Examination of Witnesses (Questions 227
- 237)
TUESDAY 28 MARCH 2006
MR FRANK
KELSALL, DR
NIGEL CROWE
AND MR
STEPHEN DYER
Q227 Chairman: I am sorry that, as
a result of a fire alarm and the previous sessions, this session
may be a little shorter than we would like but I would like to
welcome the three witnesses before us for this last part, Mr Frank
Kelsall, Dr Nigel Crowe of British Waterways and Stephen Dyer
from Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust. The three of you are here
to give us an idea of the work done in preserving the industrial
heritage particularly, which is something the committee was keen
to focus on as part of its inquiry. Can I ask you to begin with
to talk about the various options which are available for an industrial
building as it reaches the end of its working life and can you
give us some examples of where particular difficulties exist in
trying to preserve a building?
Mr Kelsall: In my experience the
biggest difficulty is usually where the building is. As with most
property matters, location is absolutely critical. My experience,
when I worked in the north west of England, was that disused mills
and warehouses found ready alternative use if they were in areas
where a development ended up with a high end value, but in areas
where the end value was low it was much more difficult. Let us
take, for instance, the difference between, say, Leigh on the
outskirts of Wigan and central Manchester. A warehouse in central
Manchester would find a new use without difficulty but in Leigh
it would not. It is often not the building itself which creates
the problem but where it is.
Dr Crowe: At British Waterways
we try and keep our buildings in the use for which they were originally
intended. A very large part of our estate is engineering structures
that date from the 18th century onwards and many of them are still
operational. In fact, 43% of our built environment is listed or
scheduled, so it is very much a question of business as usual.
Obviously, we have to replace lock gates and repair aqueducts
and so on, but they are still largely doing the job they were
meant to do. Where we have warehouses and lock-keepers' cottages,
we do not store grain in warehouses these days but we can convert
them very successfully to other uses such as residential or office
use and we do that with partners and the profit we get from that
we re-invest in the canal system to keep the rest of the heritage
going.
Mr Dyer: The Historic Dockyard,
in terms of location, is perhaps slightly more fortunate than
some of the other places that Frank mentioned in that it is virtually
a small town in itself. It is an 80-acre site embedded in the
Medway towns, containing, obviously, a lot of shipbuilding heritage
but industrial buildings of all sorts and natures, all sorts of
trades that were required to support shipbuilding, but also residential
properties as people lived on site as well, and indeed still do.
We have taken very much, since the trust's inception when the
dockyard closed in 1984, an approach of retaining that mixed use
character of the site in order to achieve its effective regeneration.
Yes, we are open as a museum, we do have 130,000 visitors a year
at the moment who come to see the heritage and to see our galleries
and our ships and so on, but we also have brought the vast majority
of the buildings back into use for a whole plethora of purposes,
including residential, as I mentioned earlier. Some are used for
what they were originally intended. Number 7 Covered Slip, which
we restored several years ago with our Heritage Lottery funding
and Medway Council, is now back in use for boat repair and boat
building. We still operate our ropery ourselves to make rope.
Some of the big naval storehouses are still in use as storehouses,
although it is archive document-type storage now. For others it
is finding a use that is sympathetic to the character of the building,
and so we have a huge range of uses from micro-breweries to opticians
to architects, website designers and so on, so it is quite a community.
It is finding the right solution for the building and, as was
mentioned in earlier testimony, the best way of preserving a building
is to keep it in use but you have to be sensitive to the heritage
of the building and find a use that is appropriate and will work
with the building and allow the building still to be read for
what it originally was.
Q228 Mr Hall: Dr Crowe, British Waterways
are engaged in quite an exciting project where you have got these
pilot heritage partnership agreements which stretch across local
authorities just because of the nature of the canal systems and
the multi-agency involvement. What are you doing about trying
to enhance community participation in these agreements?
Dr Crowe: At the moment we have
got one pilot heritage partnership agreement which we are exploring
with English Heritage at the site of Foxton Locks and Inclined
Plane. We have only got to the stage where we have drawn up the
document. We have got a traffic-light system for consents and
clearance and permitted works and so on, and we are at the stage
now where we are going to go to consultation very shortly about
that site and will most certainly be involving our stakeholders
and customers and the canal societies, the IWA, the local parish
and so on, and the local authority, of course. We very much hope
that the approach that we are taking, which is open and accountable,
which is what we want to be, will be welcomed by those people
and they will become more active participants. One of the things
we have had at Foxton is volunteer activity over many years cleaning
scrub vegetation off parts of the inclined plane and so on. That
is something we welcome volunteer activity for. Obviously, it
needs to be managed in a safe way and it needs to be managed in
such a way that we are not harming the heritage, but I am very
excited about that part of the Heritage Protection Review because
I do think that our estate lends itself very much to having heritage
partnership agreements. It is very long and linear.
