Rescue and Reuse

Communities, Heritage and Architecture

Ian Morrison, Merlin Waterson

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000726671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Historic buildings and places play an essential role in the everyday lives of the people of the UK, their cultural identity and the economy. They can inspire creativity and enterprise, bring communities together, and make people happier about where they live. This book explores how historic buildings across the UK have been brought back to life through the technical and enabling skills, creativity and sensitivity of architects. Exemplar projects explored through richly illustrated case studies demonstrate the value to society of re-using historic buildings and will inspire a new generation of architects to get involved with community heritage projects at a time of great opportunity. Drawing on interviews with architects and their community clients, this book explores the challenges that they face, how they are overcome, and the benefits that follow.

1.
Replace or revive?

Albert Dock, Liverpool.

How is it that some of the most neglected and ruinous historic buildings somehow find new uses and a new lease of life? There is, of course, no single, simple answer. Yet what such rescues usually have in common is a coming together of different contributions and skills. It is fortunate that the United Kingdom has planning systems, including the listing of historic buildings, which may be under strain, but which deserve to be celebrated and judiciously guarded. There are individuals, organisations and communities who are prepared to devote knowledge and time to protect the places they value, and who can turn to an array of charities and funding bodies for help. They can seek advice and early financial assistance from the staff of Historic England, Historic Environment Scotland, Cadw, the Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF) or the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and will frequently find that the conservation officers of local authorities respond positively. Often, the support of those with fundraising and management skills can be enlisted. Architects with conservation and design expertise, who can translate ideas and aspirations into practicable building projects, can be recruited. And there are the builders and craftspeople who know how to carry out repairs without damaging the fabric they are trying to save. What all these different contributors have in common is the imagination to envisage how an unloved or derelict building can be revitalised.

Those involved in such rescues are entitled to feel that, but for them, the project might never have succeeded. However, all but the most straightforward schemes are essentially a shared endeavour.

Communities and conservation

Frequently, there has been an assumption that local people will not be concerned about the uncertain future facing the area they live in, or the fate of historic buildings on their doorstep. That assumption has been proved wrong time and again. One of the first architects to galvanise community support for schemes to protect Victorian housing and industrial buildings, and turn them to new uses, was Rod Hackney. In 1972, he embarked on a crusade to stop the clearance of Black Road, Macclesfield, which had been designated as slums. Instead of demolition, Hackney eventually gained permission for the residents to assist with repairs to their homes, and for the transformation of their back yards into tidy and partly shared communal spaces, under his supervision as architect. This might have had no more than local significance had Hackney not run a brilliant campaign to obtain consent, involving first the local press, then the national papers, as well as councillors and the local member of parliament. He had demonstrated the potential of what he called ‘community architecture’. Hackney’s ideas were forcefully advocated in his book, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Cities in Crisis (1989), which is particularly critical of high-rise blocks of flats designed to house those moved out of 19th-century terrace housing. His criticisms have been given renewed urgency by the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London in 2017.

The initial reaction to Hackney’s ideas was at best dismissive, and at worst openly hostile. Hackney’s response was to stand for the post of president of the RIBA. His campaign, in 1986, turned into a battle between the advocates of the Modern Movement, including those who thought the role of the architect was to produce what they believed was good for society, and Hackney’s supporters, who were convinced there needed to be a radically different approach to the development of towns and cities that involved the people whose lives would be transformed by redevelopment. The RIBA presidential candidate favoured by the old guard dismissed Hackney’s ideas as ‘damaging nonsense’, but he had misjudged the ability of the RIBA’s Fellows to sense a change in public mood and aspirations. Hackney won the election with a substantial majority, and set about using the RIBA as an advocate for what he called ‘Humanism not Modernism’. He had won a powerful body of supporters, not just nationally but internationally.

fig 1.1 Rod Hackney with Black Road residents, Macclesfield.

If the old guard at the RIBA had been more attuned to shifts in thinking about planning and architecture on both sides of the Atlantic, they might not have reacted so negatively. Much of what Hackney was saying had been brilliantly articulated in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which showed how needlessly destructive much urban renewal was in the United States. Jacobs demonstrated how important it is to respect the qualities of liveliness and diversity among different social groups, which explains why some districts are much more valued than others. Indeed, many of Hackney’s and Jacobs’s ideas had already been powerfully expressed by John Ruskin and William Morris, both of whom came to realise that a thriving and healthy society is more likely to produce great art and an attractive urban and rural environment. Hackney was also tapping into other changes. Society had become less deferential, not just towards politicians but towards the professions.

Among those who responded enthusiastically to Hackney’s ideas was the Prince of Wales, who visited Macclesfield to see the Black Road project for himself. When the Prince of Wales made his much-reported speech at the RIBA’s 150th anniversary dinner in 1984, the press latched on to his description of the proposed extension to the National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’. Sadly, they scarcely reported those passages in his speech which advocated a more humane approach to building in historic cities. In a carefully argued section, the Prince of Wales stated:

To be concerned about the way people live, about the environment they inhabit and the kind of community that is created by that environment, should surely be one of the prime requirements of a really good architect. It has been most encouraging to see the development of community architecture as a natural reaction to the policy of decamping people to new towns and overspill estates where the extended family patterns of support were destroyed and the community life was lost.

