The Estate - Bevendean History Project

Brig began by saying that the houses have recently been painted in their new colours.

Date: 17 October 2022  Ref: 2022-10-17_P1340865
Hogs Edge runs roughly in an east to west direction.
Part of the green credentials of the building project was that we planted a hedge of native trees.  Ideally the trees would have been scattered about a little more but we were rather preoccupied with building the houses and so the trees got planted as a hedge.
It is not the most perfect hedge in the world but it grows very well and we need to have it cut twice a year otherwise the neighbours complain, because it gets quite tall and shadows their garden.
I came from the Isle of Wight, and moved to Brighton when I was 20, about 33 years ago. My second child was born while we were living here after we had started the self build.  My eldest son was born in Brighton however he cannot afford to live in Brighton but he has managed to get on the property ladder, which is an achievement in itself, and they are living in Worthing.
My eldest son went to Falmer High School and my youngest son went to Bevendean Primary School, where I now work in the nursery department.
I feel that it is quite a rural area here for me, it has got the best of both worlds because I grew up in a very similar situation but on the Isle of Wight.  We had the Downs there and the sea but obviously, we didn’t have the city as well on our doorstep.  For me that is what I really love about it because I do love the Downs, I do love the sea and it is really nice to be able to go and enjoy the city and all that offers and I think it was a really perfect balance for the boys as well growing up because they had a lot of freedom, but they also had the city which they were able to access as well.
I remember being in privately rented accommodation, which was very expensive to start off with and so I would describe it as being like a poverty trap you can’t really afford.  My job as a nursing practitioner was never going to pay my rent plus my bills plus anything else.
I realised that a self build scheme might be a good way to go, where my rent would not be too high and I might be able to take on a little job where you get tax credits and things like that so I was really keen to find out about the schemes that were going on.
I didn’t look at this Bevendean scheme straight away, it was in a roundabout way that I found this self build. I looked at what was going on through the centre for alternative technology based in Wales where they had self build schemes that used the Walter Segal Trust style build. This is where the frames are very easy to put up and they’re all timber so anybody can build them.
Through my inquiries and investigations this scheme at Bevendean came up but you had to be voted on to the scheme.  Fortuitously for me, a family had just dropped out, so as there was room for ten families and somebody had just decided that it wasn’t for them I applied and then got voted in. We were in housing need, I was just about to have another child and I was in a very small damp expensive, not very nice flat in Hove.
I had already moved three or four times, when landlords decide that they wanted, for whatever reason, to move you out and my oldest son was starting school. I wanted to be able to provide somewhere secure for him to grow up and to have a base where he would be able to access his school easily and so we got accepted onto the Self Building.
The buildings are all timber, there is no wet trade involved so there is no brickwork, the structure and the walls are built using wood.

The site plan for the 10 houses at Hogs Edge

Date: August 1996  Ref: DB-D-139-96-2-500

Elevation and house plans for Hogs Edge

Date: August 1996  Ref: DB-D-139-96-2-500 

This was the site looking east before work started.

Date: 1997 Summer  Ref: ACC 14063_002a

Originally there was no access road to the site it was completely green but there was a space between two buildings to put the road in because accessing the site did not involve the demolition of a house to put in a road.  I think people used to walk up here to get access to the Downs.  So, there must have been some sort of access.
I think there is a permissive path down from the Downs to reach Norwich Drive at the end of the site, it is not a full public right of way but the path is still there.
The land that was set aside for social housing was not suitable for brick built houses as this would have required a lot of ground levelling.  The houses here are built on stilts, they nestled in to the steep slope perfectly.  This picture below shows when all of that greenery was scraped off leaving just bare chalk.


Date: 1997 November  Ref: ACC 14063_003a   

The turf that was cleared from the site was relocated to another site, but I do not know where.  This was so that all the invertebrates and vertebrates in the grass would survive.

This photograph is of our first winter, that is snow, not chalk. We do not get snow like that anymore.

