From Tate Modern to Grimsby docks: the team saving Britain’s cherished buildings from the wrecking ball

Can you imagine Liverpool without its Welsh Streets or London without Battersea Power Station? For 50 years, one small band of activists have been finding creative alternative uses for great buildings their owners couldn’t seeIt’s hard to imagine London without the mighty riverside citadels of Tate Modern and Battersea power station, or bereft of the ornate Victorian market halls of Smithfield and Billingsgate. It is equally difficult to picture Yorkshire without its majestic sandstone mills, Grimsby without its fishing docks, or parts of Liverpool without their streets of terrace houses. Yet all these things could have victims of the wrecking ball, if it weren’t for one small band of plucky activists. You may not have heard of Save Britain’s Heritage, or Save as it likes to style itself. But the tiny charity, which celebrates its 50th birthday this month, has had more influence than any other group in campaigning for the imaginative reuse of buildings at risk, most of which had no legal protections whatsoever from being bulldozed. “We felt that a much more punchy approach to endangered buildings was really needed,” says Marcus Binney, who founded Save in 1975, with an agile network of likeminded journalists, historians, architects and planners. “There was too much, ‘Oh, we’ll write to the minister, and have a word with the chairman of the county council.’ The usual channels were not working. We realised that the real battleground was the media.” They were spurred by the surprise success of a 1974 exhibition at the V&A, The Destruction of the Country House, co-curated by Binney, which conveyed the shocking scale of demolition across the country with graphic power. The “Hall of Destruction”, replete with toppling classical columns, displayed more than 1,000 country houses that had been lost in the preceding century, a number that rose to 1,600 by the time the exhibition closed. The scale of the issue struck a chord: more than 1.5m signatures of support were gathered to keep these buildings standing.What set Save apart from other heritage groups at the time was its proactive, propositional approach and energetic, youthful zeal. They had no qualms about calling out the villains, and would admonish greedy developers and lazy local authorities with ferocious glee. Their press releases and campaign pamphlets were a breath of fresh air, emblazoned with bold graphics, punchy headlines and evocative texts written with fierce authority – with a critical media-savviness brought by trustees including Simon Jenkins and Dan Cruickshank. Most crucially of all, theirs was not a call to keep the world in aspic, but to find creative alternative uses for buildings that their owners couldn’t see. “The argument for demolition was always that a building had ‘reached the end of its useful life,’” says Binney. “But the question is: ‘Useful for whom?’” When the Central Electricity Generating Board planned to demolish its (then unlisted) Bankside power station in Southwark and replace it with offices, Save conjured a proposal in 1979, in a moment of wildly improbable blue-sky thinking, to turn it into an art gallery instead. A decade later, Tate announced that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s great brick colossus would become the home of its modern art collection. It is now one of the most visited museums in the world. Twenty years on, when a developer wanted to scoop out the elegant innards of Smithfield market and replace them with a bloated office block and shops, Save commissioned an alternative vision, fought two crowdfunded public inquiries, and won. The London Museum is set to open there next year, breathing fresh new life into the atmospheric warren of cast-iron domes and brick vaults, that would otherwise be dust. Continue reading...

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