Architect Sophie Hicks on being an 80s cover girl, and why every object should have a purpose

0:00It's crazy that the developers don't employ more women architects because we famously can feel what it's going to be like for the human being in or outside the building we design. We're very practical. We bring up families, we run houses, we have a job, we organise the holiday, we have our heads in lots of different places at the same time, which is what you need to do as an architect. How people sit in their space, how people fit in their space, how people fit in their city, how people fit in their landscape. I was always interested in that. Home is very important because it is your route. It's your grounded place.

0:40I don't want meaningless stuff around. I mean, I don't like clutter. Because how many things can you think about at once? I don't really know what decoration is. I mean, if you need a chair, it's got to be comfy. If you need a shower, it's got to work. I don't know what is decoration. You tell me.

1:05Hello, welcome to a new episode of Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. Today's guest is the architect Sophie Hicks. Sophie has helped fashion brands like Paul Smith, Yoji Yamamoto and Acne Studios to translate their vision into built form. But before becoming one of Britain's most respected architects, she was immersed in the world of fashion. She worked alongside Grace Coddington and Azadeen Alaya, styled shoots for Vogue and Tatler, and became an iconic face of the early 80s after appearing on the cover of ID magazine in a portrait by David Bailey. We recorded this conversation in the remarkable house Sophie designed and built for herself on a small plot in West London.

1:52It's a home where every material, detail and object has a purpose. We discuss her childhood between London and the Sussex countryside, why she pivoted from fashion to architecture, and the story behind her distinctive personal style. We also explore what makes a house feel calm, her belief that every design decision needs a reason, and why she's fascinated by the challenge of creating a hotel that feels like home. As always, there's a house tour to accompany the episode, which is available to Homing subscribers on Patreon. So here's the podcast, and I very much hope you enjoy it. Hi, Sophie. Hi, Matt.

2:37Welcome to Homing. Thanks for being on the podcast. It was very nice to have a look around the house earlier, so thank you for that. And as always, we'll make that tour available to people on Patreon. on I want to talk about this house but I also want to talk about your your origin story if I can put it like slightly ominous terms um where did you grow up I grew up mainly in London but also in the country in Sussex in a quite a remote place with no other houses around with woods and trees and mud and streams so you divided your time between the two yeah so what was that was Was that a kind of country house for the holidays kind of thing?

3:16Yeah. And my father farmed there a bit, so, yeah. And whereabouts in London were you? Just off Kensington High Street. Okay, so you haven't come far? No. Do you feel connected to West London in general? I've always lived... When I've lived in London, I've always lived in West London. Yeah. I mean, when I left home as a teenager, I moved just north of Notting Hill Gate. And then I moved around in that area for a while. and then it's I only came to Earl's Court which is where we are now by chance it's not a an area I would particularly choose but it was I managed to find a piece of land or at least a bit of land with some rough garages on it where I built this house so it was really because of the land that I've moved here okay but if I asked you to say where you belong in the world where is home from a geographical standpoint what would you say I've always moved around a bit have you so I move my home but I have a place in Northamptonshire that I've rented a little ancient cottage that I've rented for 40 years which I'm about to have to give up which is a pity because there's so much of my life invested in it but apart from that I've lived in London I've lived in Paris for a couple of years I've lived in the French Alps for a bit over a year with the children when they were still at school and now I divide my time between London and Venice where I've got an apartment.

