We have too many listed buildings and do almost nothing to protect them

Those calling for listing redundant buildings like Crooked House or Richard Dunn should be required to accompany their bid with a fully costed proposal for an alternative use

Last year English Heritage announced the listing of Bradford’s Richard Dunn Centre. The listing statement has this to say:

“...dating from 1974-1978, the 40m-high ‘big-top’ roof rising from its elliptical edge beams and slung from the tall masts is a sophisticated and architecturally striking structure which provided a dramatic setting for the sports provision within…”

Bradford Council had already closed the sports centre, indeed has built a lovely new centre at Sedbergh Fields about half-a-mile from the now listed Richard Dunn. The problem is what you do with a huge tortoise of a building now it isn’t used for sports? Prior to the listing the expectation, not unreasonably, was that the building would be demolished and the land used for some other purpose. Ideas included a business park, a retail centre and, of course, housing. After the listing the future looks less clear and the Council points out the essential problem with the decision:

“...high running costs when in use; a large maintenance backlog; a shortfall of the existing design against various current standards for access and energy efficiency; ongoing costs of mothballing the building; the budgetary assumption that capital receipts from sale of this site would contribute towards the cost of the replacement facilities; and the likely high costs should the building need to be reconnected to utilities.”

It may indeed be that the Richard Dunn Centre is an unique and special building meriting protection (this is, of course, an entirely subjective matter) but the consequence of the decision is a significant hole in Bradford Council’s capital budget and a long-term liability made more evident recently as the building had a fire (I am fairly confident that although arson is suspected it wasn’t the building’s owners who set the fire). A ruthless council would simply sell the building and land thereby making the problem a planning issue rather than the responsibilities of ownership. In all likelihood, however, the building will sit there slowly rotting because it has no use and, even if some creative alternative was proposed, it is unlikely that the council would have the money to implement this alternative.

In a nutshell this is the problem with our heritage protections, a problem revealed by an altogether more egregious case, the Crooked House pub at Himley in South Staffordshire. For various reasons (not having anyone living nearby being one more obvious of these reasons) the pub ceased trading, the brewery sold the building and its new owners knocked it down after a convenient fire. I don’t want to defend the blatant ignoring of planning regulations but we see here, again, the problem with heritage protections such as listing. We believe that the building is protected by the bureaucratic act of putting it on a list of protected buildings but, in reality, without clarity about its future, listing a building simply slows down the process of redevelopment.

Roseberry Road is a turning off Oak Lane, one of the two main high streets of Manningham in Bradford, and this is the location for another listed building, Manningham Old Manor. This building, or what remains of it, is a 17th century manor house with some fine features. It is also slap in the middle of Bradford’s poorest community and has remained empty and increasingly derelict for at least three decades. With each passing year, the cost of bringing the building back into use rises and the likelihood of this happening reduces. To the locals, what they see isn’t part of a fine old manor house but a ruined building crumbling in an overgrown piece of land just off the main street. It serves to illustrate the poverty of Manningham rather than celebrating its antiquity as a community.

I could continue round Bradford pointing to dozens of listed buildings that sit there slowly decaying because there isn’t the money to make them good. I remember the then Chief Executive of Bradford Council, Ian Stewart, coming to us with a suggestion that he meet with English Heritage to ask which were the ten or so most important of Bradford’s fifty or so listed mill buildings so as to get them to remove the listings from all the others and give us a chance of getting them redeveloped. I similarly recall the endless discussions with English Heritage about the conversion of Manningham Mills - a wonderful Grade II* velvet mill - into housing. In a place where margins really matter, the heritage costs nearly always mean no action is taken.

England’s old industrial towns and cities are littered with listed buildings that have no real purpose now the manufacturing they were built for has moved elsewhere. Yet we cling to the fiction that these are special buildings that, because we have put them on a list, must be protected at all costs (except that is any costs falling on the national government that imposed the restrictions). In the richest places this matters less because the land values and choice of uses makes restoration economically worthwhile. And in a few places public funding has covered the heritage costs allowing reuse. But for thousands of buildings these heritage costs are simply a burden, an obstacle to redevelopment and reuse.

The Crooked House closed because it had no customers. Bradford’s mills are empty because the wool industry moved elsewhere. And the Richard Dunn Centre is slowly rotting on its hill above the city because it isn’t fit for purpose as a sports centre and there isn’t an obvious alternative use for the building. These problems are repeated across the country, for every lovingly restored and carefully maintained listed chapel there are a dozen others that are dilapidated, used as cheap warehousing, sitting unloved in streets of poor quality terraced housing. If we want to have a heritage protection system, we need to have one that works, not one that contributes to the tired dereliction of our inner cities.

We didn’t allow Ian Stewart to go and talk to English Heritage about Bradford’s mills but his argument remains worth consideration. Nobody is suggesting Bradford demolishes Manningham Mills or the Conditioning House which are exceptional and important buildings but we perhaps list too many buildings for often not very good reasons.

Historic England doesn’t know how many listed buildings there are in the country but estimates there are at least 500,000 buildings on the National Heritage List for England (this is an estimate because some listings include multiple buildings such as a row of houses or a farm complex). Of these buildings over 90% are listed as Grade II. Perhaps, in our urge to protect, we have listed far too many buildings? Bradford alone has nearly 2500 listed buildings, far too many of which are in poor condition. Yet there is no support for those who are responsible for these properties. The state, through a subjective process, allocates a category to a building that results in exceptional costs for its owners but does nothing to compensate or support the owner. It is true that a planning authority has some power to make owners do something but waving a big stick doesn’t suddenly make something that is worth nothing, worth something.

It would, of course, be a brave government that announced a review of those 460,000 Grade II listed buildings with a view to reducing their number by half. But this is what should happen, we should recognise that we cannot - and probably should not - protect every pretty (and some not so pretty) old building in the land. When Bradford’s Victorian city fathers built the city centre we consider to be so important, they did so by demolishing hundreds of existing buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries, buildings that our modern heritage industry would doubtless have protected. We should guard the very best, those 70-80,000 genuinely special buildings, but the scale of current heritage protections is not helping the regeneration of cities like Bradford and acts more often to prevent urban betterment than to preserve a better environment.

And when we have a tighter list of important buildings, maybe we can find a way to provide financial support for their upkeep and reuse. After all, if we as a nation decide that these buildings must be saved, the least we can do is agree to fund some of the saving. I am, I’m sure, not the only person annoyed when I hear a representative of the 20th Century Society or the Victorian Society calling for a listing without offering anything beyond the vaguest observations as to how we should use the building. These spokespeople aren’t the owners, aren’t the planning authority and aren’t going to put up the cash for restoration or conversion. We should maybe have a rule about redundant buildings like Crooked House or Richard Dunn that those calling for listing should be required to accompany their bid with a fully costed proposal for an alternative use to the current redundant use.