Campaigning for outstanding buildings

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Casework

Casework is at the heart of what C20 is all about. We campaign to save irreplaceable buildings we love and think are outstanding.

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.

Most churches in England and Wales do not need to apply for listed building consent and changes are managed through a separate system. C20 Society has to be consulted on these too, and has a specialist caseworker who does this.

We encourage architects, developers and owners to consult with us before they put in planning applications, so that we can explain why we think a building is important and try to help them find solutions which meet their needs and preserve what’s special about it. Sometimes that’s not possible and we end up lobbying hard against the granting of permission. The caseworkers present cases at the monthly meeting of our expert Casework Committee, who guide them and can also advise on lobbying press, working with local groups and coming up with positive suggestions for alternative design approaches, or more radical lateral ideas.

In the last resort, if an application we’ve fought against gets permission, we can sometimes reverse the decision at a public inquiry or consistory court hearing, chaired by a planning inspector, or lawyer, who will make a recommendation to the Secretary of State. We have to think very carefully about whether to do this as it is very time consuming and can be expensive.

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A worrying gap: Middleton Hall, University of Hull

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...

Monuments and meaning: understanding war memorials

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...

Liverpool hero: Herbert Rowse

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 ...

An Unsung Survivor: Colston Hall

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...

The Chartist Mural

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...

Century House, Manchester, by Robert Wade

A Tale of Two Cities

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...

Milton Keynes Shopping Centre

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...

BBC Television Centre

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...

South Bank Centre

Catherine Croft recently took part in a panel discussion organised by the New London Architecture forum, at which the competing pressures of heritage and development were debated. Also on the panel were representatives from the South Bank Centre, a...

Broadgate, City of London

Although English Heritage supported our opposition to the granting of a Certificate of Immunity (which guarantees a building against listing for five years), the Culture Secretary rejected heritage advice and granted a COI for the parts of Phase 1-4 ...