Q229 Mr Hall: By the very nature
of the canal system.
Dr Crowe: Indeed, and there are
programme-built canals that were built from one end to the other
within a five to 10 year timeframe, so all their structures are
of a similar date and construction, and we think it would be a
very useful way to manage these with a heritage partnership agreement
so that we do not have to keep going backwards and forwards for
repeat consents and for advice and for this, that and the other.
Q230 Mr Hall: Can I ask you a slightly
different question? In your opening remarks you said that British
Waterways liked to use buildings for what they were originally
meant for. What plans have you got for the clothes repair and
maintenance depot in Northwich in my constituency?
Dr Crowe: I think Northwich depot
is actually a development site. Yes, we do try and retain buildings
for the use for which they were first intended but we cannot always
do that. Times change and operational requirements are different.
I think the buildings you are referring to are not actually statutorily
protected.
Q231 Mr Hall: They are not, no.
Dr Crowe: So we would not be losing
any protected heritage, nor would we wish to. I do not know exactly
what the plans are.
Mr Hall: It was a very unfair question
on my part; I acknowledge that.
Q232 Alan Keen: I think asking the
question was more important than the answer. Before I start my
questions, apart from those who actually sailed on HMS Cavalier
in the last war, this committee cares about it as much as anyone
else. How is our friend getting on?
Mr Dyer: Very well, I think it
is fair to say. A huge amount of work has been done on her, of
course, with a huge amount of volunteering, as I am sure you are
aware, and they have done an absolutely magnificent job. The basic
structure of the ship is now secure. It is a Forth Bridge job,
of course. You start painting at one end and once you get to the
other you start again where you first began, so it is constant
care and attention, but she is basically safe. Most of the for'ard
accommodation has now been returned to its 1960s appearance and
we are now starting to move into the after accommodation. As a
member of the Renaissance South East Museum Hub we have also benefited
from Renaissance in the Regions funding whicih has also enabled
us to expand our in-house ship-keeping team, which is ably supported
by our growing body of volunteers.
Q233 Alan Keen: As the only old-timer
on the committee I think it is worth explaining for others that
we were approached by the people who had sailed on her and it
was not viable because they just had one old ship, so we did a
one-off inquiry and managed to help get the money to preserve
it and it is now with a lot of other friends down there, is it
not, and part of a viable place?
Mr Dyer: Yes.
Q234 Alan Keen: Can I come on to
something completely different? I just could not take any interest
in history at school once we left the dinosaurs. You might think
this is irrelevant, but I was put off by the woman with snakes
instead of hair. I would not believe a word anybody told me about
history after that until, doing my French homework at the back
of the history lesson six months later, I suddenly heard people
talking about the ironworks and all that. I had never understood
how the steelworks had got there; I lived in their shadow, and
I believed from that time on that we should have taught history
backwards instead of chronologically and people would quickly
see the relevance of it which people like me lost at the time.
Have you ever had that feeling put to you before, that history
should be taught backwards because the industrial heritage certainly
grips me more than any other? I am fascinated by every part of
it.
Mr Kelsall: I think teach-yourself
history is going backwards because of the enthusiasm for genealogy.
There is an enormous explosion in genealogy and my experience
is that the first question people ask once they have drawn up
their family tree on a piece of paper is where great uncle or
great-grandfather lived, and secondly what he did in terms of
work. The interest in the built heritage is gaining enormously,
and will continue to gain, as a spin-off from the interest in
genealogy which has been happening over recent years. Certainly,
for anybody who has not watched the recent programmes on genealogy,
where people worked is one of the key points that comes out of
that.
Dr Crowe: Industrial history and
industrial heritage have been under-represented until quite recently,
I think. My first job at British Waterways was to carry out a
massive listing survey of the canal system in England and that
was sponsored by English Heritage. I recall that we returned a
further 600 items for listing between 1988 and about 1994 and
that was a very valid and worthwhile exercise. 95% of our visitors
tell us that they value the heritage of the waterways, and we
do get 300 million visits a year; that is 300 million visits,
not visitors. Clearly some of those people are just walking the
dog or going fishing or whatever and enjoying themselves, but
a number of them are enjoying the heritage as well. For our organisation
it is our essential product and the legacy that we want to create
for the future is that the heritage is there for the nation to
continue to enjoy.
