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.
Completed just five years ago, in 2005, the clean stonework of the tower of Bury St Edmunds cathedral can easily be mistaken for a meticulously executed conservation job on a late medieval building. Although the history of the site dates back to the ...
I’m sure most C20 members don’t need convincing of the merits of the Royal National Theatre, perhaps the best-known ‘Brutalist’ building in London and worthy recipient of a II* listing only eighteen years after it was completed. But Sir Denys...
The Society has been fighting to save a pair of unique steel-framed houses in Camden, designed by Robin Spence and Robin Webster for their families. 2C and 2D Belsize Park Gardens have been the subject of an application to demolish since February 200...
Distinctively marked by the three pawnbroker’s gilded spheres, a symbol probably originating from the balls on the Medici coat of arms and generally adopted in England in the mid-C18, Sutton House quietly tells its 75-year history on its site at 15...
The DCMS has chosen—once again—to disregard English Heritage’s advice and refused to list Slough Town Hall, which was recommended at Grade II in 2008. Revealingly, the Secretary of State was ‘persuaded by the evidence provided by others’, i...
Whilst on a series of site visits in North Wales, that also included Portmeirion, I had the pleasure of driving over the Menai Bridge and up to Awmlch, which lies on the North Coast of Anglesey, looking out over the Irish Sea. Just outside the town, ...
The churches of the twentieth century are more varied architecturally than those from any other period in this country’s history. Whether their architecture draws on the language of the past or embraces new technology and symbolic shapes that he...
On the east side of Hanger Lane— approximately half-way between its junction with Uxbridge Road and Hanger Lane tube station—lies hidden a little gem of late 1930s ecclesiastical architecture: the Church of the Ascension by Hon. John Seely ...
What is a ‘tecton’? Well may you ask. The term has been adopted for the structures designed by emigré architect Bernard Lubetkin’s practice Tecton—so far just the ones at Dudley Zoo, but it may well spread. We are delighted to report th...
Set back from the road and partially screened by trees, a very particular house is “tucked away in suburban Ipswich in a bosky setting almost Californian”, as Alan Powers noted in 1992. Standing as a pavilion in the middle of its elongated wooded...