4:41Okay why do you think you've moved around like that then? Do you like the excitement of it? I'm curious about places and I like to be in culturally different places and I like different landscapes around me and you know that landscape in Venice is very unusual you know Venice the city is what most people think of but Venice the city is in a is in Venice the lagoon and there's a big lagoon and it has islands on it and it has huge expanses of amazing flat water the horizon is very very flat and I have a boat very ordinary little boat which I love to go around on and you experience the water the sky the fog the sun the birds it's it's it's very special yeah so thinking about your childhood how would you describe the kind of character that you were people don't change really I realize they're always kind of the same um I think we're born how we are and we change a little we hopefully become a little more wise but otherwise how would I describe myself curious sort of outgoing but also a little bit shy happy to take some risks if I think that those risks will be interesting exciting or open my horizons um yeah that sort of thing so how how did that play out when you were a kid then what were you into what what we found you okay there was a very good television program when I was growing up called Blue Peter and every week they made something and they taught you how to make something as a child so that was very important it was all scissors and glue and bits of cardboard and how to make a whole world out of a cereal packet and a squeegee bottle or whatever anyway that's what I did I made stuff and you know you go from there to making buildings it's it's just an extension of the same you take some materials and you see how you can glue them together do you think that's an innate thing then or were you shown how to do that oh it's innate thing you have to want to do it you have to think oh I'm thrilled by the idea of this pot of glue or this thing of paint or you know yeah That's what thrilled me.

7:12I have a grandson now and he's thrilled about numbers and he's always adding up and, you know, doing multiplications and things. That's his thing. My thing was putting stuff together and sticking it together and placing it together and seeing how one thing faced off against another thing. Okay, so you think that you thought in a three-dimensional way in a funny sense. Visual way, perhaps. Visual way. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about the household in London. So who were you living with in terms of parents, siblings, etc.? I have a brother and I had a mother and a father who've both died now. Okay. And we lived a very, very conventional life.

7:54But we were a stone's throw from Bus Stop and Bieber and all the gorgeous and incredible and exciting stores that were on Kensington High Street. So when I was going to school, you know, You'd come back on the bus, age 13, hop off at Bieber, go and sit at those dressing tables, which they had all laid out, where you could try all the makeup samples, do a ridiculous and ghastly makeup effect, and then wipe it off before you got home. That was life. So you said it was quite a sort of conventional life. Very conventional. Did you feel a bit less conventional than that? I felt somewhat trapped okay um so when I was 17 I when I was 16 I got my provisional driving license as soon as you can fill out the form at 17 I registered for my driving test and passed at sort of 17 and a half and then I got my grandmother to give me a little car and I was off okay boom So, I mean, exploring the world, not deserting my parents, but exploring the world, driving to Italy, looking and seeing and meeting people.

9:08That's what I liked to do when I was very young. Why do you think you felt that sense of being trapped? Well, it's, you know, not as interesting. The world was more interesting outside the doors. OK. There was a lot more. London was very interesting in the late 70s, incredibly interesting. I mean I was just too young to be to properly experience punk unfortunately because that was an incredible moment I mean literally by a year or two but after that new romantics and all the music and the clubs the clubs were so good in London um you know you and then I got into magazines and by 18 I was working for a magazine that was then called Harper's and Queen I'm not sure if it exists anymore.

9:55And the editor gave me four pages to do, aged 18. Every month, I'd have these pages that I could fill with anything I liked, basically. I mean, the freedom was amazing. And London was really happening. And I moved to Vogue, and then I moved at a stage at French Vogue, and then I moved to Tatler, when Tatler was a really great magazine under Mark Boxer. Very good team there, fantastic team. Very interesting. I could work with all the fashion photographers best in the world if I wanted to which I did so you know it was a jolly exciting moment to be in fashion and fashion was um not controlled by advertisers then which people don't realize who work now when I was working at Vogue if you know we did not have to to put in our shoots uh clothing from advertisers if we didn't want to I mean now you couldn't even move without putting in advertisers clothes but what it allowed us to do was to influence fashion actually yeah you know there were you know designers were influenced by things that we did in our pictures or things that we did in our selves actually go on tell me about that well if you were devising a photo shoot on a theme we did quite a lot of themed shoots you might call up a designer and say, you know, I'm doing a shoot about Andrew, I'm thinking of one of Grace Coddington's shoots when I was her assistant, Andrew Wyeth, the American painter in Maine and soft light and gentleness and pastel colours, can you make me this?

