DEMOLITION workers converting an historic building in the elegant West Country town of Dartmouth know a high-pitched wolf whistle will bring the authorities down on them like, well, a ton of bricks. Not because they are overly sensitive to matters of political correctness, you understand, but for fear of disturbing a group of long-term residents in the neighbourhood.
Signs have gone up on the building site of the Grade II listed former pottery, saying: “Quiet, please, bats in this area”.
The pottery is being converted by Angel Property, a firm noted for its sophisticated urban conversions, into nine apartments and eight new-build mews homes on a gem of a site an anchor’s throw from the beautiful and sheltered sailing waters of the River Dart on Warfleet Creek.
Site clearance and demolition started but have been called to a halt for the sake of the bats, a blackbird, a wren and, possibly, a robin, which might, or might not, be nesting there.
With about £1 million already committed, and interest payments thereon stacking up at now rising rates, you or I might be feeling less than chirpy. Not so Henrik Foster, Angel’s senior project manager, who is positively cheerful as he shows me the spot behind a partly demolished concrete wall where the birds might be.
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“We need to take the whole lot down before we can see whether we will be building on to rock or need to do piling for foundations. We’ve got contractors ready to press on with the groundworks, but we are waiting for the birds,” he says with a smile. Foster has got used to digging deep to secure the lifestyle of winged creatures. The pottery has a small colony of lesser horseshoe bats, which are, apparently, quite rare. I wouldn’t know.
What I do know is that the developer is paying Cresswells, a firm of consultants, about £800 a month to count the bats, not to mention that a small army of government and quango officials are on nice little earners affording our winged and furry friends the sort of cradle-to-grave care that the NHS would envy. Bats? You can say that again. All you can see are small, wrinkled, black bags of skin, dangling upside down from the roof timbers, disgracing themselves with mass droppings on the floor below. Why they need to be counted regularly no one can say. But they have a golden future. Bat caves larger than any of the apartments are to be created below the pottery at considerable loss of money to the developer.
“We could easily get £10,000 a unit for storage space, and some of it could have been used to create three-bed units instead of two,” says Foster, whose firm won awards for its conversion of the Hartley jam factory in Southwark, South London.
“We have been held up over the bats and the birds in the wall. Now we’re standing by to start on the roof to make it watertight for winter, but we are having to wait for English Nature to finish all its paperwork.”
Meanwhile, a long written report that came with the developer’s “Bat Licence” from Defra contains a clause stipulating that the demolition workers “communicate in whispers” to avoid upsetting the winged ones. Hence the signs. All this comes after a planning battle which took almost two years. The project’s architect, Adam Bemms, of BBH Architects in Dartmouth, says: “There was some well-meant feeling about keeping a commercial use for at least part of the building, but it’s just not looking feasible.”
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The whole of the top floor — covering 3,500 sq ft, with structurally interesting early laminated wooden beams and the best views — was offered to the town as a possible museum, but no funding could be found to secure the project.
“The planners would like to have seen something here that might create more local jobs,” Foster says. “But we have been advertising the top for commercial use for at least the past 15 months without a single inquiry. What more can we do?”
“Dartmouth is a planning nightmare for developers,” Bemms says. “Well-off, welleducated people have settled or retired here with not much to do. So they have plenty of time to devote to fighting any changes in the town once they have secured their own bolt holes. There is a lot of resistance to anything happening at all here.”
When members of the development team arrived for their first site meeting with planners they were greeted by hostile, placard-waving protesters. They opposed the development even though the pottery had gone out of business and the building was derelict and decaying. “The local paper was wound up to describe the project as a ‘slum’ even before we’d started,” Foster says.
Some slum. The old stone pottery with its big timber beams and iron columns is being renovated inside and out with new timber windows to match the originals. The apartments will have oak floors, limestone tiling and contemporary fittings. Prices reflect the great location — close to the centre of Dartmouth and to some of the nicest villages, coves and beaches in the whole of the West Country.
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Such is the demand for a waterside retreat in this part of the South Hams that just along the coast at Salcombe the estate agent Edward Symmons is selling a rocky ledge on the side of the river measuring just 10ft x 20ft as the perfect private picnic spot. The asking price? £75,000, with no development potential whatever. Earlier this year the same agent sold a 19 sq ft sliver of shingle next to the yacht club, big enough for a couple of beach towels, to an anonymous television presenter for a reputed £30,000.
What does that make several thousand square feet of space given to the bats worth, I wonder? “Never mind,” says Jeremy Ladyman, another member of the Angel team, “wait until they get their service charge.”