RESTORATION VILLAGE
Restoration Village
Producer and director 2 x 60' episodes (Wales and South East England) Made with Endemol for BBC
First TX August 2006
Series Editor: Jeremy Cross
Camera: Andy Jackson
Producer and director
2 x 60' episodes for the third of the BBC's Restoration Series - presented by Griff Rhys Jones - in which the public vote for the 'building at risk' that they would like to be saved. The two programmes I produced and directed were in Wales and the South East of England.
In Wales, the buildings in contention were a neo-Tudor Institute donated by Anglesey boy-made-good, Sir John Prichard Jones (managing director of the former Dickins & Jones Department store in London), the Pen Yr Orsedd Slate Quarry Workshops, in a spectacular setting in Snowdonia and Pembrey Court Farm in Carmarthenshire, an early 16th century Tudor manor house allegedly visited by Oliver Cromwell.
In the South East corner of England, the choice was between the completely bonkers Massey's Folly at Upper Farringdon in Hampshire, Watts Gallery at Compton in Surrey, built for George Frederic Watts, one of Britain's leading portrait painters in the late 19th century and Tollesbury Granary in Essex. it needed funds to raise it out of the spring tides and rebuild it as a visitor centre, community space and field study centre.