11:32I need a skirt like this or a twin set like that. And the designers would do it and then that would influence their connection. When I was working for Azadeen, which I did when I left British Vogue, I worked for Azadeen to put together photos of his collections up until that point. And I remember once being in his place and him saying, we're going to the Fashion Oscars. What are the Fashion Oscars? I don't know. Anyway, you've got to wear something. So what can I lend you to wear? I'm going to give you this. And it was like a chiffon coat, very floaty. and there was a skinny dress that went underneath it.

12:12I cannot wear a skinny dress. I'm too embarrassed. So I got back to my hotel and I looked at it and I thought, I can't wear the skinny dress, but the black floaty thing is nice and it had a big strong belt that went with it. I thought, I can wear that, but what can I do? I said, well, all I've got with me is black trousers and a white shirt, which is kind of a uniform and still remains a uniform. I'll put it on over that. And so I just did. And it was like a coat. it was fine was black mousseline with sheet seams on it and when he saw me he said huh I thought he's going to be furious I'm not wearing the right outfit but I can't can't wear this dress and he said oh oh that's interesting he turned me around he started looking and what it ended up being is I inadvertently had shown up all the seams by putting a white shirt behind it and so then he realized ah I could make this coat even more seamed and put a white shirt under then that turned into a section of his next show which was white taffeta shirts that were very wasted and and sort of with peplums and these black muslin like coats that went over and of course all the seams on the muslin all were backlit with this white so anyway so you could do things in those days where you were creatively influencing you were being influenced it was a very nice back and forth and you know it was wonderful and that doesn't I don't know if it happened so much I left after soon after that I left fashion and started to study architecture because I realized I really wanted to create myself rather than demonstrate other people's creations obviously you create images when you're styling but but I suddenly thought I want to make the clothes well I don't want to make the clothes I want to make buildings so then I changed to architecture So in this period, you were on the cover of ID magazine, weren't you?

14:04Yeah. How did that come about? I think they wanted me on the cover. And I was shooting something with David Bailey. When you say shooting something with him, in what capacity? Oh, I was the stylist of something. I can't remember. I was styling something and working with Bailey. And I said, look, will you ID want a picture of me? And I've got to wink. Will you do it, Bailey? So he said, OK, sit there. um so you sit on the stool and he said wink and I can't wink he said well you're bloody useless I said I'm sorry I'm sorry I can't do it so he then got this tape and stuck it over my eye and then for some reason they had Jack Nicholson was in the studio I don't know why so they were you know two old devils behind the camera going you know making monkey noises I mean you know just being silly um so that's why I'm grinning because they're ridiculous the pair of them and I've got this stupid tape stuck over my eye because I can't wink and the whole thing's a fiasco.

15:01It turned out like a nice picture. It's a great picture. Yeah, it was funny. The idiot who can't wink. I really can't. That's really funny. But there's also, it was influential, I think, because there's a kind of androgyny to it as well. Is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah. There's a boyishness to the way that you look in that image. Yeah. Tell me about that. You know, I know that, for example, you don't like to wear makeup and so on. Just tell me about that kind of androgyny and why that is representative of you in some way. I think it was all just happened very naturally. I mean, when I was a young teenager, I used to wear girly clothes and have jewelry and play around with makeup and stuff like that.

15:43And then one day I had a friend who was going to Princess Diana's wedding as a journalist. and when I heard he was going, I said, how are you going to get there? He said, well, I suppose I'll take a taxi and we have to get there really early because journalists have to be in and sitting in their seats hours before the proper guests arrive. I said, well, don't take a taxi, I'll drive you. So then I thought, well, if you're driving somebody, you have to be a chauffeur, I'll borrow a suit. So I borrowed a Piero de Monzi grey flannel suit and then I borrowed a chauffeur's cap from, who did I borrow?

