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.
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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...
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...
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 presen...
‘The No 1 Poultry site posed an overwhelming question at the level of representational form in three ways’, wrote Colin St John Wilson in 1998. ‘Firstly the primacy of its location in the city required that an exceptional statement should be ma...
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 ...
In March this year, we submitted an emergency spot-listing application to save the former Western Morning News building in Plymouth, after we were alerted by local campaigners to plans by its then owners, the Daily Mail and General Trust, to demolish...
This was the title given by an impressed Observer to Charles Holden’s new headquarters building, 55 Broadway (1925-29) for Underground Electric Railways of London Ltd. It was the tallest office building in London when it opened, and for nearly 90 y...
Hyde Park Barracks has been making headlines since before its construction began, so we were ready to react as soon as press reports indicated that its occupiers, the Household Cavalry, were moving on. Sale and redevelopment will be almost inevitable...
Welcome to C20 Society’s annual Buildings at Risk list. The following have been selected as our top ten threatened buildings for 2015, and have already helped draw attention to some very worthy cases. Keeping a list like this helps us demonstrate ...
In issue 2013/3 we reported on two unlisted buildings which, despite making positive contributions to their respective conservation areas, were slated for demolition. Here is a similar story, but this time it has a happier ending. Cofferidge Close ...
A 1990s suburban office park, with offices for the Ready-Mix Concrete company, built in the setting of an early C18 Grade II former country house, a C19 stable block and a C19 half-timbered and gabled house, a listed wall and part of a Conservation A...
The commemorative structures that were built as a response to the losses of the First World War featured strongly in our casework in 2014. Heritage Lottery Fund grants and similar schemes have led to the re-evaluation of many memorials and plans to r...
Sir Leslie Martin’s Middleton Hall, an important post-war listed building at the University of Hull, is a recent case revealing critical gaps in our historic protection system. It is set for a raft of damaging alterations and extensions, but if lis...
One of the Society’s triumphs in 2013 was our successful application to upgrade Herbert Rowse’s India Buildings in Liverpool (1924-32) to Grade II*. But this superb building, with its stunningly beautiful shopping arcade, is not the only ...
Colston Hall is well-known in Bristol as a city-centre entertainment venue, home to shows from stand-up comedy to classical concerts. Less celebrated, however, is the 1950s interior, still virtually unaltered inside its handsome Victorian she...
We were consulted recently on two inter-war office buildings in cities at opposite ends of the country: both unlisted, both in conservation areas and both positive contributors to them. When we became aware of plans for their redevelopment, w...
Every so often a colourful post-war mural – often deployed to liven up a drab concrete building – catches your eye. But the Chartist mural in Newport, which lines a pedestrian tunnel in the city centre, stood heads and shoulders above the...
Once again the pressure is on this listed shopping centre, as the owners seek to increase their floor space. Backed by English Heritage, we have strongly objected to plans currently under consideration by Milton Keynes Council to drastically extend t...
The Television Factory ‘Change is usually sad, but it is dangerous to live too much in the past, and to overstate the past at the expense of the future.’ This was the reply of Graham Dawbarn in 1956 to the outcry at proposals to demolish the lat...
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