are simply fly screens — and it looks like it could quickly be folded up and moved, much like a traveller’s camp.

Laurie Baker set an extraordinary precedent. Yet his frugality was not virtuous so much as practical: frivolous design features can be difficult to build and maintain in searing heat and torrential rain, where many materials are liable to shift or be worn away.

Buildings function best when they work with, not against, their natural surroundings. But as the projects of practices such as Troppo Architects show, these principles of sustainability can be transported and modified — and have an ever-increasing relevance in the climate challenges of our times. 

The Iconic Tropical House by Patrick Bingham-Hall is published by Thames & Hudson

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