16:22Anyway, I borrowed a chauffeur's cap. And I drove down the mall, which was so exciting because we were one of the first cars to drive down the mall because the press had to get there so early and he was quite junior. And so all those people that had been sleeping all night, they were like, yay! So it was a real laugh. I had a yellow Jeep with a soft top. I mean, it was nuts. And we drove down. And then after I dropped him off, I drove around back to this part of London where, you know, friends were giving parties on Royal Wedding Day. Prince Charles marrying Lady Diana Spencer. Yoo-hoo, day off, day off work, everybody partying, and it was a laugh.

16:56And I came to some couple of parties along the King's Road or something. People said, oh, that's a good suit. Oh, I like that suit. So I thought, oh, OK, maybe this is a good look. Hadn't quite found my look before then. So then I had success. So I thought, OK, well, we'll run that one then. So I did. And you're still going for the same look now, right? Is that fair to say? What happened is that when I was working for magazines, um the women in the magazines dress and they dress in the latest and they do all the looks and I've always liked to be a little bit apart so I don't I don't want to compete and I don't really want to be in a female uniform I don't really want to be in a female fashion uniform so I used to wear literally a uniform I used to wear Mao suits or simple overalls or something and also I couldn't afford there might have been some expensive wonderful fashion I wanted to wear but I wouldn't have been able to afford it so so I was quite into sort of work wear and then it sort of stuck really um and when I moved to architecture you know it's quite difficult being in the construction industry as a woman it's most of the construction industry is run by men and until quite recently you still went into site offices and there were those ridiculous calendars of sort of topless 17 year olds over the filthy kettle and mugs you know do you think I think, oh, come on, guys.

18:21You know, it's a bit of a backward world, although it's obviously getting better. And it's much better outside the UK. We're particularly sort of backward in that respect, I think, because I don't see that in Europe ever or in the Far East, actually. No way. I mean, they don't even have those Page Three girls. I don't know. Perhaps we don't have Page Three girls anymore. Probably not. Luckily, Page Three doesn't exist anymore. But, yeah, you're right. That's an undercurrent of it. There's a bit of an undercurrent. So it's just much easier to be in a suit or something simple, some classic clothes.

18:55I'm not drawing attention to the fact. I could be anything. I'm an it. I quite, that's better. Prefer it. I love that. That's really interesting. So you feel like it helps you sort of find the right level with the people you're communicating with somehow? It wrong-foots them. I'm obviously quite feminine, actually, in the way that I speak, in the way that I communicate. it's quite nice to be a little bit austere in the way I dress. I'm more difficult to pigeonhole, I think, which I think makes people keep an open mind. So I think maybe that's part of it. That's really brilliant. But, you know, when I was young, it's like a game.

19:37If you walk into a boardroom of Japanese businessmen who are all wearing grey suits and you know they're going to be wearing suits, grey suits, what do you wear? Obviously a grey suit. because then they don't know what's come in and it makes them stop and think and, you know. And am I right in saying you don't wear makeup and you never really have much? I don't wear makeup and occasionally I think, God, I really should trample a bit of makeup to sort of improve things a bit. And my daughter Edie says, Mama, no, you can't start now. And I know I can't. I mean, about once every five years I succumb and allow someone to put a bit of makeup on me because I think, well, I'm sure they can, you know, improve things.

20:22And very often it's not an improvement at all and I just look pasty or I look like a drag queen or something. It's just, no, it's not good. It's much better just to be me. And have you ever had long hair? No, well, I did until I was about nine. I had a terrible sort of, you know, a fringe. and curtains, and then off. Did you at the age of nine? Well, my mother foolishly left me in the hairdressers when she went shopping and just said, cut her hair. And he said, what do you want? And so I said, take it off. He said, do your mother won't mind? Of course she won't mind. That's amazing, though, isn't it, to be that sure of yourself at that age, because that's quite unusual.

