EXHILARATION, despondency, tedium, outrage and frustration — they all come in equal and repeated measure to those who take up one of life’s ultimate challenges: rescuing a beautiful historic building on death row.
You may do it as a private purchaser or a commercial enterprise or, as I have, through a preservation trust. Rashly, I and my colleagues at SAVE Britain’s Heritage have done it four times and are now embarking on a fifth, each time starting without a penny in the bank.
True, Barlaston Hall in Staffordshire only cost a pound to buy, and for a substantial 18th-century Palladian villa with accommodation on five floors that might sound a bargain. But it was falling into a coal mine and suffering from severe subsidence cracks, and rain had been cascading through the roof for nearly 20 years, bringing down all the plaster ceilings. When we finally gained entry you could stand in the basement and look out through a hole in the roof. Wet and dry rot were everywhere and, for good measure, the sole surviving flights of the back staircase promptly collapsed.
With All Souls, the Victorian church at Haley Hill in Halifax, the magnificent slender spire by the great Sir George Gilbert Scott (of Albert Memorial fame) was deemed to be dangerous and liable to fall on a passing bus.
The 18th-century cottages in Hue Street in St Helier, Jersey, were deemed so dangerous that we had to use a cherry-picker to take off the roof tiles one by one.
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With 6 Palace Street, in Caernarfon — the subject of another dangerous structures notice — it was a question of finding a local builder willing to carry out emergency repairs. So we went to one recommended by the National Trust, who came back saying: “There’s only one thing to do with this building — demolish it.”
That’s the point. It will be a fight, or at least an uphill struggle, from start to finish. So here are some tips and caveats. Remember that though your wreck may look a disaster it may not be quite as bad as it appears. With the Hue Street cottages we found the scaffolding was not propping up the building, just a self-supporting framework poking out of every window.
Some of the hardest work comes in persuading owners to sell and agreeing terms. It is vital to have proper access and a secure right of way — possibly across land owned by others. Ensuring Barlaston Hall would be a saleable proposition was dependent on obtaining three quarters of an acre at the side for a garden, which would provide future owners with privacy.
With 6 Palace Street we had to offer to provide 24-hour security in case a drunk broke into the building and injured himself. We found a local man willing to keep watch from an empty shop opposite. No sooner had he gone off at 9.30am for a ten-minute wash and brush-up than an irate official was on to our solicitor saying we had breached our agreement.
The most vital point of all is that, before you begin, you must be able to see your way out of the project as well as in. Basically this means that the building can be put in a usable form, allowing you to sell it and recover your money. Make this a possibility even at the halfway stage when the building is windproof and watertight and structurally sound. Though we won our battles with the National Coal Board over Barlaston, we ran out of money and had to sell. Luckily we found the perfect buyers — James and Carol Hall — who turned it back into a single family house and restored the interiors, including the wonderful rococo plasterwork.
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At All Souls, we had only taken a seven-year lease and after we had repaired the spire, with help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, we withdrew, determined that it should be vested in the Churches Conservation Trust, which looks after more than 300 former parish churches. At Hue Street, we restored and sold the first cottage, then found a developer partner willing to use our architect, Huw Thomas (who gallantly went on to Palace Street), and do it to our specifications. Within a month of going on sale, every cottage was under offer.
It is vital to find an architect who recognises that you, as client, come first. At Hue Street our first architect insisted on pursuing his own ideas, which involved rebuilding the ramshackle but interesting buildings behind the cottages. As a result we were refused planning permission but still left with his bill.
It is essential to have a careful archaeological clearout because mouldings, fragments of woodwork and paving stones may lie buried. At Barlaston we found fragments of all the plasterwork as well as most of the woodwork of the glass-fronted library bookcases. At Hue Street there were enough well-weathered pantiles to cover the whole length of the street front.
The first major building task is to stop the leaks, if necessary with a temporary roof or even tarpaulins, and to let the interior dry out. At Barlaston we had Swan and Partners, our heroic builders, who struggled through a bitter winter to get a temporary roof on. Even urgent works, sadly, can cause conflict with planners who may have stood by for years while the building collapsed. At All Souls, Donald Buttress, our well-named architect, practically came to blows with the planners when he insisted the only way to make the roof watertight before winter was to use precast tiles, not real slates.
Our latest project, Castle House in Bridgwater, Somerset, is a glorious oddball. Looking like an early Tudor gatehouse complete with battlements, it is almost the birthplace of modern concrete construction in England. It dates from 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition — an appropriate vintage for an experimental building. We have pioneering concrete block construction, pre-cast concrete corbels, reinforced concrete beams, “post-tensioned” concrete, even concrete staircases, handrails and window frames. Bridgwater was a centre of the local construction industry and the Board and Ackerman families who built the house led the way in developing concrete. With costs estimated at more than £500,000 we are setting up the Friends of Castle House to enlist donations from the many architects and engineers who believe that concrete is the wonder material of our age. Donations are welcome at SAVE, 70 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6EJ, 020-7253 3500.