Listed building in Worcester to be converted into flats
Part of a listed building in Worcester city centre is to be converted into flats - a project drawing a mixed response from special interest conservationists. The upper floors of 2 The Cross in Worcester, as well as the back part of the ground floor, will be turned into seven one-bedroom apartments, although the existing interior layout will remain.The front of the ground floor of the building, which according to Historic England dates from the early 18th century, is currently home to the Skipton Building Society.Worcester City Council, which has approved plans for the conversion, said most of the building had been empty for between three and 10 years.
The plans say the development will provide "much-needed housing" in the city.Worcester Civic Society welcomed plans to leave the external appearance of the building unchanged."It is accepted minor repair and redecoration work to the windows will be required to bring the building up to standard," the society said.The Hopmarket Charity, which owns similar properties in The Foregate, said it had no objection if the flats were "of a high quality and presumably privately managed".But the Georgian Group, which promotes the conservation of Georgian buildings, said it had "serious concerns" about the plans.
A spokesperson for the Georgian Group said: "These works are likely to cause a considerable degree of harm to the historic fabric and significance of the grade II* listed building."Council planners said the proposals were "of a sensitive design" and would complement the character of the area.The owners of nearby nightclub Bushwhackers had also expressed concern that future occupants of the proposed flats would be affected by noise from the venue.But planners said concerns over noise had been considered and the plans "would not result in unacceptable living conditions".The council said no car parking spaces would be provided as the site was in a "sustainable location" in the city centre.But there will be space for seven bicycles, in line with planning rules.
This news was gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, which covers councils and other public service organisations.
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Then, inexorably, it all fell apart. Glasgow was brutalised by politicians: depopulated, disregarded and disfigured; left in the state of 'blight and dereliction' we see today. It has already 'technically' become Britain's Detroit, Murphy believes, reduced to a shadow of its former self. So, the big question is: can it survive? (Image: Niall Murphy, Director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust. Photo: Gordon Terris /Herald & Times) Murphy is among the world's leading experts when it comes to Glasgow and its buildings, streets and architecture. There's nobody more qualified to talk about how this city came to its present state and where it goes from here. He is director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust, the independent charity which protects the city's historic buildings. Murphy has been an architect for 25 years, and co-chairs Glasgow's Built Heritage Commission. It's the perfect time to follow Murphy on a journey through time, and through the streets of Glasgow, as the city celebrates its 850th anniversary. To mark the date, Murphy's Heritage Trust is staging a special photographic exhibition beginning this weekend called 'Lens On Legacy' spotlighting Glasgow's most endangered buildings – and there are plenty of them. The sight of beautiful Georgian and Victorian buildings sprouting trees from roofs, or crumbling down, has become depressingly familiar. Origin Let's start at the beginning. 'There have been settlements here for millennia,' Murphy explains. The Clyde Valley was perfect for hunting, fishing and fresh water. Rome built a road here, but got no further. Legend says St Mungo founded his church on the site of Glasgow Cathedral. By the medieval era, Glasgow was dumbbell-shaped 'with a religious heart around the cathedral and a mercantile heart at Glasgow Cross'. Merchants lived safely back from the Clyde's flood plain, but close to the river that earned them their fortunes. The High Street eventually connected 'these two hearts of the city, but it took the best part of half a millennia to form'. Glasgow escaped the Reformation's ravages, gifting Scotland its 'best surviving medieval cathedral'. However, the Reformation did mean Glasgow 'ceased to be a place of pilgrimage. It had to reinvent itself. That's why you get the shift down to the mercantile heart'. The medieval merchants were smart. They knew that to make money they needed ships for trade and the Clyde was a perfect location. They hired European academics, Murphy explains, to teach 'navigation, geometry and maths so they could educate their sons' at the new university, established at the Cathedral in 1451. Ships from Glasgow could reach the 'New World' six weeks faster than those leaving London. Glasgow made strong links in the Americas. City merchants 'came up with a different system of working their markets compared to the English. They based their apprentices in early American colonies and got the people addicted to debt for fancy European products'. Until this point, most Scottish cities, including Glasgow, were built on a dense medieval 'fishbone pattern' by King David I, featuring one long central spine with higgledy-piggledy streets branching off. The Royal Mile in Edinburgh is a perfect example. Come the American War of Independence, Glasgow merchants began returning home, bringing with them the city grid system of colonies like Virgina. Many believe Glasgow 'exported the grid to America', Murphy says. 