21:06I didn't like being a spectacle. Oh, OK. And I felt I was, didn't fit having, you know, These great long things psychologically didn't work for me. Is that a shyness then? No, I just felt like a dodo. I don't know, like a wig, like I was wearing a wig or something. I don't know. I don't know. Tell me about working with Grace Coddington because that's pretty amazing. Well, I was a very good assistant. Yeah. I am a very good organised person. Okay. Yeah, so her life was made much simpler by me being the person that was organizing the stuff she needed organized. Is that one of your superpowers then?

21:47Yeah. Yeah, because as an architect, I suppose, it's just spinning plates all the time, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to be able to do so many things as an architect. And this is one reason why I think it's crazy that the developers don't employ more women architects because we famously can feel what it's going to be like for the human being in or outside the building we design. We're very practical. We bring up families. We run houses. We have a job. We organise the holiday. We have our heads in lots of different places at the same time, which is what you need to do as an architect.

22:23You need to be able to technically understand something, but you can't just do. You have to have around in the back of your mind all these other facets which are important, and one of them is aesthetic. one of them's lighting, one of them's functionality, which is incredibly important. And there are multiple functionalities in a building. And then there's all the technical stuff to make the thing breathe right, warm right, cool right, you know, all those things and fit into the environment and have a feel for your surroundings and who are the people who are going to look at your building. You want them to go by and think, oh, that's nice, or a smile to come on their face or say, oh, that's improved that corner of our city or whatever.

23:03So there are many, many things you have to hold in your head at the same time, and budgets and timing. Women are very good at doing multiple things, all sort of staggered at the same time, I think. Definitely, definitely. I mean, I'm extremely good at prioritising. I can have 50 things I need to do, but I can, we do that first, because I know it's important, because I can see instinctively that until we've done that, these other five things can't happen. I think it's a woman's skill, and I think that hopefully more and more women architects will be brought in to design architecture because it's crazy not.

23:42Anyway. Yeah, agreed. Okay, so you've been working with Grace Coddington and Azadean Alaya and you've been on the cover of ID working with David Bailey. This is a pretty amazing world you're immersed in and then suddenly architecture. architecture so explain that by the way before i did architecture i thought maybe i wanted to be a film director ah and so i went to see fellini and in chinecita which is amazing place to go and he and he cast me in a film okay and so okay so you've been in the fellini film as well i have i mean the film kind of morphed into something else even fellini couldn't make the film he wanted to make He wanted to make a film which was Kafka's America and he wanted me to play Carl.

24:32But even he couldn't raise the money and get the thing going, so he had to turn it into a completely different film called L 'Intervista, which is kind of sampling history of his films and bringing back the stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg as older people talking and having a conversation with nothing to do with America. So if Fellini can't make the film he wants to make, what hope did I have? So I realised, OK, that's a fiasco. It's hopeless. I mean, so then I thought, OK, so I did a bit more fashion. And then I thought, OK, architecture. I'll go back to architecture. Why? Because as a child, I'd sort of thought I might want to do architecture.

25:12So I'd sort of struggled through a maths A-level to make sure I had at least one maths or science A-level in case I needed to apply. And because I like environment. I like how people sit in their space, how people fit in their space, how people fit in their city, how people fit in their landscape. I was always interested in that. So you got a place at the AA, the Architectural Association. Yeah. Am I right in saying you didn't have anything to show them in terms of work? I had my fashion show sketchbooks. Okay, so you took those. They said, bring your sketches, bring your portfolio. I don't know what portfolio.

