George Clarke visits ‘challenging builds’ with Channel 4

The four-episode series begins this coming week…

In a brand-new series, George Clarke meets people who are taking on challenging huge builds for powerful emotional reasons.

From being drawn back to an area that they’ve always loved or a place with strong family memories, to taking on a house that’s close to their heart – like historic ruins that need rescuing, or a wreck of a beach house.

Channel 4 will follow them as they uproot their lives, stretch their finances and test their relationships, all in order to build wonderful homes of their dreams.

George Clarke with participants in episode one, Chris and Ellie / Channel 4

In the first episode of the series young married couple Chris and Ellie have returned to where Chris grew up, in Lancashire’s beautiful Ribble Valley, to build a home together. After months of struggling to find the perfect property, they ended up buying a run-down bungalow from Chris’s grandparents, in sight of his old primary school. But what they thought was a doer-upper has turned out to be a knocker-downer and so began the months-long process of building a new house from scratch.

Despite terrible weather and all the complications of a new build – from bricklaying mistakes to broken feature windows and ‘decision fatigue’ inside – the couple are determined to hit their schedule and be in by Christmas. For Chris and Ellie, more than other home builders, time is of the essence, as Chris has been diagnosed with stage four cancer.

George Clarke’s Building Homes, Channel 4, Wednesday – February 5th – at 9pm