'No it didn't. Many early American settlements were laid out in grids. Those ideas are brought back.' (Image: Niall Murphy, Director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust. Photo: Gordon Terris /Herald & Times) It's now that the city really starts to take shape. George Square was originally 'swampland', considered only good for 'slaughtering horses'. It then became market-gardening land, before the gentry moved in as Glasgow sprouted 'new towns' around today's city centre. The Millennium Hotel is 'the last' of the grand Georgian townhouses built around the square. The square was enclosed at one point for use only by the rich – much to public anger. There were plans for a fountain called 'Le Jet de L'Eau'. It has had repeated facelifts, alterations and redesigns. 'The only constant about George Square is change,' Murphy adds. In the Georgian period, rich 'Glaswegians loved a point of view' – in other words, they liked a city laid out with architectural flair. So around what is now the Merchant city, squares sprung up with civic buildings, mansions or churches 'framing' the perspective, and townhouses built around. St Andrews in the Square was a classic example. READ MORE: 'I'm just a wee bam from Grangemouth' How Gillian Mackay aims to lead Scottish Greens Labour's taste for biological extremism is both creepy and dangerous The super-rich are lying to us. It's time we turned the tables Mob ONE such mansion, built for the MP Daniel Campbell near the Trongate, was positioned to impress anyone crossing Glasgow Bridge from the south – the main entrance into the city. Campbell taxed malt, riling 'the Glasgow mob who descended on his home and wrecked it'. The architect who built that mansion was Colen Campbell, a 'key player' in the Palladian style. Think of grand Georgian homes and you're probably visualising Palladian mansions. A perfect Glasgow example is the Tobacco Merchants House on Miller Street. Unlike many English cities then, Glasgow was built almost exclusively from stone, as two fires in 1652 and 1677 destroyed a third of the medieval timbered city. Queen Street Station was built over the old quarry which provided the materials. Another was at Giffnock. Both produced blonde sandstone, though that ran out in the 1890s. Red sandstone from places like Maybole became the replacement. For a while, these red properties were considered 'posher' than the blonde as they were new. The Georgian city was 'arcaded', with street-level archways, and shops and homes set back from the road. 'It was the civilised thing given Glasgow's climate,' Murphy adds. Walk around the Merchant City today and you'll still see archways on buildings, remnants of 18th-century arcades. Many, however, were lost 'from 1866 onwards when the Glasgow Improvement Trust' began demolishing swathes of the city. These upmarket arcaded buildings in areas like Wilson Street, Glassford Street and Hutcheson Street became Glasgow's 'first new town'. Tenements were the standard home for most Glaswegians, apart from the very rich or the very poor. 'It's a very Scottish thing,' Murphy adds. 'Scottish cities don't expand in the same way as English cities as they're under attack at various points. So you get these more compact settlements. Rather than spreading out, the only way to go is high.' Some Scottish tenements reach 14 floors, among 'the tallest buildings in the world at that point'. 25th September 1956: The Surrey Lane entrance to Nicholson Street flats, in the Gorbals, the notorious slum district of Glasgow Class IN Glasgow's tenements in the 1700s and 1800s, 'the richest lived above the shop on the first floor. The further up you got the poorer you were because the higher you had to climb'. That style of living continued, to some degree, into the 20th century. Go to The Glad Cafe in Glasgow's southside to see a good example of an Art Nouveau tenement where social classes lived together. This mix helped foster Glasgow's egalitarianism, Murphy suggests. 'The tenement encompassed the entire social strata, and Glasgow became a tenement city par excellence.' However, that didn't mean Glasgow was utopia. Down by the Trongate, there was a grand building called the Tontine Hotel, next to the Tollbooth which was effectively 'the original city chambers'. This was where merchants gathered to drink coffee, read newspapers and cut deals. 'It was like an early stock exchange.' Beneath the arcades was what was known as the 'plane stanes' – Glasgow's first pavement. 'Tobacco lords cloaked in red velvet like Venetians walked up and down, and if they thought you weren't the same social class they'd sweep you into the gutter.' As Glasgow entered the Victorian era, 'wealth became more expressed through buildings'. Financial distinctions were also hardening and 'social classes more stratified on a neighbourhood basis'. So slums grew. 