East Essex

For many, retirement means the promise of relaxation and stress-free days filled with gardening and playing golf. But not ex-advertising man Geoff, he's decided to spend his golden years building a dramatically cantilevered steel framed house right on a flood plain. At the ripe old age of 63, Geoff is selling his luxury villa in Spain to take on one of the biggest challenges of his life - a flood resistant architectural marvel on the Essex coast budgeted at a whopping seven hundred thousand pounds.

 

Unlike his daughter, Geoff sees no risk in sinking every penny he has into this unusual building and moves into a small caravan on site, the ultimate bachelor pad. This is his base through wind and the rain as he project manages the complicated construction of a house designed to be safe in a one in a thousand year flood event. But after one hundred and ninety thousand pounds worth of anchoring steel and concrete foundations are drilled over fourteen metres into the ground, Geoff hits double trouble – not just Covid but a collapse in the Spanish property market. Without funds to continue and trapped in his cold caravan, the odds are stacked against him. But refusing to give up, there is one expression this East End boxer knows well – ‘No guts, No glory'!