Find out which building Kevin McCloud would bulldoze

Is there a building you wish had never been built? If so, we want to know about it. E-mail a picture of your eyesore to property@timesonline.co.uk and we will showcase the worst.

The short promotional film for Kevin McCloud's new TV series invites us to see the Grand Designs presenter in a different, more assertive way. McCloud strides towards a boxing ring, a heavyweight champion's satin robe slung over his shoulders, flexing his muscles for the fray. This is an image make-over for a man who is usually seen attempting to establish consensus in troubled situations and who tends to hold with the Reithian view that TV's mission of TV is to educate and inform and that entertainment follows from this.

Yet even though McCloud is not about to start sorting things out in the manner of an EastEnders character, a tough, physical challenge awaits him. In Grand Designs Live, a spin-off series, McCloud must build a two-storey house - in just six days. The property must comply with his own beliefs about sustainability. This is a creed with so much sway that its four million followers - Grand Designs' average audience - have been designated by the Conservatives as a key voter group, likely to be attracted by sound environmental policies.

The first of the six nightly Grand Designs Live programmes will be broadcast on Sunday; the series accompanies the Grand Designs Live London exhibition, which opens tomorrow at ExCel in East London: the McCloud brand supports a whole industry.

Once this piece of reality TV derring-do is over, McCloud will return to a much more testing construction contest, his very own HAB (Happiness Architecture Beauty) development, a micro eco-town near Swindon to which he has committed lots of his own cash.

McCloud concedes that “in a housing market in meltdown, one is punting a lot of money on paying architects, seeking planning permission and the rest”. But although some housebuilders are abandoning new schemes as unviable, McCloud is pressing ahead with his plans for contextual eco-conscious dwellings.

He says: “HAB is going well, but scarily and ploddingly and slowly. We will be applying for planning permission in the late spring. We hope to break earth in December as our Christmas present to ourselves.”

The HAB enterprise, including the meetings with bankers and local residents, is to be the subject of a documentary, a chronicle of McCloud's own conviction that, despite the credit crunch, there is a pent-up longing for homes that take some pity on the planet and are at one with their setting.

This desire appears to be global: the Grand Designs series, in which McCloud acts as counsellor, labourer and critic on house-building ventures of the sustainable variety, has been sold to 137 countries. However, part of its popularity may also stem from the very British eccentricity of some of those who have featured in the 97 programmes in the six series pursuing their idiosyncratic vision of the ideal home. Perhaps for this reason, in France the multilingual McCloud's voice is dubbed by an actor speaking French with an exaggeratedly English accent.

HAB's residents will be encouraged to form a community through devices such as car-sharing clubs. McCloud thinks we should all “own less and share more”, a view formed before the slowing economy made shows of frugality fashionable. He is averse to acquisition, disliking supermarkets and forbidding his four children from shopping at disposable fashion outlets such as Primark. He says: “I don't need any new clothes, and should I decide that I do the next jeans that I buy will be made of hemp.”

The layout of the Swindon site will also not be governed by strictly utilitarian principles so as to give the maximum return. Quite the opposite, as McCloud explains: “You don't treat a greenfield site like a tabula rasa; you have to take account of its history, the bumps and the ditches. If you have a great view, that's what you've got to keep, you have to enshrine that in the design.”

He professes himself a pupil of the tenets of sustainability formulated by Common Ground, a charity set up in 1983 by Sue Clifford and Angela King, the authors of England in Particular. This local distinctiveness rulebook is admired by green glitterati such as Zac Goldsmith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

McCloud's willingness to state his views on the quality of the built environment may have become part of brand McCloud, but this does not mean that they are anything but heartfelt and grounded in knowledge.

He declares: “If you are trying to make a place, you don't make that place look like anywhere.” It is now commonplace for developers to produce an unusual design and market it as “iconic”. McCloud finds this offensive. An “iconic” building such as the Gherkin in the City and the Sage building in Gateshead can make a place. But the iconic can also be out of place.

He continues: “I am appalled at the lack of contextual design. Every town has its rash of look-at-me buildings that could be dropped in anywhere. The iconic can be as offensive as rows of grey sheds.”

But it is not only the self-consciously quirky to which McCloud objects. On the right, you will discover what he would like to be his deconstruction project of 2008.

Fact File

Age 48 (he turns 49 on Thursday).

Education Read History of Art and Architecture at Cambridge.

Family Married to Zani, who runs her own online interiors business; they live in Somerset with their four children.

CV Grand Designs presenter since 1997; presenter on Don't Look Down and Home Front; runs a design practice; has designed lighting for the Dorchester and Savoy hotels, Edinburgh Castle and Ely Cathedral; consultant for Fired Earth and Debenhams homewares; author of design books; ambassador for the WWF and supporter of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

Which building would Kevin crush?

Kevin McCloud this week conceded that Grand Designs has encouraged a plethora of oak-framed homes and white-rendered boxes. But he has not developed an aversion to the modern - just to homes or other structures that do not fit their context. For this reason the building that he would most like to demolish is the Celtic Manor, above, a resort hotel near junction 24 of the M24 in Newport, Wales. McCloud has seen rather too much of this building lately, on his way to filming. He describes it thus: “It's a huge monolith on an American scale which looks like it was about to swallow up the motorway. It's not contextual - it doesn't even look English.” Paul Williams, a Celtic Manor manager, says: “The exterior architecture by David Preece may not be to everybody's taste but its design was influenced by functionality and the unusual demands of accommodating a 330-bedroom, five-star hotel. The interior design by Jane Goff, including a striking atrium lobby, has made a favourable impression on most visitors.” Newport, meanwhile, can be consoled: one of McCloud's favourites is its 19th-century transport bridge, a structure that combines elegance and utility.

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