Date: 1997 December  Ref: ACC 14063_004c

Building work started in December 1997.
This is the beginning of the construction of timber frames in January 1998 after the clearing of the site.  The frames were built flat which involved us all learning carpentry.

This is the hedge arriving, all these little saplings.

Date: 1998 February  Ref: ACC 14063_007a

A lot of the groundworks had been done by this stage and then came the lifting of the frames into positions.  We had a crane which lifted them up and then they were braced, there were four frames for each house.


Date: 1998 February  Ref: ACC 14063_009a

There have been several self build schemes in Brighton, that I looked at in my process of trying to find a way of providing secure housing for my family.  There was a scheme at Whitehawk where they have the Walter Siegel style of housing, but with two storey buildings.  I got chatting to the group called Diggers at the time who were building in a road called See Saw Way.
I think that the scheme in Bevendean was one of the last self build schemes, I do not know of another scheme, people always ask me how can they get onto a scheme like this.
We started a cooperative and we went from there really, all the hard work was done before we started building.  The building was the easy bit.  Finding a suitable piece of land and finding a Housing Association that would plough the money in to buy the land and pay for all the materials, leaving us, the cooperative, to build it.
Our scheme is a self build to rent, we pay a reduced rent like a council house and it’s secure but we will never own it because it is just a rented property.  However, we can pass it on to our children, I think that you can do that with a council house as far as I am aware.

The framework for one of the houses is well underway.

Date: 1998 May  Ref: ACC 14063_021a

Stirling boards go onto the roofs, panelvent continues going up and windows go in.

Date: 1998 July  Ref: ACC 14063_028a

The roofs will take a lot of weight because they are turf roofs similar to the Nordic style. The idea being that it is well insulated so it’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter. When we have a lot of rain the turfs hold a lot of water so there is a lot of weight on the roof.
Underneath the turf there something called butyl which is like a pond liner, a rubber sheet. The roofs have been redone since the original build.  We have been here over 20 years now; we started building in 1997 and we moved in about 2000.
Date: 1999 Summer  Ref: ACC 14063_066a

There were plans to change the roofs in 2015, but we fought that, they wanted to use something like a shed felt roof made with bitumen.  We said that it was not in keeping with the area, it would have been horrible, and also completely do away with the ecological idea.
The roofs were originally covered with turf but we no longer have grass, the grass died off quite early on after the build and so we replaced it with Sedum which is quite drought resistant it is like a little succulent plant.  It spreads really well into everything, they are in every plant pot I have got in the garden now, because a little bit falls off and it keeps regenerating.

Brig describes how they worked and looked after the children.
Our days involved working together, as one very big family with all our children grew up together, that was part of the self build hours.
We were all expected to put in at least 30 hours, a week and some of those build hours were spent with the children in the creche.  The creche had to build on site first, somewhere to put the babies.

Brig remembers Jeff who was the site manager for the project.

Date: 2000 Spring  Ref: ACC 14063_097b

The project was all done with a tight budget because first of all they were going to give us money for childcare and training but the money for childcare was withdrawn.  So, we had to work out how we were going to overcome this problem.  We had a container brought to the site and we converted it and that became our creche.
The training was fairly minimal for building the houses, we were taught how to hold a hammer how to swing a hammer and how to saw in a straight line.  Jeff was amazing he oversaw us all; he was paid for his work as the site manager.  He was not actually one of the people building the houses.  Another man was the clerk of works and he was also paid for his time.

This photograph shows the paint going on.

Date: 1999 March  Ref: ACC 14063_063b

The original paint we used was like a wood stain and that seemed quite good.  The housing association changed hands several times and so when the work was done more recently, they used a plasticky kind of paint.  They have probably been painted four times in the 25 years they have been here.
The Housing Association has allowed us to choose our colours, they have been very flexible in that regard.  I was green and a sort of Terra Cotta colour to begin with and now we have gone to a blue colour.  The housing association get somebody in to do the painting and have handed over all the repairs to someone else.
The first Housing Association was South London Family Housing Association. Then our landlords became Horizon, then Amicus Horizon and now we are Optivo.