Mr Kelsall: I think it is important
that the industrial heritage is not just seen as very large factories
and warehouses. In recent years historical studies have started
to concentrate much more on workshops and areas like the lace
market in Nottingham or the jewellery quarter in Birmingham. Twenty
to 25 years ago I was involved in some of the early ideas of listing
textile mills in Greater Manchester. That was seen as a new idea
then, to start listing the big factories, but I think in more
recent years we have moved much more to seeing industry as a much
wider area than simply big buildings: all the small things by
the canals, but also small workshops, just where people worked,
small forges as well as big foundries, is the best way of putting
it.
Dr Crowe: I would agree with that.
I think it is often the small local details that people are most
passionate about and want to conserve that tell their own story
and so on, and it is important we do that.
Q235 Alan Keen: How is it done now?
When an industrial building reaches the end of its useful life
what mechanism is there for deciding whether it has a value or
whether it should just be knocked down and replaced by something?
Mr Kelsall: I suppose the critical
issue is, is the building in some way subject to the heritage
test? Is it a listed building, is it in a conservation area? In
many factory buildings the issue is usually simply that of the
building. There are, of course, cases which are of particular
importance where there may be machinery or that sort of thing
inside. Machinery can be covered by scheduling and there are obviously
places—and Chatham Dockyard is a prime example—where
there is a very significant number of scheduled monuments and
for anybody who has not seen the rope-making machinery going at
Chatham, it is a wonderful sight. I suppose relatively speaking
that sort of place is going to be small, where you can maintain
what is effectively an out-of-date, old-fashioned technology process.
In my experience the great majority of industrial buildings tend
to be shells in which one can do an awful lot of work to adapt
them for new uses. It is important to maintain all evidence that
survives and that, I think, having heard previous witnesses, is
the importance of the record, that it is important that that building
is looked at carefully by somebody who understands it, in textile
mills, for instance, the evidence of the driving machinery, either
races or, if it is really old, shaft-driven machinery. Some years
ago I took the Society of Architectural Historians into east London
on an annual conference and we went to two pumping stations, Abbey
Mills, north of the river, and Cross Ness, south of the river.
Cross Ness has now been bypassed. Cross Ness is a wonderful mid-Victorian
building, which has got its four original beam engines rusting
and doing nothing. Abbey Mills was replaced by electric engines
in, I think, the 1950s. There you have the hum of machinery and
you have the whiff of sewage. The building is still in its use
but it is less interesting as a monument than Cross Ness, which
is in no use but fascinating as a monument. It is a very difficult
issue to judge. I think it is fair to say that the balance of
opinion amongst people that I took to those buildings was that
they preferred Abbey Mills because it was still in use even though
the machinery was not original.
Dr Crowe: I think that is a good
point Frank made. Industrial buildings are often very robust.
They do not have ornate ceilings and fireplaces and so on and
they can be adapted to modern use, and it is important that we
do that, but certainly at British Waterways a lot of our estate
is engineering structures. We have a very well organised inspection
regime where our engineers inspect and report back and so on.
As I said earlier, we will do all we can to extend the life of
those structures provided they can remain in a safe and workable
state, and we see that as very much part of our vision, if you
like. We also have a heritage framework and we train our own people
to do brick repairs and mix lime mortars and all that to ensure
that those conservation aspects are dealt with.
Mr Dyer: If I can pick up on that,
the example of the ropery is quite a good one. It is totally at
the opposite end of the size spectrum, of course, from the smaller
units that Frank was talking about earlier. If you do not know
the ropery at Chatham, it is a building a third of a mile long
on three floors, three rope-walks. We still operate the lower
rope-walk. Clearly, making rope on early 19th century machinery
in the early 21st century is not economic but we took the decision
that the best way of making the ropery work for our visitors was
to manufacture rope on there and therefore do it in a quasi-commercial
way, and so we do sell rope that we produce to all sorts of people.
There was no need though for the two upper floors in terms of
rope making and we decided to find an alternative use for these.
As a Trust we have two main sources of earned income to support
our charitable activities. One is from commercial leases. It is
an 80-acre estate and a lot of our properties are let out to commercial
organisations which operate from within our buildings. Our other
main source of income, obviously, is our visitor income but our
income from our properties is very much the greater and we effectively
use that to cross-subsidise the activities we do from a museum
point of view and for our visitors. The ropery is like that in
microcosm because we came up with a creative solution in co-operation
with English Heritage principally in terms of how we could do
it, which has enabled us to convert those upper floors to be used
for archive document storage, which then provides an income which
supports the heritage activity on the lower level, so that we
can still show people how the ropery worked 200 years ago.
Mr Kelsall: If you had been to
Queen Street mill in Burnley, which still uses its original steam
engine and still drives the looms, just to hear one or two of
those looms in a loom shed which at one time had 300 looms going,
the noise is quite unbelievable and I think it is trying to make
the industrial past work, even if it can only be done in a number
of cases—Styal Mill, Helmshaw Mill; there are a number of
other places.
