Casework is at the heart of what C20 is all about. We campaign to save irreplaceable buildings we love and think are outstanding.
Read about our latest Casework news here.
Below are more reflective articles by our Caseworkers.
Our expertise is recognised by our official role in the planning process. The Twentieth Century Society has to be consulted about any application for listed building consent involving demolition, anywhere in England. Although we don’t have the same legal role in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we are often asked to give our views on the future of important buildings of our period there.
We get to hear about threated buildings by lots of other routes too, and our members and supporters are always alert to threats and quick to let us know about them. Most societies like ours (such as the Victorian Society or the Ancient Monuments Society) can reckon on almost all the buildings of their period that should be listed already being safely included on the National Heritage List for England, which is run by Historic England. That’s not the case for us, and putting buildings forward for listing is a big part of what we do, and often a crucial early step in a campaign. We’ve called for much wider recognition for groups of C20 buildings, by designation of conservation areas, but generally our resources mean that we can only lend support to individual buildings if they are already listed, or we think they deserve to be.
If you found this useful, please give what you can afford to help us identify and save irreplaceable C20th buildings and design.
This is an excerpt of the recording of our AGM 2020 where Catherine Croft gave a round-up of our Casework highlights from this year....
We have recently had plenty of positive publicity for our campaign to save the bus station. Five other heritage organisations also signed our letter to The Times, calling on the Council to re-think their demolition plans; and we have also taken part ...
Pool Court was one of those cases that come to us not through official notification but by word of mouth, when it was threatened with complete demolition. It’s a small 1970s house designed by Francis Pollen and located in the historic Thames-side...
The current proposals to alter St John’s church Waterloo (Francis Bedford, 1829, Grade II*) are extremely damaging to its post-war interior. After a direct hit by an incendiary device in 1940, the church required substantial reconstruction, and lit...
Over the summer we submitted a listing application for ‘Underhill’, a house whose name only modestly hints at the sort of building it is. It was designed in 1969 by Arthur Quarmby for the architect and his family; it was completed in 1975 and the...
We are used to seeing C20 buildings used as film locations, but one of our current cases involves a house in Kensington that’s not just the setting for Joanna Hogg’s movie Exhibition – it’s integral to the plot. Hogg has described it as the...
No building that has crossed my desk in my first three months as Conservation Adviser has captured my eye in quite the same way as a house by the remarkable Irish architect Ernest Trobridge; Swedenborgian, militant vegetarian and architectural vision...
Last December I spoke at a Historic England conference on 19th and 20th century parish church interiors. These come up in our casework surprisingly often, so I had plenty of examples to share with the conference. The main aim was to highlight the var...
I was intrigued when the BBC asked me to take part in a programme filmed at the Red House in Bexleyheath; this Arts & Crafts masterpiece designed for William Morris is not usual Society territory. As part of a series on C20 council housing presented ...
This was how the American critic G E Kidder-Smith described Alton West, the development in Roehampton, SW London on the edge of Richmond Park, designed by the London County Council Architects Department in 1955-59. It has become an enduring exemplar ...