'But the idea of a tenement just being for poor people alone didn't exist.' Look at Victorian banks or merchant offices and you'll see carvings of ornate symbols like the goddess of prosperity, or luxury goods like bananas and pineapples. It was a form of bragging. By the mid-19th century, the first of 'Glasgow's tragedies' begins with a wave of 'urban clearances'. The lust for eradicating historic buildings and whole neighbourhoods reached crazy proportions in 1911 when fire destroyed the Tontine Hotel and the council voted to demolish the adjacent Tollbooth. The Tollbooth steeple only stands today as it was saved by one vote. City fathers felt it 'got in the way of traffic. It's astonishing that they seriously contemplated demolishing something which stood since 1627'. Industrialisation saw the population boom, and city fathers became worried about 'hygiene' in the wake of epidemics like cholera. In Glasgow, unlike Edinburgh, it was decreed that all tenements would have no doors, to aid ventilation. Glasgow tenements were among the first in Europe with running water. 'Glasgow was ahead of the curve,' says Murphy. 'Municipal socialism here was tremendous.' Glasgow sent delegates to Europe who were captivated by the work of architect Baron Haussmann. He'd broadened Paris streets creating the city's distinctive boulevards. Swathes of old Glasgow were demolished around High Street. Edinburgh was dealing with similar issues like overcrowding and sanitation but chose 'conservation surgery. They're much more careful, preserving much more of the medieval fabric of the city. Glaswegians sweep it all away and decide they want a brand new city instead'. Slums AT the time, Glasgow slums were described as 'dung hills' with 20 people of both sexes and all ages sleeping in one room. The High Street's population density exceeded 1,000 people per acre, Murphy says. Compare that to the most densely populated parts of Hong Kong, one of the most overcrowded cities on Earth, which has 562 per acre. As part of the demolition work in the mid-to-late 1800s, Glasgow University moved from its original site to the west end. 'Those were the finest collection of post-medieval buildings in Scotland before they got demolished,' Murphy says. Glasgow city fathers bought up huge areas around places like Saltmarket and levelled them, but in an early act of municipal mismanagement they failed to notice that fashions were changing and developers were now more interested in the west end. The demolished sites 'just ended up as wasteland for a long time'. Then the City of Glasgow Bank collapsed in 1877, the biggest UK banking collapse before Northern Rock. 'It does massive damage to the city's economy, causing a depression in Glasgow.' That too slowed redevelopment of demolished areas. It's not until the mid-1880s that the economy improves. Building the City Chambers became a 'pump-priming exercise' to kickstart the city again. 'They spent in contemporary terms the best part of half a billion. It's a lavish exercise – that was the point. It's spend, spend, spend to get the economy firing on all cylinders.' The city centre certainly benefited. Come the 20th century, the centre of Glasgow was being described as 'a Beethoven symphony' thanks to its grid system and the vistas down wide, long streets. But places like the Gorbals and Govan were about to undergo Glasgow's second 'great tragedy' in the post-war period with more slum demolition. Populations had grown in these neighbourhoods as Glasgow became the empire's engine room. After the First World War, however, political focus centred on London. That really hasn't changed, Murphy adds. It meant Glasgow struggled to get going once more, and there was another effort to use building to drive the economy. An 'enormous Bank of Scotland on St Vincent Street' went up. It's still there and 'you could dump an Empire State Building on top of it', says Murphy. It and many other buildings in this period copied the architecture emerging in New York. 'That's one of the reasons why Glasgow has such an American feel.' Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who lived until 1928, 'loathed American classicism' as it eclipsed the 'Glasgow style'. Glasgow was still struggling to boom again when the Second World War broke out. That 'masked' the many problems besetting the city. 'Once the war is out of the way, you just begin to get collapse,' says Murphy. Municipal 'mismanagement' meant 'everything that could go wrong, goes wrong'. The old Glasgow Corporation was desperate to 'hang on to its population', but ongoing concerns around overcrowded slums were the focus of the Scottish Office. 'Glasgow falls between these two stools.' (Image: Niall Murphy, Director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust. Photo: Gordon Terris /Herald & Times Stalin A PLAN developed to effectively 'demolish the whole city centre and start again'. If fully enacted, Glasgow would have become a 'Stalinist city'. Buchanan Street would have been 'lined with 20-storey tower blocks and everything else demolished – City Chambers, Central Station, the School of Art, everything. It was completely laughable'. It displayed 'self-loathing', says Murphy. 'In some ways, we've never really moved away from that since then.' The scheme didn't advance, but when plans were developed 'to disperse Glasgow's population to New Towns' like East Kilbride, 'this was where it came from'. The intention was to 'deliberately reduce' Glasgow's population from 1.3 million to 750,000. Many warned this would 'massively impoverish the city, which is exactly what happened'. Glasgow, however, still saw itself as 'a world city – which it had been for two centuries', but it was being whittled away. Council delegates to America returned with plans resulting in the M8 slicing through the city and 'sterilising whole swathes of the centre'. It could have been worse. There were plans for a motorway 'bigger than the Kingston Bridge' over Glasgow Green, with a 'mast through the centre for a revolving restaurant at the top'. Post-war, city fathers began eyeing the Gorbals for levelling. 