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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
Despite our best endeavours and those of the Friends of Birmingham Central Library, the City’s planning committee has passed major plans for a city-centre redevelopment scheme that includes the demolition of John Madin’s monumental Birmingham Cen...
Claimed to be the largest building of its kind in Britain upon its completion in 1969 and recently called a ‘baroque cathedral for buses’, Preston Bus Station is certainly the largest building ever designed by Keith Ingham - working at the time...
by Henrietta Billings We have recently been to look at one of Dorothy Annan's few surviving murals, in Cayley Primary School in Tower Hamlets, East London. Still fixed in its original location, the large textured glass and plaster panel, concealed u...