DERBY CIVIC SOCIETY COUNCIL
PATRON: Her Worship the Mayor, Cllr. Mrs. Linda Winter
PRERSIDENT: Don Amott, Esq.
VICE PRESIDENTS: Donald Armstrong, Maxwell Craven, Derek Limer, Robin Wood. CHAIRMAN: Cllr. Alan Grimadell [3, Netherwood Court, Allestree, Derby DE22 2NU]
VICE CHAIRMAN: Ashley Waterhouse [33, Byron Street, Derby DE23 6ZY]
HON SECRETARY: David Ling [67, South Avenue, Darley Abbey, Derby DE22 1FB]
HON MEMBERSHIP SEC’Y: Cllr. Robin Wood [103 Whitaker Rd., Derby DE23 6AQ]
HON TREASURER: Phil Lucas [26, St. Pancras Way, Little Chester, Derby DE1 3TH] HON ACTIVITIES SUB-COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: David Parry [110, Kedleston
Road, Derby DE22 1FW]
EDITOR & CASEWORKER: Maxwell Craven [19, Carlton Rd, Derby, DE23 6HB]
REPRESENTATIVES:
Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust Council of Management: Cllr. Robin Wood
Conservation Area Advisory Committee: Ian Goodwin
COUNCIL (in addition to those named above, who serve on the Council ex officio): Laurence Chell, Carole Craven, Richard Felix, Keith Hamilton, Roger Pegg, Emeritus Professor Jonathan Powers, John Sharpe & Thorsten Sjölin (on behalf of the Darley
Abbey Society).
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The opinions expressed herein are entirely those of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the Society, its council or its editor. All contributions submitted under noms-de-plume/pseudonyma must be accompanied by a bona fide name and address if such are to be accepted for publication.
The Newsletter of the Derby Civic Society is normally published twice a year by the Society c/o 19, Carlton Road, Derby DE23 6HB and is printed by Glenwood Printing Ltd., of 2a Downing Road, West Meadows, Derby DE21 6HA. A limited number of back numbers of the Newsletter are available from the editor at the above address @ £2 per copy.
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Cover picture:
St. Mary’s Bridge, north side, photographed from the garden of the Bridge Inn, Mansfield Road, February 2016. It was designed by Thomas Harrison of Chester and built under the auspices of the Second Improvement Commission 1789-1794 (the latter date is incised on the vermiculated rustication of the SW cutwater just above water level). The balustrade was originally of cast iron from Alderwasley Ironworks, but was replaced in stone by the Council in the 1970s after a lorry had damaged it.
This view will soon be lost as the Environment Agency’s un-necessary and hugely expensive ‘once in a hundred year event’ anti-flood scheme (mockingly called ‘Our City Our River’) will place a substantial wall between the pub and the river’s edge here.
C O N T E N T S
- Editorial
- 1
Modernism versus Traditional
Chairman’s column
New Members
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- 11
- Clock on!
Derby’s Forgotten Buildings
No. 37, RowditchBarracks.
Derby’s Listed Grade II Buildings
No. 35, Wilderslow
12 15 19 21 22 22 23 24 26 27 29 31 35 40 43 45
Architsctural Curiosities Lookalikes The Field: a Note
Lincoln’s Waterside Shopping Centre
An Important Ruling: South Wingfield Manor Another Important Ruling: Darley Abbey Friends of Friar Gate Bridge
Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall
Lunar21 Symposium A Discovery in Traffic Street In Praise of the Mercury Blue Plaquery Pokémon Go! Comes to Derby Kingsway Retail Park
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EDITORIAL
In 2015 a first rate architect belonging to an internationally rated firm produced a report into the best way to preserve the ambience of historic towns. The architect was Spencer de Grey and the
firm Lord Foster’s, although the latter’s
eponymous founder is a practitioner whose work I invariably dismiss out of hand as a pretentious modernist who ought not to be let loose within 1,000 miles of the UK. That not wholly irrational prejudice, however, should not detract from the work of his noble colleague, whose report is exceedingly pertinent.
The problem is that as cities and towns become increasingly in demand as places to live, the ambience which attracts people to them becomes rapidly degraded by formulaic development around the periphery (permanently devaluing the setting) and by inappropriate development in the historic heart. Furthermore, such development is also driven by the imposition on local authorities of housing quotas, which have to be met in order to ensure the payment of various subventions.
The report was commissioned by the Duke of Richmond’s heir the Earl of March & Kinrara
whose Goodwood estate is perilously close to Chichester, a historic town in West Sussex almost under siege from potential house-builders. The aristocratic de Grey argues that British planners need to look urgently at Continental practice as a way to resolve this conundrum.
