[1] McCloud attended Dunstable Grammar School, which became Manshead comprehensive,[2] and after his A levels, went to work on a farm in Tuscany and studied singing at the Conservatory of Music in Florence for a year.

[3][4] Although he was offered a three-year course in Italy, he was persuaded to return to take up a place at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied languages before changing to philosophy and finally settling on the history of art and architecture.

[4][5] He was a member of the Footlights comedy ensemble at Cambridge alongside Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, working as a costume and set designer for the troupe.

In 1999, he then went on to write and present Grand Designs, a programme covering unusual and elaborate architectural homebuilding projects, produced by Talkback Thames, which recently completed its twenty-fourth series.

In the course of the later series, McCloud demonstrated his fluency in French and Italian, occasionally acting as a translator for people who had houses built abroad in places where they didn't know the language.

His co-presenters included Dave Gorman, Janet Street-Porter, Naomi Cleaver, Diarmuid Gavin and Bill Bailey.

In 2013, the cabin was moved to the seaside near Watchet on the Somerset coast to film a second four-part series of the show with a more "beach shack" theme.

He went to four different British families around the world who have left Britain behind to a life in far-flung remote destinations: one on a desert island in the south Pacific nation of Tonga, one near a volcano in Chile, one in the middle of a jungle in Belize and the final in Jämtland in Sweden.

McCloud led a consortium to purchase two plots of land to build a HAB housing development on the outskirts of Swindon, Wiltshire.

McCloud was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to sustainable design and energy-saving property refurbishment.

In October 2023, on Times Radio, he endorsed the Green Party and specifically Ellie Chowns' candidacy, in his home county of Herefordshire.