Going full tilt

Warped, twisted and wonderfully wonky, who can fail to be intrigued by the quirky glory of Britain's medieval buildings? Rob Crossan explores the asymmetrical charm of the crooked house

- Rob Crossan

ACCIDENTS will happen, but their consequences needn’t always be disastrous. In the 1930s, Ruth Wakefield, proprietor of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, US, created the chocolate-chip cookie by chance when throwing broken slabs of chocolate bars into her biscuit mix, assuming they would melt in the oven. Her mishap created one of the world’s favourite sweet treats. And so it is with buildings that tilt, lean, list, slope or camber. We have long embraced these architectural equivalents of the failed soufflé with the kind of warmth and sentiment usually reserved for the retro sweets of our childhood.

Wonky pubs, houses and church spires are the poor kittens of construction and their obvious failings are precisely what we most adore about them. Perhaps it’s because a crooked building is a wobbly riposte to all that is over engineered, over codified and, inevitably, over budget on our high streets. Or because, as a nation, we love the eccentric in any form (except when it comes to war memorials and train timetables).

Certainly, when we featured Alex and Oli Khalil-Martin’s 600-year-old pumpkin-hued home, the Crooked House in Lavenham, Suffolk, on the front cover of the January 12, 2022, issue, the magazine sold like hot cakes. ‘With a house like this, you’re looking after it for the time you have it, not owning it,’ Oli told us in a subsequent article. ‘There’s such a long line of people that have lived here and you are part of that chain.’