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He compares the centres of a number of UK towns to their continental equivalents. In the UK the number of people living in a town centre has long been in serious decline, whereas on the
Continent, it is increasing. He quotes King’s Lynn a former post-war ‘overspill’ town, with a
decaying town centre, currently lived in by 4,800 people. In contrast, Delft, a town of equivalent size with an equally unspoilt historic but very thriving centre, boasts over 12,000.
The de Grey study demonstrates that almost all the housing proposed for various English towns and cities, currently being directed to greenfield sites, can be accommodated within the existing envelope of the settlement. This raises the population density which in turn supports shops, services and cafes whilst reducing dependency on the car, something Continental towns and cities have been doing for a long time, also using not only their brown field sites but also their sometimes rich stock of historic buildings. The piece (below) on the Lunar 21 symposium ids of relevance here.
This eminently sensible approach to wholly sustainable town development is one that the present planning system is not geared up to deliver. For a start, many town centre sites are under
multiple ownership. Two typical examples obtrude from Derby’s recent planning history.
First, Duckworth Square, until recently multiply owned. When I was on the Board of Derby Cityscape, developing this site was considered a priority, but the five owners of various chunks of it all wanted unrealistically high prices for their portions and huge patience was needed to negotiate the sale of all the parts, only achieved five years later when the residuary postCityscape body, from 2010 part of the Council, managed to wrap up a deal last year.
Old Blacksmith’s YardL view of the blocked access into George Yard, March 2016. [M. Craven]
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Second, is the example of Old Blacksmith’s Yard, Sadler Gate. The reason why there is no exit from Old Blacksmith’s Yard to George Yard, which would have improved usage, is that the ten
feet from one to the other fell under three ownerships, each being used against the developer David M Adams as a ransom strip. Hence a blind archway where once there should have been a gateway.
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The developmental carcrash that is Duckworth Square, complete with derelict brutalist hotel, as
- seen from Becket Well Lane, 7/12/2015.
- [M. Craven]
Therefore this sort of problem (remarkably common) can deter developers and planners whilst picking off green field sites inevitably becomes the more easy option. With local authorities thinning out staff to save money, the time and effort are not seen as being worth the candle. Worse, our model for expansion is heavily developer-led, so picking off the easiest and cheapest options – green field sites - saves them money and keeps dividends up.
The entire planning system needs radical overhaul if we are to have decent towns and cities in a generation or so. The system needs to be led by planning criteria not by developers, as on the Continent. Developers will still build, but the places where they will build will be subject to tighter control and scrutiny. As it is, we get developers, councillors, planners and non-
accountable ‘fixers’ like John Forkin banging on about developments making the City ‘more vibrant’, yet firms like Clowes Investments are still allowed to sit for decades on vast segments
of inner city land like the GNR station and goods yard, the land between Sadler Gate and St.
James’s Street and other portions in the City centre, as land banks, occasionally getting planning
consent for some grandiose scheme but never implementing them, usually for a variety of unconvincing reasons, whilst the land appreciates steadily in value on their balance sheets.
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This is not ‘developer led’ planning but ‘developer hindered’ and strikes one as completely
unacceptable and essentiually contemptuous of the community. Powers exist to force such land back into public use, but the Council, bereft of any vision or competence and frightened to commit resources which may be difficult to recover, never acts. After nearly 40 years the GNR site, despite three plans for its development, has never been touched, yet a repairs notice could have been served on the bonded warehouse 25 years ago when it was first vandalised, but nothing happened. Were one to be served now it might act as a wake-up call to the developers and remind them of their responsibilities to the community.
Friar Gate Station 12/5/2011: land for hundreds of houses going to waste for 32 years. View of
- the westernmost platforms looking east.
- [M. Craven]
What Derby requires to become ‘vibrant’ (if that’s what people want: ‘commercially sustainable
and attractive to live in’ would be a preferable way of describing it) is to stop fantasising about grandiose projects nobody wants to promote and build houses or apartments on Duckworth
Square, Friar Gate Station, in the GNR bonded warehouse, in the St. James’s area, in the St. George’s area (unless that really is going to be the Dean’s new school) and elsewhere
Another way of trying to implement this sort of fundamental change lies in the notional revival of the Michael Heseltine inspired ‘Living over the shops’ (LOTS) scheme of 1986, along with legislation to enable such a scheme to actually be attractive and to work. The idea is to adapt unused city centre upper floors to be opened up as places to live. In Derby more than 50% of unused upper floors are in historic buildings in desperate need of sustainable, viable use. There are inevitably problems: with insurance, access, car parking, VAT and administration, but none insuperable, albeit some requiring legislation. But even without the co-operation of those developers selfishly sitting on land banks, bringing back these unused spaces in the historic core of the city would go a long way to solving the problems which face most similar settlements.
A typical area ripe for development in the core of the city is Canary Island but, thanks to the megalomaniac scheme called Our City Our River promoted by the Environment Agency (EA), an unaccountable quango, and its stooge, the City Council, most of this area is to be stripped of
buildings to accommodate a run off channel to deal with a ‘once a century’ flooding possibility.