The Prince of Wales may have embarrassed some in his audience, but he struck a chord with many both inside and outside the profession. He proceeded to set up the Prince’s Regeneration Trust, which since 1999 has supported 90 projects, from Govanhill Baths, Glasgow, and the North Wales Hospital, Denbigh, to the Middleport Pottery, Stoke-on-Trent (see the case study in Chapter 5, p. 73).

Building preservation societies and community action

The changes in attitude at a national level coincided with energetic action regionally. Around the UK, local communities were setting up building preservation trusts (BPTs) that were prepared to work for the conservation and adaptation of buildings under threat. These were non-profit-making charitable bodies, and so could take on projects which local authorities might find difficult to undertake because of the time required to put projects together and to raise adequate funding from grant-giving schemes.

Preservation trusts were able to come to the rescue of buildings valued by nearby communities. For example, in the 1980s, British Rail decided they had no further use for the goods shed designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1845 on the Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway. The repair of the building by the Stroud Preservation Trust is described in the case study on p. 17.

The way former industrial communities have supported efforts to protect a nearby historic house has sometimes taken people by surprise. When the future of Seaton Delaval in Northumberland was in doubt, few thought that an area still struggling with unemployment after the closure of its mines would become the house’s champion. The building is Sir John Vanbrugh’s most compact, most powerful design, but a baroque extravaganza might have been thought to appeal principally to connoisseurs, rather than to those living in a region with high levels of deprivation.

In fact, the response of people in Seaton Sluice and Blyth was extraordinarily generous and in 2009 helped to tip the scales in favour of acquisition by the National Trust. The mines may have gone, and with them local employment, but Seaton Delaval helped local people to feel pride in their own distinctive past.

fig 1.2 Seaton Delaval, Northumberland.

Three minutes’ walk from Birmingham city centre are some of the ‘back to back’ houses which were once home to the city’s working classes. They were preserved thanks to the efforts of the Birmingham Conservation Trust, who appreciated their rarity and interest. The trust raised the funds needed for their repair, devised plans for showing them to the public – four distinct periods of occupation are presented – and carried out detailed research from primary sources, which is the basis of what visitors are told. The ‘back to backs’ are now safeguarded by the National Trust and are so popular with visitors that access has to be by timed ticket. These and many other projects described in this book show just how deeply rooted in local communities the preservation of historic buildings can be. Very often supporters are quick to see that these are not cultural indulgences but can provide local employment, engage volunteers and support economic and social recovery.

figs 1.3, 1.4 Back to backs, Birmingham.

fig 1.5 Brick Lane Carpet Factory, London.

The role of the architect

A younger generation of architects has built on what Hackney achieved in Macclesfield. When Bird’s Custard relocated from Birmingham to Banbury in 1964, it left behind factories close to the centre of the city. These have been transformed by Glen Howell Architects into a shopping area and creative and digital workspace which, over time, has expanded and fed into other innovative businesses. In London’s East End, the firm of Selgas Cano has turned the former Brick Lane Carpet Factory into a creative hub which combines modernity with carefully preserved historic features, for instance by leaving old concrete exposed in ways they choose to call ‘old-tech and non-tech’.

The skills of a conservation architect are particularly valuable when potential new roles for a threatened building are being assessed. Architects have been trained to see how the best possible use can be made of available spaces; how access can be improved, especially for visitors with special needs; and whether or not additions to the building will enhance its use. The case studies which follow show that sometimes a sensitive and imaginative extension to a historic building, to facilitate new uses, may be the best way of protecting what is most significant about the earlier fabric.

Foundations

For centuries, builders and architects have found ingenious solutions to the task of integrating new buildings with their older neighbours. When materials were expensive or difficult to transport, there were strong incentives to add to or adapt existing buildings, rather than clear the site and start again. Most of the great cathedrals, historic towns, village streets and country houses were allowed to accrete, with the timber, stone or brick that happened to be available giving pleasing variety. Our forebears often seem to have understood the benefits of recycling building materials rather better than some of today’s developers. When the Greyfriars Friary in Leicester was suppressed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, stone and timber from the friary was used to repair the nearby church of St Martin. A ‘bayme’ (beam) was bought from the ‘freers’ (Greyfriars) for 15 shillings and then used in what became Leicester Cathedral.

This was not simply a matter of economy. Both patrons and builders often wanted to give their work a sense of context and of the passage of time. At Blenheim, Oxfordshire, Vanbrugh argued for the preservation of the ruins of Woodstock Manor because he believed that the new palace he was designing would be enriched by the survival of ‘the Remains of distant Times’. Very often it was the most capable architects who were skilful at integrating their work with what came before. At the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Sir John Soane designed a stable block and new infirmary which respected the scale and elegance of the 17th-century buildings by Sir Christopher Wren, yet are entirely original: they are described by the architectural commentator, Ian Nairn, as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• About the Author
• About the Editor
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Replace or revive?
• 2. Downsize
• 3. Live
• 4. Work
• 5. Shop
• 6. Play
• 7. Learn
• 8. Visit
• 9. Integrate
• 10. Constructing our future from our past
• Bibliography
• Index
• Image credits