Kevin Duffy has spent the last thirty-one years building his own Tudor Village and experimenting with historical vernacular-style buildings at his garden business in the north of England. Far from conforming to the conventional need for shelter or function, however, his structures are all follies. They satisfy a need to make something that he enjoys looking at, as well as enabling him to ponder the past and to think about the people who once lived in buildings similar to the versions he creates.

Duffy was born in a small town near Wigan, Lancashire, in 1945. He left school at the age of fifteen and, like many people in Lancashire at that time, he took a job in the cotton mills, where he worked fifty-six hours a week. After a period of economic decline, the northern mills began to close and he was forced to make his living through musical performance, with his wife Pat, in pubs and clubs across the county.