From Tate Modern to Grimsby docks: the team saving Britain's cherished buildings from the wrecking ball

The Guardian

4 days ago

It's hard to imagine London without the mighty riverside citadels of Tate Modern and Battersea power station, or bereft of the ornate Victorian market halls of Smithfield and Billingsgate. It is equally difficult to picture Yorkshire without its majestic sandstone mills, Grimsby without its fishing docks, or parts of Liverpool without their streets of terrace houses. Yet all these things could have victims of the wrecking ball, if it weren't for one small band of plucky activists.
You may not have heard of Save Britain's Heritage, or Save as it likes to style itself. But the tiny charity, which celebrates its 50th birthday this month, has had more influence than any other group in campaigning for the imaginative reuse of buildings at risk, most of which had no legal protections whatsoever from being bulldozed.
'We felt that a much more punchy approach to endangered buildings was really needed,' says Marcus Binney, who founded Save in 1975, with an agile network of likeminded journalists, historians, architects and planners. 'There was too much, 'Oh, we'll write to the minister, and have a word with the chairman of the county council.' The usual channels were not working. We realised that the real battleground was the media.'
They were spurred by the surprise success of a 1974 exhibition at the V&A, The Destruction of the Country House, co-curated by Binney, which conveyed the shocking scale of demolition across the country with graphic power. The 'Hall of Destruction', replete with toppling classical columns, displayed more than 1,000 country houses that had been lost in the preceding century, a number that rose to 1,600 by the time the exhibition closed. The scale of the issue struck a chord: more than 1.5m signatures of support were gathered to keep these buildings standing.
What set Save apart from other heritage groups at the time was its proactive, propositional approach and energetic, youthful zeal. They had no qualms about calling out the villains, and would admonish greedy developers and lazy local authorities with ferocious glee. Their press releases and campaign pamphlets were a breath of fresh air, emblazoned with bold graphics, punchy headlines and evocative texts written with fierce authority – with a critical media-savviness brought by trustees including Simon Jenkins and Dan Cruickshank. Most crucially of all, theirs was not a call to keep the world in aspic, but to find creative alternative uses for buildings that their owners couldn't see. 'The argument for demolition was always that a building had 'reached the end of its useful life,'' says Binney. 'But the question is: 'Useful for whom?''
When the Central Electricity Generating Board planned to demolish its (then unlisted) Bankside power station in Southwark and replace it with offices, Save conjured a proposal in 1979, in a moment of wildly improbable blue-sky thinking, to turn it into an art gallery instead. A decade later, Tate announced that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's great brick colossus would become the home of its modern art collection. It is now one of the most visited museums in the world. Twenty years on, when a developer wanted to scoop out the elegant innards of Smithfield market and replace them with a bloated office block and shops, Save commissioned an alternative vision, fought two crowdfunded public inquiries, and won. The London Museum is set to open there next year, breathing fresh new life into the atmospheric warren of cast-iron domes and brick vaults, that would otherwise be dust.
It is hard to appreciate now, but Save's early activities fundamentally transformed the perception of heritage, and expanded the scope of what was deemed worth keeping. The conservation movement tended to focus on churches, country houses and town halls, but Save was the first to suggest that industrial buildings were equally worthy of attention. Its 1979 exhibition and publication, Satanic Mills, highlighted the threatened textile factories of the Pennines, and led to campaigns to protect places such as Salts Mill in Saltaire – now a Unesco world heritage site – and Lister Mills in Manningham.
'The building itself is an icon for Bradford,' says Mollie, who now lives in a flat in Lister Mills, once the largest silk mill in the world, which was transformed by architect David Morley for Urban Splash in 2006. 'When it was becoming derelict it gave the community a real down feeling – you felt everything was bad and going wrong. When it was done up it really raised people's hearts.'
Save has long argued that communities' emotional attachment to buildings is just as powerful an argument for their retention as their place in the architectural canon. But that's not a factor that planners can consider. 'The planning system is heavily focused on historic fabric and architectural significance,' says Henrietta Billings, Save's current director. 'But what about emotional attachment and embodied memory? What about the feelings of loss when these buildings are ripped out of communities, and what about the unlisted buildings that people really care about?'
The development industry may not speak the language of loss, but it certainly understands the 'value uplift' that a 'heritage asset' can bring. At Capital and Centric's recent development of a Manchester textile mill, Crusader Works, the sales team received four times as many inquiries for flats in the 19th-century mill buildings than in the new-build blocks. And they sold them for 10% more, inviting buyers into a fantasy of 'exposed beams and red brick dreams'. Another office developer says it favours renovating postwar blocks in order to attract the gen Z workforce, who prefer working in 'distinctive, characterful buildings' with low carbon credentials over generic 'grade A' glass boxes.
Alongside financial value, Save is increasingly raising the environmental benefits of keeping buildings – something which can be more precisely measured than emotions, and fought over at public inquiries with the help of expert witnesses. The Oxford Street branch of Marks & Spencer recently became a lighting rod for this new frontier of the heritage debate, when the carbon emissions of demolishing the 1920s department store and replacing it with a 10-storey behemoth were raised as one of the key reasons for keeping it. The M&S plans, Save argued, with the help of carbon expert Simon Sturgis, would release 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – the equivalent of almost 20,000 flights from London to Sydney.
'It was a watershed,' says Billings, 'aligning heritage and sustainability at the heart of a public inquiry for the first time. Although we lost the battle, we were able to show how, by avoiding demolition, you are not chucking out all the embodied carbon in the existing building, as well as not expending more carbon on producing all the steel, glass and concrete for a brand new building.'
Save may have lost the case but the inquiry highlighted its next crucial battleground. The then secretary of state Michael Gove's decision to quash M&S's permission to demolish the building was ultimately overturned, because he had misinterpreted the national planning policy framework (NPPF). He suggested that there was a 'strong presumption in favour of reusing buildings' in the rules – which there is not. At present, the NPPF merely tries to 'encourage the reuse of existing resources, including the conversion of existing buildings'. There is a legal ocean of difference between a 'strong presumption' and a mere 'encouragement', as M&S's barrister successfully pointed out. The devil is in the semantic detail, and it is exactly that detail that Save is now campaigning to see changed.
'The current government's rhetoric is all about 'build, build, build' and 'bulldozing the planning system',' says Billings. 'But planning is not the obstacle. It just needs to be properly funded and tightened up. There are plenty of planning applications that we know local councillors and planners are uncomfortable with, but they are often forced to approve them because of the costs involved in defending refusals.'
Entirely funded by donations, Save's team of six is currently juggling numerous campaigns, from trying to close legal loopholes in Scotland's heritage protection rules, to saving a Georgian seaside hotel on the edge of Snowdonia, to contesting several controversial plans to butcher Liverpool Street station. As it celebrates five decades of such David and Goliath battles, against a bleak backdrop of rapid global heating, missed emissions targets and a government intent on building at any cost, the work of this gutsy little group is more critical than ever.