Not only that, but a purpose-built block of over 120 social housing flats, Exeter House, which are
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also of considerable historic significance, is to be demolished to allow for it if you please - this at a time when we are being asked to find more and more housing, especially for those least able to afford it. Another planned casualty is the former Harwood’s building (now NatWest) on Derwent Street, designed in best Art Deco style by Naylor & Sale in the mid-1930s. Should Natwest move on (a possibility, I understand) this would convert to very smart housing units.
Derwent St., Canary Island, Harwood’s (now NatWest), a locally listed Art -Deco building now
- threatened with demolition, seen here on 22/2/2005.
- [M. Craven]
The rest of the area is prime building land, bearing in mind the EA would require ground floors to be garaging only in case of that ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ flood event. All that potential developers would have to do would be to stick to a brief imposed by an enlightened Council (well, one can dream!) to keep height down and adhere to a design brief that would avoid such hideous utilitarianism as the nearby Miller Homes blocks on Stuart Street, which were never intended to be built as they are, but which got the nod to be simplified after consent was granted.
There is another tarantula in the woodpile too, upon which I touched in the last issue. The building of student flats has already disfigured parts of the town with great cheaply-built behemoths of buildings. So instead of getting permanent residents into the town centre we are getting seasonally occupied blocks built to the cheapest possible standards. I did wonder why, as most normal students, like my daughter Cornelia and her friends at the University of Nottingham and elsewhere, like to life off-campus in shared houses. Yet I gather these blocks are for foreign students to live in, a commodity upon which the University of Derby is apparently majoring in order to attract central funding. Whether the post-Brexit landscape will remain the same is another, rather pertinent, question in this context.
I fear Spencer de Grey’s report failed to mention this strange intrusive and, one suspects,
ephemeral phenomenon. How the university cities on the Continent contend with the problem I do not know. Yet I hope his report gets wider circulation than just in the estate office at
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Goodwood, though, because our towns and cities desperately need to be taken seriously and not
just used as vehicles for various governments’ essays in social engineering.
H erbert Aslin’s pioneering and humane Exeter House Flats, locally listed but now seriously
- under threat. Photographed 1st November 2011.
- [M. Craven]
As it is, we have the annual MIPIM conference in Cannes where councillors junket off at the expense of the very firms whose planning applications on which they will later sit in judgement.
It’s as near to open bribery as you can legally get, so the cynic might think. They’d be better employed going to Delft or Osnabrück and seeing how to make their town centres truly ‘vibrant’
and sustainable. Otherwise in the longer term, those of us who live here will begin merely to suffer the place, as its genius loci becomes eroded, and few visitors will wish to come to it, due to its increasing ugliness and uniformity.
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MODERNISM vs TRADITIONAL
‘The school of thought personified by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner established a moral convention that one should only build in the style of one’s own time – that architectural progress was relentlessly
and morally pure and that to revert back to the architecture of past civilisations or generations was automatically reactionary. For the [distinguished architect Professor] C. R. Cockerell (1788-
1863)….the progressive and inventive use of, in his case, the language of Classical design was not “anachronistic”….but a rational, visual and symbolic choice.’
(Matthew Saunders, review of Bordeleau, A, Charles Robert Cockerell, Architect in Time: Reflections around Anachronistic Drawings, Ashgate, 2016).
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CHAIRMAN’S COLUMN
Hello everyone! As you read your latest Newsletter yet another Blue Plaque will have been launched by our Society. The site is the Marble Hall of the old Rolls-Royce factory administration block on Nightingale Road and the Plaque is to Sir Henry Royce Bt. (engineer and co-founder of Rolls-Royce) and Captain The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls (company co-founder, pioneer motorist and aviator). The partnership between Derby City Council and the Derby Civic Society continues and, as Chairman I’m very grateful to Council officers Andy Hills and Chloe Oswald, and to Cllr Martin Rawson for their hard work and continued support. We hope to launch many more Blue Plaques before the end of the year.
A few months ago my wife Louise and I tavelled to our twin city of Osnabrück to celebrate 40 years of twinning with Derby. There are a number of photographs within this Newsletter depicting the architecture of some of the buildings. Other delegates attending twinning celebrations of their cities with Osnabrück included Hefei (China), Evansville (USA), and Tver (Russia). The City of Osnabrück is well worth a visit, and our party was well looked after, directed, guided by Derby envoy Daniel Hampton. Thank you, Daniel.
The medallion men! Osnabrück Oberburgomeister Wolfgang Griesert at a Civic Reception, flanked by Deputy Mayor
- of Derby, Cllr. Mark Tittley and Alan, our Chairman.
- [Louise Grimadell]
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We held our Annual ABCD Awards last February it was very well attended by many of our members, and of course the winners! