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And ideally we needed somewhere that could be seen from all four sides. Then we needed to find a house that was scheduled for demolition. She also wanted it to be in the north or north-east because that was the part of the city she knew best. Rachel had some parameters: she wanted to make this piece in London, because that’s where she was brought up. We really had to go round the houses to find House. Photograph: Nicholas Turpin/The Independent/ Rex/Shutterstock James Lingwood, co-director, Artangel ‘It was messy and exhausting’ … Whiteread making a concrete cast inside the original house. And I’m proud that so many people have memories of it. But I’ve kept it with me in the work I make now. There was nothing nice about it coming down, though. This was its location and this was where it should stay. Charles Saatchi offered to put it on wheels and transfer it to his gallery. The lease the council gave us was temporary, so I always assumed that House would be demolished. We were coming out of a recession and there were so many debates about housing and the cost of living. But it also had this connection to everyone’s lives. House felt autobiographical: I’d grown up in a house in north London that was very similar. A poor security guy basically had to live there for months. The other hard thing was making sure that it didn’t get broken into. We began in August 1993 and didn’t finish until late October.
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It was messy and exhausting – and the whole thing took months. The complex thing was finding the right material to spray on the walls so that the concrete wouldn’t stick when we tried to remove them. We made a new foundation, removed the internal fittings, took the roof off, created a metal armature to support the new structure – and then filled the house with concrete. The mould – the house itself – already existed, so the job was really to make a building within that building. In terms of making, House wasn’t a complex idea. A poor security guy basically had to live there for months We had to make sure it didn’t get broken into. He had been a DIY fanatic in the 1970s and had spent a lot of time doing up the house: he’d installed a bar, hung different wallpaper on every wall, that sort of thing. He was bemused by the idea, but interested. Eventually, they found him another Victorian house, I think. Bow council had been trying to get him out for years, but he didn’t want to be rehoused in a high-rise flat. The one we found, at 193 Grove Road in east London, wasn’t empty: a guy called Sydney Gale was living there with his daughter.