The Essay

Novelist Mark Haddon reflects on the house in Northamptonshire which was his childhood home, until the age of 12: "It was a detached, three bedroom, two storey new-build on a thin strip of reclaimed rubbish dump between the end of a red-brick terrace and the Smarts' bungalow. My father was an architect and although he didn't design the building himself it was, in its modest way, an architect's house, a couple of cuts above provincial 1960s boilerplate." This week's Essays are part of the 70th birthday celebrations of the Third Programme: the network discussed architecture from its earliest days, covering both new initiatives and historic buildings, most notably in talks by Nikolaus Pevsner. Producer Clare Walker.