I was very fortunate, I got a Henry Fellowship to Yale, and that was absolutely incredible... I mean Manchester was a nine to five mentality and Yale opened on the first day of term and closed on the last... America was incredibly refreshing... I had been the odd one out working to pay my way, but in America that was not unusual at all, it was more normal than abnormal, so America was a tonic. I still get a charge when I go back there, and I still enjoy it, but at the time it was incredibly liberating... If you like the anonymous vernacular and you also have an insatiable appetite for those heroes you had discovered in your teens in a public library... It was absolutely unbelievable to work around the clock literally and then to submit, and instead of falling into the pattern of collapsing in a heap and recovering for the next project, to actually just go travelling and see those buildings. The anonymous tradition is very strong, those extraordinary covered bridges and clapboard houses in New England... and then California, Schindler, the Eames, Ellwood, Koenig... that was an extraordinary period...[+]