'They see it as a slum with 90,000 people. Yes, the conditions were dreadful, but it didn't need to be this 'bulldoze everything' approach.' When the Gorbals finally came down so did some 'great Georgian tenements'. The site of what's now the St Enoch Centre was bulldozed and for years was 'wasteland'. Glasgow's famed tenements were in dire disrepair by now. Ironically, Mary Barbour's rent strike helped the deterioration. Addressing high rents, made it difficult to afford factors in tenements for maintenance. Unlike most Scottish cities, Glasgow tenements were factor dominated. Tenements were owned by the middle-classes – like 'unmarried daughters of Victorian families' – who rented them out. The costs of factoring meant that, by the 1950s, tenements were dilapidated. That led to individual flats being sold. 'This fractured ownership', says Murphy, makes it 'really difficult' to collectively attend to repairs like leaky roofs. It took until 2004 with the Tenements (Scotland) Act to fix that problem. Today, Glasgow has about 77,000 tenements. That sounds a lot but, says Murphy, thanks 'to the urban clearances of the 1960s and 70s, we demolished 110,000'. Nevertheless, Glasgow still has 30% of all Scottish tenements. Housing associations often intervened to 'save Glasgow's tenements from demolition'. Another saviour of Glasgow's tenements was 'Annie's Loo'. Annie Gibbons from Govan campaigned in the early 1970s for an inside toilet. Clever architects worked out that the bed press and coal bunker in flats could be adapted to install toilets. Without Annie, many more tenements 'would have faced the bulldozer'. READ MORE Yes to Flamingo Land, no to National Parks: what is the SNP playing at? The rubbish the wine bar fakes like Farage talk about the working class makes me sick SNP will be the winner as Reform outflanks Labour from the left Devastation IT was one positive story amid 'all the devastation in the late 1960s and 70s and the loss of population'. Sandblasting was another good news story. It brought colour back to blackened Glasgow streets and helped lead to an upswing in tenement living as old flats became more desirable. Come the 1980s recession, and deindustrialisation under Margaret Thatcher, Glasgow 'was massively thinned out'. At its lowest, Glasgow's population shrank to 570,000. Today, it's 640,000. Murphy describes what happened to Glasgow in the post-war period as 'urbicide, trying to kill a city'. He knows it's provocative, but isn't afraid to equate Glasgow's fate with what 'happened to Warsaw in the Second World War – the Nazis trying to destroy the Poles' spirit'. The Polish Resistance drew maps of Warsaw so that after the war architects could rebuild what was destroyed. 'They recognised the value of their city's heritage. We didn't until it was too late and whole swathes of the city were taken away.' Up to 'a third of the Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian city was bulldozed. We lose 90-plus per cent of our industrial buildings'. He adds: 'The difference is that while in Warsaw the motives were evil, in Glasgow the motives were good.' Murphy also evokes Chairman Mao, saying Glasgow's leaders tried to enact a 'Great Leap Forward. 'Unfortunately, once the vision encountered reality it failed as Great Leaps Forward tend to do'. Working-class communities 'bore the brunt of this brutal reshaping of Glasgow'. By the millennium, 'Glasgow had more tall buildings over 20 storeys than even Moscow'. Today, a 'donut of dereliction and blight… encircles Glasgow's city centre'. The destruction was ongoing into the early 1980s. There were even discussions in the 1970s to pull down the building where the Tron Theatre stands. Junior staff to Glasgow's head planner 'worked behind his back' to save the building. 'Glasgow's decline was precipitous,' Murphy adds. He blames a desire to imitate America by officials who 'genuinely thought that was the future and they were doing the right thing'. Instead, he says, they were 'sacking the city. What really breaks my heart is that you could have solved the problems without destroying the whole fabric of the city'. Ironically, planners copied American developments which had deliberately demolished black neighbourhoods for seemingly racist reasons. 'People were scattered to the four winds. There's a moral to that story.' The same destruction was inflicted on the Gorbals, Cowcaddens and Townhead. Communities disappeared – the city 'lost its soft connections'. Studies have shown links between city demolition, population resettlement, and death rate spikes and drug use. Clearances MURPHY says the 'Glasgow Clearances' of the 1960s and 70s could be linked to the Glasgow Effect, which sees Glaswegians experience lower life expectancies than other European citizens. 'If you sweep away everything that has informed somebody's life, you can destroy their spirit, which is exactly what the Nazis were trying to do with the Poles. We ended up doing it to ourselves. You look at these areas and there's nothing left.' Murphy often stages Glasgow walking tours and has seen elderly people returning to visit the city cry in places like the Gorbals when they can find nowhere they recognise. 