Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1983 and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week I'm speaking to you from a house on the country on the Essex Hertfordshire border,

the house of the architect Sir Frederick Gibbard.

Sir Frederick, you've chosen to live in a fairly isolated spot. that mean that you could endure isolation?

Well I don't think it's isolated because it is part of Harle Newton.

I came here not because I wanted to be isolated because I wanted to make a garden

And for the last 25 years I've been making it and you've certainly made a great success with it and we're going to talk about that later

on your Desert Island, which is a far less comfortable place to be,

do you think music would be a great comfort?

Oh, most certainly, of course.

I don't have any musical background at all. There was no

music in the family. My father bought an immense HMB gramophone without the

dog and he used to play Gilman Sullivan and Music Hall and that

sort of record and we used to solemnly listen to them and then when we got bored it

was put away and I really didn't hit any music at all until I left school and went to a school of architecture

where I began to meet people who enjoyed music.

Did you find it difficult to pick just eight records that may have to last a long long time?

Very difficult indeed. You see, I must confess I had an eye on this interview and I thought,

well, so and so it would give me a jolly good lead to talk about some episode in my life.

And then in the end I thought, no, I'm going to be shut up with this.

So I'm really going to get eight records that I really would love to live with and I think I probably got them.

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