The Orphan Building

At the very summit of the St David’s Hill area of Exeter, there is an orphan. This orphan was born in 1979 and has lived in the same place her entire life since; she never left home. Only, her parents left a few years ago and, like many, she found herself lost. Now, after a series of foster parents, she has had to reinvent herself to keep up with the times. This orphan is a building.

On the outside, Maxwood House is a nondescript, 1970s office conversion. It hugs the pavement - desperate for company - reaches up fifty feet, and offers nothing more pleasing to the eye than brown bricks, squares of crazy paving stone cladding , and a little vertical, streamlined glazing.

It is like one of those poor, unattractive and abandoned children in a Romanian orphanage, the type you see on the TV adverts. It is the essence of 1970s urban architecture, adapted for the tiny plot of suburban land it occupies. It also towers incongruously over the district’s oldest building, Walnut House, a very attractive, well-formed Regency building, just the other side of the road. One is in all of the local history books, acclaimed and admired by everyone; the other never gets a mention. You could say that one is always in Cosmopolitan, turning heads, while the other never even makes the Big Issue.

I once knew the orphan very well, perhaps even intimately. I knew her parents, too. She was created by a building firm, perhaps the greatest the South West has ever known.

It all started with Jack Slowman back in the pre-War days when, among other things, he did some work on the Airport. He was so successful that Slowmans - the original firm - quickly outgrew its own company and began to expand, cleverly acquiring other local contractors along the way, each with its own specialty. In the end, ABC Group PLC was formed, and at one time it was the only truly local firm in the city that was quoted on the London stock exchange.

Well, by the 1970s this proud construction firm had a burgeoning office department, employing all sorts of accountants, draughtsmen, lawyers, and so forth. But they were scattered all over the place, in little terraced houses, contractors‘ offices, etc; there was no ‘headquarters’ as such, poor communication was endemic and there was little company ethos and socialisation of which to speak. Slowmans needed an HQ.