'It really is Glasgow's tragedy.' The irony is, he notes, that Glasgow emerged mostly unscathed from the Blitz. We still see the consequences of this depopulation today. Part of the grand old India Buildings on Bridge Street collapsed recently. 'What do you expect?' Murphy asks. 'We removed the best part of 90,000 people. The buildings no longer had purpose. It's basic cause and effect.' Similarly, 'Glasgow turned its back on the Clyde'. Unlike many cities, Glasgow's river is underused and underdeveloped. Why? Because once again the populations which lived there were removed. To make matters worse, the back of the St Enoch Centre faces the Clyde creating this 'huge dead frontage which kills that whole section of Glasgow'. Depopulation caused many weird anomalies. The little-used West Street subway station sits in an area which was once thriving until 'the tenements of Tradeston were swept away'. To rebuild Glasgow's population, the city must bring people back to these 'wastelands' south of the Clyde which are infected with 'blight'. The part of the Broomielaw known as the International Finance District is 'horrible, you just get huge call centre footprint buildings, with little active frontage. People don't want to hang out there. We're a social species – why would we hang out in grim places?' Covid and homeworking have hurt the city. Central Station sees 33,000 fewer passengers daily, 'roughly two Helensburghs. That's why shops are shutting in the centre'. Glasgow, in the 1950s, had 700,000 people 'within a mile radius of the city centre'. Today, it's 28,000. Cowcaddens, before it was cleared, had 18,000. But Glaswegians shouldn't get too hung up on the current state of Sauchiehall Street, Murphy believes. The work will benefit the city in the long run. The 'avenue-isation' is just part of what's going on. The really important work is underground fixing decaying Victorian infrastructure like sewers. If these problems aren't addressed the city centre's population cannot grow – and that has to happen. Murphy says the council must 'improve their communications' – telling that story in a better way to Glaswegians would reduce how fed up citizens have become. Buchanan Street bucks the trend. 'It's a success story.' That's because it has two huge shopping centres at either end and large numbers of pedestrians walking between Central and Queen Street Station. It's a lesson in what good city design does. Murphy considers himself a 'critical friend' of the council. He says the current crop of councillors do understand the problems facing the city, but their hands are tied due to lack of funding from central government – in both Edinburgh and London. There's 3.3million square feet of empty space in Glasgow city centre, often in vacant upper floors. Decay GETTING that space back into residential use is key to changing the city's fortunes. But it's a chicken and egg problem. Who wants to move into decaying parts of town? Perhaps, Murphy suggests, artists could be encouraged to move in as was done to reinvigorate dilapidated Manhattan in the 1970s. However, that led to 'gentrification hell' and crazy prices. Compulsory purchase of abandoned buildings is another option. The Lion Chambers on Hope Street is an example of one of the city's most beloved buildings going to ruin. However, it's owned by multiple shell companies based in the Virgin Islands, Murphy says. That makes it almost impossible to trace the owners and serve them with compulsory purchase orders. Some lanes in Glasgow, which should be vibrant, are just dead space, used for commercial bins. In other cities like Amsterdam, lanes are freed up by storing bins underground. Today's councillors are 'hamstrung by the legacy of the past which has done enormous damage to Glasgow. So much of the economy was diverted away. What did people expect would happen? It was going to end up in collapse because you cut off the lifeblood'. He adds: 'Glasgow is one of the powerhouses of the Scottish economy and it isn't firing on all cylinders. We cannot have this degree of vacancy and dereliction. We now have nearly 150 buildings on the at-risk register. That puts people off investment.' The law needs tweaked, Murphy suggests, to empower councillors. The council is legally obliged to set aside money for statutory duties, around issues like education. That inhibits the council committing to spending money to fix the city. Even so, just repairing Glasgow's rundown tenements would cost £3 billion. Why not build our way to success, Murphy suggests, like America did during the Great Depression? Meanwhile in London,'it's gold-plated infrastructure'. The UK needs to 'invest in its other cities and stop running them down'. He talks of investors arriving in Glasgow at the turn of the millennium, exiting Central Station and wanting to leave. 'It's because of the blight. Why would you want your workforce among all this blight?' Why not tree-line rundown Union Street, for example, he says. It has extensive, empty upper floors, so making it more attractive would encourage people to 'move back' into the city centre. Though if people do move back, that will require the state to build schools and GP clinics. Murphy's biggest fear is that 'the decline into dereliction continues, the blight increases, and the rot just carries on spreading'. Is he predicting a future like Detroit? A ghost city? 'Technically, Glasgow is kind of the Detroit of the UK in terms of deindustrialisation and the buildings at risk. But our city centre isn't like Detroit. I really hope we can avoid that. We'll see.'
