Last week, some friends pointed me in the direction of George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces. It has everything to appeal to my interests – from a cute paper splitty in the credits, to amazing and quirky uses of unusual spaces.

After catching up with last week’s episode, I popped onto the 4OD website where Series 1 is available to watch (if you register). There are several glimpses of campervans during the series, including an interview with a couple at Bug Jam where they show off their lovely splitty.

The first episode of Series 2 also featured a couple of glimpses of Florence of Polly’s Parlour – hopefully she’ll be making a bigger appearance in future episodes.

Campervans aside, there were many exciting and incredible small spaces to inspire and excite, from the Victorian underground toilets converted into a beautiful flat, offices and work spaces in reclaimed tube carriages and shipping containers to beautiful beach houses and cabins in the woods. I also enjoyed watching the progress of George’s own static caravan, which developed, with a lot of hard work and hours of toil, from something unloved and stuck in the 1970s to a beautiful piece of modern design. His project this series is an accessible tree house, the progress of which I will be following with interest.

Some people didn’t like that the ambulance in the first episode of Series 2 was being converted to a camper, or that the couple paid an expert to carry out the work rather than do it themselves. In my opinion, a repurposed ambulance is better than a rusting, forgotten ambulance in a field somewhere, and if we all tried to do things to the best of our abilities, rather than employing people who were good at them, my daily driver would not be running, but I’d not need it to go to work, seeing as how you’d all be educating your children at home 😉

The great thing about this programme is that it gets you thinking about how to use the space and materials you have more efficiently, and how something functional and practical can also be insanely beautiful. As a child, I harboured a notion of living in a double decker bus for a brief period of time – the space provided would be palatial, if utilised wisely!

George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces is on Channel 4 at 8pm on Thursday.

An episode guide for Series One can be found here.