22 September 2016
Swinging the Ball
The loss of the Grimsby dock buildings.
by J.R.Thomas
This part of the Shaw Sheet gets all the glamorous assignments. Last week the curving soft sands of the Dorset coast and the early autumnal hints of the Lake District fells; this week: Grimsby.
Ah, fair Grimsby, dreaming gateway to the mysterious North Sea, what wondrous secrets your empty dockyards must conceal. But not for much longer. For some time, Associated British Ports (“ABP”), who own the port of Grimsby, have been fighting English Heritage (the advisory body on historic architecture), SAVE Britain’s Heritage (the architectural conservation charity) and the Victorian Society (a specialist conservation group devoted to saving threatened nineteenth century architecture) over the future of the port, or at least its historic dock buildings.
Grimsby, though little known as an historic great port when compared with, say, Liverpool or Bristol, was one of Britain’s most active and busy Victorian ports, handling much of the huge Victorian North Sea fishing trade. We like to think of rugged grim fishermen sailing home from the terrors of the North Sea into picturesque ports such as cliff girt Whitby or the protecting mudflats of Wells-next-the-Sea, but in reality fishing was a very big business by late Victorian times. The huge growth of the population created strong prices for fish, the improved boat building technology (especially steam power) greatly improved efficiency, and the piscatorial resources of the North Sea seemed never ending. That created the need for all-weather ports with good handling and storage facilities and an excellent distribution capability.
Grimsby was perfect – well up the safe and navigable Humber, lots of room for building processing and warehousing space, and excellent railway connections to all parts of England. In that confident Victorian way, a whole series of magnificent buildings was put up to service the fish trade, designed with great verve and originality by a series of architects and built to remarkably high standards – so high that even after more than a century and a quarter’s rough and neglectful use for the fish business, the buildings are still standing. Though not used for fish. The buildings, the largest collection of sea fishing buildings in the world, are mostly empty and in increasingly poor condition after years of minimal or no maintenance, effectively abandoned for more than twenty years.
In the London Docklands they would be eagerly converted to hip residential dwellings at £1,000 per square foot, but Grimsby does not quite have that market dynamism. Yet, says SAVE; the examples of Liverpool and Bristol show that converting historic areas to other uses can lead to new economic activity and be a catalyst for large scale economic revival. The area already has a trendy name – the “Kasbah” it has been called since Victorian times – and it is (or was) remarkably complete with a number of heritage listed centrepiece buildings such as the grade 1 listed Dock Tower and the grade II* listed Ice Factory. It also has a local authority very anxious to bring regeneration to the town.
None of this cuts any ice with ABP. They have no specific plans for the unlisted dock area buildings, but they are a major public company with obligations to their shareholders and concerns about the liabilities of maintaining derelict historic buildings close to docks which are still in use. Grimsby is now the main port for importing cars from Europe (around 500,000 cars per year come through the docks there) and ABP would like to grow it further, not least for the rapidly increasing trade in servicing offshore wind farms. The factors that made the Port of Grimsby so attractive to the fishing business make it equally so to modern trade. The trouble is that modern trading ports do not require brick warehousing, special processing facilities, or an ice factory. They just require large clear dock wharves.
Although ABP does not need to use the land on which the historic buildings sit, it might in the future. And it sees no point paying to maintain derelict buildings with no real current value, even if at some future indeterminate time, given favourable winds and a surge of desire to live in an historic property, values in North Lincolnshire might rise to sufficient levels to justify the conversion of derelict buildings to some other use. After lengthy legal battles ABP last week won its final court battle against the conservationists and the bulldozers immediately moved in, converting the buildings to dust and rubble.
The battle for the Kasbah shows how times have changed. Architectural conservation is no longer fashionable; preservationist urges have faded. SAVE itself perhaps exemplifies the rise and fall of the architectural conservation movement. It was founded in the early 1980’s when in the newly Thatcherite Britain conservative and conservation politics both kissed and quarrelled. All was by no means retro in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain. Increasing wealth, especially in the south-east and London, also brought great pressure for intensification of use which does not sit well with historic buildings. Public outrage at the overnight demolition of the art deco Firestone Factory brought a new stimulus to protection and the impetus that led to the creation of SAVE, and to major changes in historic building statutory protection. The mark of the times was soon for reuse and repair, to save whatever could be saved and to reuse it, to build using the rhetoric of the past.
SAVE soon had a whole series of resounding victories, some by way of public pressure, some by recourse to the law, a few by simply showing owners and developers alternative solutions to their building’s problems. It published a series of very well researched and thought out publications which were highly influential in leading conservationist thought into how best to refocus the use of buildings – sheds became supermarkets, mills became loft apartments, great mansions became opera houses. The most fashionable architects were soon referencing Georgian and Victorian architecture, especially in domestic architecture. Every new housing estate attempted design symmetry and stuck plastic fluted columns either side of front doors. Amongst the rich, newly liberated to build well by lower taxation, Quinlan Terry was the architect of choice, building scholarly studies of Palladio and Adam. Farrow and Ball provided original eighteenth century colours, Sanderson, Victorian wallpapers from original blocks.
It is perhaps ironic that now, when we are urged to recycle and reuse everything we can, even plastic carrier bags, the urge to save our built heritage seems to have departed. The economic arguments for complete redevelopment and reuse are given much greater weight than before; new is thought more desirable than old; green issues are focussed on future building life – how much the building will cost in terms of carbon footprint is a factor more closely attended to than the environmental costs of clearance and rebuilding. The conservation societies such as SAVE, but also the specialist groups such as the Victorian Society (who have been greatly concerned about Grimsby) are much weaker than they used to be, lacking celebrity backing and generous donations, and also media exposure. The twenty first century seems to prefer new, maybe a sign of society more confident about itself and more excited about the future than it used to be. It is a painful demonstration of how heritage times have changed that the publications section of the SAVE website contains mostly its books and pamphlets from the 1990’s.
Fashions come and go in all things of course; the difficulty with historic buildings is that when they go, they’ve gone. That Biba coat can be rescued from the back of the wardrobe or copied in perfect replica. Jaguar is building “XKSS” type Jaguars on the basis of a spare chassis which it found at the back of the factory; Farrow and Ball have managed to convince the world that those Georgian colours work even better in modern glass and concrete apartments. But the chances of putting back brick and polychrome slate roofed buildings in Grimsby is unlikely to come our way; maybe that does not matter if we can build better and more beautifully in their place. But can we?
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