A nursery of inventions

7, Park Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire | A Cotswold townhouse echoes the remarkable career of its restorer and creator, Rory Young. Alan Powers reflects on his influence and enthusiasms as embodied here

- Alan Powers

THE death earlier this year of the remarkable figure of Rory Young, at the age of 68, has brought to an end his admirable transformation of a small and unassuming townhouse in Cirencester. Ultimately, it was a combination of three houses, but one in particular served as the base for his notable and action-filled life as an artist, artisan, educator, thinker and networker, so that the person and the building became so intertwined that one could scarcely be understood without the other.

Young’s parents both had roots in the area going back several generations and he grew up on the farm that Prince Albert had planned as a demonstration facility for his Royal Agricultural College. His father, Peter, liked the old ways of doing things, among which was maintaining dry-stone walls, on which the fledgling builder worked with him. His mother, Jill, trained as a painter and continued to produce still-life flower pictures and local scenes, so art was a daily activity. The nursery where Young and his sister, Katrina, played always had lining paper pinned to its walls and readily available crayons. In the sandpit, he experimented with making stone arches and, as a teenager, built some ambitious follies with spare bricks.