25:52I don't have a portfolio. Well, haven't you got anything? I said, well, I've got my fashion show sketchbooks. Oh, bring those, they said. OK, so I turn up to this little room in the AA where there is a panel of sort of tutors and I think one student rep in top-to-toe Azadeen, you know, one of those really great, waisted great coats and some kind of, he did beautiful suits. I used to wear these incredible suits and with a little stack of leather-bound notebooks I put on the table and, who are you? And I said who I was. and I said I'm terribly sorry I don't have a portfolio but I got my fashion show sketchbooks if you want to see those so you spin around you know this is Versace and that's it mom wearing this one and the reason we sketch and we have to sketch them very fast because they come quite fast the girls past us so ding ding ding and this is Romeo Gigli and this is Azadine and this is this and that's all I've got and they looked at me and thought what what is this I'm sure they did I don't know anyway to give them their credit they thought okay well we'll take a punt on this one and half of them said she's never going to stick it more than three weeks and other people apparently I got a bit of feedback afterwards said no I think she might how old were you then 26 I think yeah that's exactly the age when I decided I wanted to be an architect and went to architecture school as well so I went to the Bartlett age 26 okay having had a career in magazines and so on okay so same as I can totally identify with it but I got as far as a term in and then we we'd set up the modern house at the same time so I had a quick decision to make and I pivoted over to that but yeah you know they're the sliding doors things aren't they but it does take quite a lot of conviction to go through the architectural educational process at that time in your life actually so how did you start in terms of actual work then well because I was a bit older, once I got into my third year, you know, I was like knocking 30.

27:50And I had friends who had started businesses, wanted an architect. And so I was rung up by these friends who ran a magazine publishing company, say, we've just got new offices. We need an architect. I said, but I'm not qualified. My friend Neil Mendoza said, well, look, if you don't do it, Sophie, I'm doing it. And I'm certainly not qualified. So would you please come over and look at it and just tell us what you think we should do so okay so it started in my third year I also had a friend Norman Rosenthal who was at the Royal Academy and he was having problem with with the pop art exhibition he didn't like the design that the designers had proposed what would you do and I said well I'd make everything white in your galleries you can't put pop art against these brown floors brown you know dados and everything you've got to just make everything white I think Yeah.

28:39And so I did that as well. We put white linoleum across all the gallery floors, you know, just to make a white background and to make a sort of industrial background, not a Victorian. I just anyway. So I did that. So I was quite working in my third year. And then by my year out, I had a really busy and I'd opened my office and had someone working for me and we were doing a couple of houses and stuff. So by the time I went back to the AA for my fourth and fifth year I had a functioning architectural practice um so I was sort of juggling things that was fine and wasn't Paul Smith one of your first clients yeah Paul Smith was one of my first clients that was after I'd finished after I'd qualified how did that come about he used to come over and say should we have breakfast yeah yeah okay so he'd come to the office he'd bring the croissants I'll bake the coffee and we'd chat and after a few visits I said you know it's lovely having breakfast with you Paul really nice we'd chat about all kinds of things what is there anything you want well i thought i've just bought this property and maybe blah blah blah whatever and so it went from there and i did westbourne house which was the big house on the corner in notting hill which is like a paul smith department store with all the collections in it women's the men's the objects the accessories the all the stuff yeah just fantastic yeah fantastic shop but i'd known him from years back because i'd known him when i was working in fashion so I knew him anyway.

30:07So you've worked with, you know, Acne Studios, Yoji Yamamoto, Chloe, so on and so forth. How do you explain why you connect with fashion brands or rather why they want to work with you specifically on their stores? Well, I understand their fashion. Okay. So if the creative director says, this is what I'm doing, this is where I'm going, this is what I'm feeling at the moment, I understand what they am saying I understand them I understand what they mean uh you know and they quite often they talk in shorthand you know it's like sort of fashion-y shorthand I get it so I can you know I know what they're up to and also if they don't tell me much but I see what they're doing I can understand where it's coming from they don't have to it's helpful if they can speak a bit because you can misinterpret sometimes.

31:00But I can generally understand what it's all about and understand the feel behind the inspiration that's producing these clothes and what they mean and what they mean in terms of the atmosphere and the kind of character of the brand. So, and that's because I've worked in fashion for nearly a decade. So I think I probably have an advantage in a way. And when I do the first meeting and they ask me questions, you know, I can surprise them with my answers and drag things out of them. And then they feel it's been a conversation that was rewarding for them too. Because I'm interested in them. You know, all these fashion brands are doing different things.

