Readers of Gavin Stamp’s “Nooks and Corners” column in Private Eye will be familiar with the barbaric stupidity of most local government in Britain. Yet habitually the grisliest misdeeds of Labour and Tories councillors alike stem not from how they administer the planning applications of others, but from how they plan to handle their own property estates. Take the inestimable post-Edwardian baroque of Perth City Hall. This once glorious structure has been left vacant by its council owners and the inevitable has happened. By not maintaining it, they now claim they’re justified in demolishing it. In its place would be an impressively dismal proposed new ‘civic square’. Now Perth’s technically a former, not an actual ‘city’. It is, however, bidding to be one of those towns given city status to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee. The last things such vandals should get is a reward. It beggars belief that a council as piously keen as any to trumpet its ‘Green’ credentials sincerely maintains that it can enjoy any while expending the energy required to demolished rather than repair.
A more expected example of just how unfit regulation of our historic buildings is comes from Peterborough. There, a Sue Ryder home has won permission from its local council (and gained the support of English Heritage no less) to expand itself on its current site. This site happens to be the Grade I listed Thorpe Hall, one of the very few worthwhile structures to remain from the Commonwealth. Such boons Sue Ryder will gain include the inevitable ‘state-of-the-art facilities’ the up-to-date hospice requires. And the permanent cost will be to disfigure a building as yet unspoilt into its fourth century, and a key example of a class you can count on not much more than the fingers of two hands. You don’t have to have a tear-stained copy of Tim Mowl’s Architecture Without Kings in your hands to wonder if a better fate could have been found for Thorpe Hall if this sublime example of Puritan classicism does indeed no longer suit Sue Ryder’s purposes. Could they not, for one, have sold it? And purpose built the hospice they wanted elsewhere, perhaps utilising the money undoubtedly capable of being raised by selling Thorpe Hall?
These two cases may seem to be at variance with one another, at least in our condemnation of them. In truth, they’re the same thing: examples of the inability of faddists to recognise value in what we have from the past and our duty to hand it on to the future. More and more an anti-localist case makes itself that the last people who should be responsible for Britain’s built environment are our wretched councils.