Q236 Mr Hall: And there is the Anderton
boat lift.
Mr Kelsall: Yes. Queen Street
first brought home to me how noisy the industrial past was, and
I think that is important in terms of people understanding the
past and understanding not only where we come from but where we
are going.
Dr Crowe: Anderton boat lift is
a classic example of an industrial structure that, with help from
English Heritage, HLF, the Waterways Trust, the RDA and others,
has had its life prolonged and is now, I am happy to say, back
in use.
Mr Hall: It is a magnificent piece of
Victorian architecture and machinery.
Helen Southworth: I was just thinking
of the noise of Lancashire cotton mills. When I was young it was
automatic that older women were deaf and lip-read, and the number
of jokes that you did not understand if you did not understand
that.
Mr Hall: My mother could lip-read me.
Q237 Helen Southworth: Yes, absolutely.
Do you think there is a capacity nationally, spread evenly, to
be able to identify buildings which are at risk and to find methodologies
for preserving them and giving good access to them?
Dr Crowe: At British Waterways
we have a corporate commitment to reduce our buildings at risk
to zero if we can by April 2009. We are actively engaged upon
doing that by negotiating with the local authorities and by re-prioritising
things and bringing repairs forward. I think often it is incumbent
upon the owner to do what they can but I have noticed also that
some local authorities are far more vigilant over this than others.
We deal with about 300 local authorities and a very large number
of them do not have a buildings-at-risk register. Some of them
do, some of them even employ a buildings-at-risk officer, and
they are obviously on the ball, but others do not and the whole
approach to the subject is at the moment rather patchy.
Mr Kelsall: I have ambivalent
views about buildings-at-risk strategies. In some ways all buildings
are at risk in one way or another. I wish that more effort would
be focused on keeping buildings off the buildings-at-risk register
rather than waiting for, in the English Heritage graphic terminology,
the six hats to appear which means that this building is now in
imminent danger of loss. There are two ways probably of doing
that. One may be the stick and one is the carrot. The carrot is
obviously for the local planning authority to be more flexible
in alternative uses. In the last 18 months I have been involved
in two cases, both residential conversions of industrial buildings,
and in both cases the local planning authority in my view were
not as flexible as they might have been, but probably in both
cases not because they were taking a difficult view of the heritage
but because of other planning constraints. In one case they were
worried about the amount of development and local pressure from
people because it involved a certain amount of enabling development.
In the other case, simply because the local authority had already
run out of housing allocation, they were saying, "You cannot
have planning permission for residential conversion because that
would mean we would exceed our housing targets under the structure
plan". I think if there was greater flexibility at an early
stage there might be a greater chance of getting buildings into
new uses at an earlier stage. As for the stick, I was reading
the evidence which had been given to you when you were in Liverpool,
when I think you had some discussion about urgent works notices
with the witnesses there. My own feeling is that perhaps there
should be by local authorities a greater use of repairs notices
at an earlier stage. Repairs notices are a much more draconian
measure and are therefore used less often but in practice very
often buildings fall into disrepair simply because owners have
unreasonable expectations of value. If local authorities were
more willing, perhaps with backing from English Heritage, to serve
a repairs notice or at least to threaten a repairs notice, I suspect
that quite a lot of buildings which eventually come up on the
buildings-at-risk register would not get there in the first place.
Dr Crowe: I think another way
of dealing with it, and I am very keen on this although I accept
it would not work for individual owners but it does work for big
estates and for big landowners, is the Heritage Partnership Agreement.
If you have a management agreement drawn up and the local authority
are involved and English Heritage and all the owners are involved,
and there is an agreement about the way forward to prioritise
repairs and look after things properly, then I do not think you
need a buildings-at-risk register. I think that is a more mature
way of dealing with things, to be honest.
Mr Dyer: Ours is a slightly different
circumstance, of course, because it is a discrete site, but there
are perhaps lessons to be learned. One of the earlier witnesses
was talking about how important it is to consult with English
Heritage at an early stage. I think that spins off from what you
were saying as well in that the approach that we have taken within
the Historic Dockyard is to work very closely with English Heritage
and with the local authority effectively to take a master planning
approach for the Historic Dockyard with, in effect, softer zoning
which defines acceptable uses within the various areas and identifying
the likely uses going forward for each individual building. There
is therefore a framework that we have agreed with English Heritage
and with the local authority so that when we do want to do something
or have the opportunity to bringing a building back into use there
is a framework there that we are all signed up to which then really
smoothes the whole process. That may be a model that could have
wider application.
Chairman: I do not think we have any
more questions. Thank you very much indeed.
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