Interview with Keith Barrell
Keith joined the CMK team as architectural technician on Lloyds Court. He comments on the enthusiasm in the team ‘… within a few days you knew it was gonna be good’. He describes the role of an architectural technician in planning the detailed design of a building; elements such as staircases, sprinkler systems and lifts ‘to make the building work’.
After Lloyds Court he joined the Shopping Building Team: ‘Chris (Woodward) was heavily involved … he’d do the main details and I’d take the thing and develop it.’ Syd Green was project architect. Keith comments it was Syd’s idea to ‘put the service road at first floor … big, brilliant decision’. Keith describes some difficulties he met with the design such as: placing sprinklers; the details of the first floor servicing. He comments that dealing with contractors nowadays is very hard, ‘But then, … working with Boulton and Paul, was superb’. In his opinion, ‘the building had been well thought out and put together and… it’s passed the test of time’. But he says, commenting on recent changes: ‘… I hate going up there to see what’s happened’. He discusses the issue of putting suitable doors on the building.
Keith recalls being in the site hut: ‘in the hot summer of ’76, in about 100 degrees with swimming trunks on and a tank top’. At the opening, he says: ‘I remember watching the undercover police when Maggie came to open it… Tooling up, you know they had guns in the back of the car ‘. Keith then became one of the ‘hole in the wall gang’ designing the Central Business Exchange in 1, Padstow, Fishermead; he recalls that when they moved out of the house, sacks of documents were found by the next occupant, who leaked information to the Milton Keynes Gazette. He talks of his career after MKDC and the major projects he has worked on. Keith says: ‘Shopping Building is still, I think, my favourite and best job that I worked on… I don’t like to see it being messed with’.
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