31:43They're all, and they've all got their message. And some are more defined and some are less defined. but the architecture has to embody the message of the brand, the character, the ethos, the kind of the values, but also the integrity of who they are. And I think this is what a lot of branding agencies don't really get, you know, and I get these branding documents which say, you know, a lot of buzzwords and it doesn't actually help you at all. and I want to psychologically understand the brand. I need to in order to be able to make a proposal for them that would make sense for them. And that's why I can do so many such different brands.

32:28You know, I've done Mugler, which is all, you know, completely zhuzhy and amazing with perfume bottles with shooting stars and this and that. You know, but you have to get into it and understand what they're about. And then, you know, we did a completely blue aluminium, brushed aluminium louvered shop in Shanghai for them because it was who they were it's modernistic futuristic it's this blue color that is them you have to get in the mood of it to the point where you can say don't let's put just blue accents don't let's be apologised apologetic about this it should be a blue store oh we can't do blue yeah you can do blue I'll find a way where you You can do everything blue so that it really is you.

33:13So all these jobs are not about my taste. They're about who are you, brand? Who are you? What does it mean? Where do you come from? Where are you going? Yeah, it's not about me. So somewhere in the middle of you working with all these brands, getting your architecture practice up and running, you got married and started a family. Yeah. How old were you when you started your family then? I think I was 28 when I had Arthur. And I have three children. Okay. By modern standards, that's actually quite young. Yeah. By modern standards, it is, isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah. So what was that like for you? Pretty chaotic because I was finishing, I was doing my finals at the AA.

34:02I was running a practice. and running a house and having babies is quite exhausted too. So, yeah, I was crazily busy actually. Yeah. But, you know, it's very good having children when you're studying because you've got long summer holidays like kids do. So that's all very good. So I can't quite remember how it worked out, but I think certainly when Arthur and Edie were little and going to nursery school, I had the same summer holidays as they did. That was nice. So I thought, oh, this is great. It would have been, I mean, I was also running, building, you know, anyway, building at the same time.

34:41But, you know, at least I wasn't, at least it wasn't a full year of study. And because I was experienced, I knew how to get work done. You know, work that takes students five days took me two days because I work much more quick. I make decisions much more quickly. if we were to ask your children to describe you as a mum what what do you think they would say you'll have to ask them do you think the same things would apply in terms of your creativity and practicality combining somehow i really don't you really have to ask them but i value family very highly so i did concentrate a lot on nurturing them um and so and I think they've all three turned out quite well you know it really concerns me that they're moving through life in a way that they're happy with that that they're succeeding in the things they want to succeed in you know and all of that just needs encouragement and attention and you know and it really concerns me if ever you know one of my children is more distant or something like that I think oh what's going on you know what's happening there come back and what do they all do now my oldest is a software engineer and he has a little boy who's three years old who he's teaching maths to and who can do his nine times table age three amazing amounts of mental arithmetic they do together so they're the boys and then I have a daughter Edie who is an obsessive horse rider she has something like crazy like six horses and she does three-day eventing and then to fund it she does modeling and then my youngest one is Olympia and she is a scientist and she is a doctor and she's just finished some postdoctoral research in Toulouse and she's just won a British Academy fellowship and she'll be working from Cambridge in the autumn and so that's very wonderful and she's the first sort of scientist in our side of the family so.

37:06What a great mix. I know it's good isn't it? Isn't it exciting when children do something that you can't do or that you haven't thought of doing absolutely the best i mean you know i can't do any of the things they're doing yeah they're mind-boggling yeah it's brilliant isn't it yeah wasn't talking about the modeling wasn't your mum a model as well she was but it was a much more low-key thing in those days yeah she was a model in the 50s what kind of modeling did she do well a little bit of photos um and quite a lot of sort of house modeling where You'd, you know, model for a house and, you know, fashion shows were not like fashion shows are now.