The broadcaster has a panoramic view of the London skyline from his four-bedroom flat. It suits him down to the ground, he tells Joey Canessa
Jonathan Meades in his study Originally, this place was just a covered space on the top of a four-storey building. When I first saw it, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, and, with the help of a draughtsman, created this quite versatile and extremely comfortable flat. It could be described as a four-bedroom flat, although I use two of the rooms for work.
The main body of the flat is the open-plan kitchen and living room with a central staircase leading up from the front door below. At the far end is my study. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms run down the side of the building arranged in such a way that they can be shut off effectively to form a separate area where the children can have some privacy when they drop in.
I love the amount of light we get here, with windows filling three sides of the flat. The hyperbolic weather effects are fascinating from up here; you really get the sense of the weather approaching from the east, over Canary Wharf, owing to the amount of visible sky. It is also, curiously, frost-free in our roof garden.
Our roof garden totals 1,000sq ft, as it wraps around three sides of the flat. It’s astonishingly quiet up here and presents a virtual 360-degree view of the London landscape: Tower Bridge, the Millennium Wheel, the Gherkin, the transmitter masts of distant Crystal Palace and Forest Hill to the south. During the nine years, the skyline has changed immeasurably. There’s always something new being created. At the moment, I’m watching the progress of two Slovenian kit houses that are being built by friends of mine in the alley down below. It’s a great spot for bird-watching, too. Last autumn, a flock of several hundred little finches landed in our garden at once, stopped for a minute and promptly took off again – off on their holidays to Africa, I suppose.
My kitchen has magnificent views through the steel-framed glazed wall that faces east. In here, I have a proper industrial gas stove where I cook several times a week. As a child, I had an unusually broad education in a variety of cuisines. My father had been in the Paiforce, a combined army of Persia and Iraq, and had enjoyed recipes cooked by his Afghan chef. He brought back boxes of spices sealed with solder that he used to recreate the flavours that he had become fond of, and we ate these dishes regularly at home.
My mother’s father worked for Southern Railways who ran ferries to Saint-Malo and Le Havre. As a family, we enjoyed frequent free passage across the Channel, a luxury unheard of in those days for people like us. I believe that my grandfather had a fancy woman outside Saint-Malo and we got to know the area and its inhabitants very well, spending riotous evenings at La Régalade. So I was introduced to an unusual variety of flavours that educated my palate as a child.
My passion for art and architecture has led to quite a collection of pictures that cover most of the walls. Among my favourite pieces is a painting by Steve Walton. It’s a large portrait of an unknown but very enigmatic character. Steve is a brilliant painter, taught, along with Dougie Fields, by Patrick Caulfield and Howard Hodgkin, but he has since given up painting and become a fabric designer.
Another favourite, a modern, slightly surrealist piece with a Flemish look, is by Peter Lucas, a friend of my parents. During the war, he was called up to join the Navy and was supposed to be sailing on HMS Hood. He broke his ankle that same evening, falling, pissed, on the quayside and couldn’t sail, thus avoiding certain death as the ship was sunk by the Bismarck in the North Atlantic with loss of 1,400 hands. He spent his recuperation with my mother, during which time he made great friends with the wife of a local nob, Lord Normanton, and they did a flit together. I like paintings with a bit of history behind them.
Ten years ago, I wrote a series for the BBC called Jerrybuilding, investigating architectural relics of the Third Reich. My forthcoming series of programmes I have called Joebuilding, an insight into the Stalin Heritage Trail. I spent the whole of last summer in Russia. It’s a fantastically corrupt place, which is comical for a day or two, but the moral squalor quickly becomes really tiresome. There is good food to be had in Moscow but Volgograd, previously Stalingrad, presented us with very little choice. One memorable horror was a dish called “salad of cancer necks”, a terrifying crabstick platter.
I have also just finished writing and filming a series of five one-off films (the first of which will be broadcast on 29 April on BBC2), featuring topics such as the insidious influence of the garden suburbs, the great work of the architect Cuthbert Roderick, the gravy train of regeneration and an autobiographically inspired report on Sherborne and Blandford, areas where I spent hours wandering around on my own as a child, accompanying my father on his travels as a rep for a biscuit company. These pieces of television involve enormous amounts of writing; every word of every scene is prescribed. And when you’re stuck somewhere, filming, and are forced to eat there, you are inevitably struck, once again, by the poverty of British cooking.
I’m moving out of London soon, as I am becoming fed up with its associated problems. There are aspects that I will miss, of course, but I realise that I don’t need to be here anymore and I’ll probably head for France.
