Rise and shine
The former Big Breakfast house has emerged beautifully from a troubled past, says Gary Parkinson
From our media-saturated present it’s faintly shocking to note that before 1983, there was no such thing as breakfast TV in the UK. But with its jauntily whistlable theme-tune and anarchic presentation style, Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast – launched in 1992 – catapulted the nascent segment out of its polite Pringle-sweater early days and into a noisy adolescence.
Part of the show’s popularity came from its visual excitement: instead of gliding round a fusty studio floor, handheld cameras dragged the viewer around an actual house in East London. And now that broadcast landmark of a house is up for sale – although thankfully no longer decorated in the eye-poppingly colourful aesthetic of 1990s TV.
In fact, Lock Cottage has multiple layers of history. Not far from the resurgent Hackney Wick, it’s only a few meters from the London Stadium, the former centrepiece of the Olympic park and now home to West Ham United. Fans of fin-de-siecle TV may also note it’s a mile up the River Lea from 3 Mills Island, setting for the first two series of the similarly-titled Big Brother.
It was built in 1947 as three dwellings for lock keepers, toll-collectors and navigation operatives on the Lea, its canalised navigation the Hackney Cut and the Hertford Union Canal, which connects the Cut to the Regent’s Canal and thus into England’s inland waterway network. Trouble was, said network soon declined into dereliction – so when Bob Geldof’s Planet 24 production company wanted a remote location for their noisy new breakfast show, the long-deserted cottages were perfect… if in urgent need of updating.
After a lightning seven-week renovation by a 140-strong team, designer Cath Pater-Lancucki’s bright decor opened many a breakfast-bleary eye, from the lime-green kitchen cabinets to the pink satin bedsheets on which Paula Yates provocatively probed the stars, to the variously hued rooms in which presenters like Chris Evans, Gaby Roslin, Zoe Ball, Johnny Vaughan and Denise van Outen woke up the nation.
Nowadays, the decor is a sight more tasteful than televisual. Indeed, a building once primed for loudness is now designed to be discreet, with an understated entrance and mature trees protecting the property. Gardens wrap around the detached, quadruple-aspected cottage; the south-facing front garden measures an impressive 118 x 101 feet (35.9 x 30.7m), while the rear garden contains a 62ft (19m) teardrop-shaped swimming pool.
The three-storey property’s renovation suitably reflects the area’s industrial heritage through its palette of materials, many of them recycled. The floors are beech wood and period parquet, and there are glints of metal throughout: cast iron radiators, Crittall doors and windows (some stretching all the way to double-height ceilings) and most of all the steel spiral staircase winding its way from the first floor to the second (each of which has three bedrooms).
At the heart of the home is a double-height reception room with an exposed brick chimney rising through the two storeys from the log burner in its hearth, while the adjacent kitchen-diner’s industrial chic reflects its heritage – it has also been reclaimed.
The building’s current floorplan reflects its most recent division. After the last Big Breakfast in 2002 the building was ravaged by an arson attack and gradually renovated. Nowadays, it’s split into two, with a two-bed residence (currently tenanted) following one of the original three cottages’ floorplan while the larger slice combines the other two into a four-bed.
However, both sides have been similarly sympathetically renovated and the option is there for the next owners to make the place a single unit again. Just don’t expect to find zany puppet pals Zig and Zag still larking in the bathroom.
• Lock Cottage, £4.6m, hamptons.co.uk
Originally commissioned by Metro for 14 Dec 2021, but shelved when the property sold
