Bringing 'beauty' back

Lord Deben explains the thinking behind his 'Gummer's Law', which provided for the creation of new country houses within planning law

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THERE'S no point in being a cabinet minister if you don't make a difference and do things that only you would have done. Therefore, when, almost by accident, John Major moved me from Agriculture to the Environment, I realised I had been given a great opportunity. From the first, I had been captivated by buildings.

Brought up in a Victorian Gothic complex of church, school and a gaunt, cold vicarage, my earliest travels from home were by bus to a stop still called Jezreels after the huge, half-finished ruin designed by a Victorian sect to reach towards Heaven. Then school: worshipping every day in the Norman cathedral and being taught in the gracious Georgian confines of Satis House, Kent, overlooked by the powerful walls of Rochester Castle.

Going up to Cambridge, my first public protest was not political, but marching in the Anti-Ugly campaign. We confronted the Master of Emmanuel for allowing his beautifully proportioned 17th-century college, largely designed by Wren, to be disfigured by a vulgar, undistinguished and wholly unsympathetic 1950s extension. His response was typical of the time: 'We can always grow ivy over it.'