12 C O N T E X T 1 0 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 Ancoats BPT was working towards restoring Murray’s Mill and St Peter’s Church in partnership with the North West Regional Development Agency (NWDA); and the St Francis Monastery Trust (in Gorton) was working towards restoring that building. Manchester decided to keep its approach simple. The principal objectives were to rescue buildings at risk and to prevent vulnerable buildings from becoming at risk. The strategy was based on rescue and prevention. The first step was to develop a priority list of buildings at risk. Following an English Heritage survey, the BAR officer conducted a simple visual fast-track survey. Partnership was a key theme in the BAR project. In order to make progress with these buildings it was necessary to create links, and establish partnerships with private owners and internal departments. This made it possible to make use of the tools available under the legislation. Building control at Manchester City Council had developed a dangerous buildings policy which supported the BAR project by promoting a coordinated approach for dealing with dangerous historic buildings. The key to success with BAR was developing good links. Borland advised patience: more often than not the owners could be more difficult than the buildings. The aim in removing a BAR from the regiser was for it to stay off the register. Chris Griffiths explained that a 1991 survey had found that one third of all listed buildings surveyed in Liverpool were at risk. By 2001 the situation had not improved. Decay was a growing problem among buildings at risk, and was compounded by political indifference at the local level. Griffiths said that three ingredients were required. Heritage had to be valued at the political level; there was a need to build on local popular support for the historic environment; and the potential benefits of heritage-led regeneration had to be recognised. A forum was established, meeting quarterly and chaired by the Bishop of Liverpool. The aim of the exercise was to bring building owners around the table to demonstrate what progress was being made.Where necessary, the forum would name and shame, a tactic pioneered by SAVE Britain’s Heritage. The approach gained the support of the city’s political leaders and English Heritage. It led to the formation of HELP (Historic Environment of Liverpool Project). HELP had three themes: investigation and characterisation; managing the historic environment; and access and celebration. English Heritage also funded the BAR officer post. If safeguarding the city’s heritage was to be a genuine political objective, money would be needed to save the buildings identified in the BAR strategy. NWDA provided £1.5 million as part of its buildings at risk programme. It liked the fact that it could get its money back on successful projects. Ian Lush, chief executive of the Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF), provided a very useful summary of the main funding sources for historic building regeneration. Bob Kindred, conservation, urban design and planning policy manager at Ipswich Borough Council, spoke about the future of buildings at risk. He described the background to BAR in Ipswich, where the loss of historic buildings at risk had been almost halted in recent years as a direct result of an effective long-term conservation strategy, first implemented in 1987. The strategy had been consistently applied, with careful use of specialist technical advice, grant aid to buildings in need, and statutory action where necessary. Consequently listed building demolitions had more or less stopped. The Ipswich approach had been to concentrate on buildings in ‘at risk categories’ 1–3. Kindred said that 21 years of the BAR programme in Ipswich had confirmed the maxim that there was no such thing as a problem building – only problem owners. First, professionally, BAR must be a higher workload priority. Second, there must be better political buy-in at local level, because BAR work needed support at cabinet level, and cross-party support. BAR programmes needed indicators that generated outcomes generating. A regularly updated buildings at risk register was essential. It was also important for local authorities to sort out the at-risk buildings that they owned. Another part of the solution was for BAR officers to generate a profile for their work and for the buildings. Publicity was the key to this and ‘exposing the guilty parties’ was the means. Kindred believed that in order to generate a profile it was vital to ensure that officers had the appropriate delegated powers, so they could act quickly. But officers also needed to think about the market and about the big picture in policy terms. Throughout the day several themes emerged. For BAR programmes to be effective it was important for local planning authorities to have a strategy, and the resources had to be provided. Funding and partnership were often linked: partnership was often the key to funding. Partnerships were important anyway, since local planning authorities could not deliver BAR programmes on their own. Keith Parsons, principal lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire A former watchmaker's factory in Liverpool prior to carrying out urgent works in 2003 Rochdale Road, Harpurhey (Photo: Manchester City Council)
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