Tyers Gate Penthouse is for sale for £925,000 through Cluttons, Tower Bridge (020-7407 3669) and Daniel Cobb, London Bridge (020-7357 0026)
Jonathan Meades in his study
Originally, this place was just a covered space on the top of a four-storey building. When I first saw it, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, and, with the help of a draughtsman, created this quite versatile and extremely comfortable flat. It could be described as a four-bedroom flat, although I use two of the rooms for work.
The main body of the flat is the open-plan kitchen and living room with a central staircase leading up from the front door below. At the far end is my study. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms run down the side of the building arranged in such a way that they can be shut off effectively to form a separate area where the children can have some privacy when they drop in.
I love the amount of light we get here, with windows filling three sides of the flat. The hyperbolic weather effects are fascinating from up here; you really get the sense of the weather approaching from the east, over Canary Wharf, owing to the amount of visible sky. It is also, curiously, frost-free in our roof garden.
Our roof garden totals 1,000sq ft, as it wraps around three sides of the flat. It’s astonishingly quiet up here and presents a virtual 360-degree view of the London landscape: Tower Bridge, the Millennium Wheel, the Gherkin, the transmitter masts of distant Crystal Palace and Forest Hill to the south. During the nine years, the skyline has changed immeasurably. There’s always something new being created. At the moment, I’m watching the progress of two Slovenian kit houses that are being built by friends of mine in the alley down below. It’s a great spot for bird-watching, too. Last autumn, a flock of several hundred little finches landed in our garden at once, stopped for a minute and promptly took off again – off on their holidays to Africa, I suppose.
My kitchen has magnificent views through the steel-framed glazed wall that faces east. In here, I have a proper industrial gas stove where I cook several times a week. As a child, I had an unusually broad education in a variety of cuisines. My father had been in the Paiforce, a combined army of Persia and Iraq, and had enjoyed recipes cooked by his Afghan chef. He brought back boxes of spices sealed with solder that he used to recreate the flavours that he had become fond of, and we ate these dishes regularly at home.
My mother’s father worked for Southern Railways who ran ferries to Saint-Malo and Le Havre. As a family, we enjoyed frequent free passage across the Channel, a luxury unheard of in those days for people like us. I believe that my grandfather had a fancy woman outside Saint-Malo and we got to know the area and its inhabitants very well, spending riotous evenings at La Régalade. So I was introduced to an unusual variety of flavours that educated my palate as a child.
My passion for art and architecture has led to quite a collection of pictures that cover most of the walls. Among my favourite pieces is a painting by Steve Walton. It’s a large portrait of an unknown but very enigmatic character. Steve is a brilliant painter, taught, along with Dougie Fields, by Patrick Caulfield and Howard Hodgkin, but he has since given up painting and become a fabric designer.
Another favourite, a modern, slightly surrealist piece with a Flemish look, is by Peter Lucas, a friend of my parents. During the war, he was called up to join the Navy and was supposed to be sailing on HMS Hood. He broke his ankle that same evening, falling, pissed, on the quayside and couldn’t sail, thus avoiding certain death as the ship was sunk by the Bismarck in the North Atlantic with loss of 1,400 hands. He spent his recuperation with my mother, during which time he made great friends with the wife of a local nob, Lord Normanton, and they did a flit together. I like paintings with a bit of history behind them.
Ten years ago, I wrote a series for the BBC called Jerrybuilding, investigating architectural relics of the Third Reich. My forthcoming series of programmes I have called Joebuilding, an insight into the Stalin Heritage Trail. I spent the whole of last summer in Russia. It’s a fantastically corrupt place, which is comical for a day or two, but the moral squalor quickly becomes really tiresome. There is good food to be had in Moscow but Volgograd, previously Stalingrad, presented us with very little choice. One memorable horror was a dish called “salad of cancer necks”, a terrifying crabstick platter.
I have also just finished writing and filming a series of five one-off films (the first of which will be broadcast on 29 April on BBC2), featuring topics such as the insidious influence of the garden suburbs, the great work of the architect Cuthbert Roderick, the gravy train of regeneration and an autobiographically inspired report on Sherborne and Blandford, areas where I spent hours wandering around on my own as a child, accompanying my father on his travels as a rep for a biscuit company. These pieces of television involve enormous amounts of writing; every word of every scene is prescribed. And when you’re stuck somewhere, filming, and are forced to eat there, you are inevitably struck, once again, by the poverty of British cooking.
I’m moving out of London soon, as I am becoming fed up with its associated problems. There are aspects that I will miss, of course, but I realise that I don’t need to be here anymore and I’ll probably head for France.
Tyers Gate Penthouse is for sale for £925,000 through Cluttons, Tower Bridge (020-7407 3669) and Daniel Cobb, London Bridge (020-7357 0026)
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