The verandas are being added to the front of the houses.

Date: 1999 Summer  Ref: ACC 14063_069a

All our carpenters, were employed, as I think the work started to drag on a little bit. We were just amateurs and inexperienced and so I think the housing association employed some carpenters to help shift us along a little bit.

Date: 1999 Summer  Ref: ACC 14063_070c

That isn’t the real Father Christmas, that was a carpenter too, so we had our little Christmas celebrations, this was the creche and the little kids all shoved in there.
Date: 1999 December  Ref: ACC 14063_074a

Here is the creche when Father Christmas visited the children in December 1999.

Date: 1999 December  Ref: ACC 14063_076a

That is the retaining wall to hold back the soil at the back of the houses.

Date: 2000 Spring  Ref: ACC 14063_091a

This is the children from all of our households we all held up a little sign to say thank you to Jeff who was the site manager.  What would we have done without you?

Date: 2000 Spring  Ref: ACC 14063_092a

This was me and my partner, we are no longer together, and our two little boys.

Date: 2000 Spring  Ref: ACC 14063_095a

We moved into our house in July 2000.

There are some plans for the inside with a bit more detail than the plan at the Keep.

Date: no date – c1997  Ref: ACC 14063_100d

Des Turner the MP came and planted a cherry tree at the east end of the site to mark the completion of the project.

We had an exhibition for the self build and here is one of the drawings done by one of the children for the exhibition.


Date: c2000  Ref: ACC 14063_129

The Hogs Edge project was displayed on the front of the Amicus Horizon booklet with page 14 devoted to the self build scheme. The document, dated Summer 2010, was ten years on from the building of the houses.  It seems incredible that we have been here for 23 years old and we have been involved with the project for over 25 years.

The project was featured in the television program Grand Designs.  In the very first series with Kevin McCloud they filmed the project for the program and then they came back again when the children were older to interview the them.  He said that in the 20 odd years he had been working on the series this was one of his favourites because it was social housing and it was a genuine self build, where we had actually physically built the houses ourselves.

At this time of year (October 2022) the sun comes right in the window and it is so hot in here, but that was the idea the houses are passively solar heated so we have not actually got solar panels.
When I walk in after work sometimes it’s boiling in here.  I have got two tortoises and they are usually dashing about because they have warmed up nicely.
The windows are double glazed, they were double glazed from the beginning.
One of the things that has come out of the self building in Bevendean is that I had lived in Brighton and Hove for quite a time prior to that.  I had my oldest son and at that time I had never heard of Bevendean because there is no through road, thank goodness.  I used to just say this is Brighton’s best kept secret it is absolutely gorgeous here.
I previously talked about that poverty trap.  My rent is now low, so I was able to get a job at the local school thus putting something back into the community.  In that respect I became able to pay my own rent and get out of that poverty trap.
I have since got involved with the friends of Bevendean Down which is how I got to know Jeff and Dorothy and do conservation tasks in my local area.  I now teach yoga at the church hall on a Tuesday evening, so all of those things have come out of the self build scheme and I think in one way or another we have all contributed the Bevendean community, hopefully in a positive way which is a really good thing, I think.  There were some reservations about the self build initially, and there was a campaign to get it stopped. I think because the housing association was called the South London Family Housing Association, it was assumed that people were being housed from London.  so, some local people didn’t like the idea of that for whatever reason. However we were all desperate for somewhere to live and to provide secure housing for our children so that was a real moment of anxiety for us. I think that actually we have helped to benefit the local community.
My husband takes the micky out of me, he says I’d never leave Bevendean, I live, work and teach my yoga class here and I said “well why would you need to leave Bevendean?”.  I can walk the dog straight out the door onto the Downs here.

Brig Clay – October 2022

More photographs from the Self Build Project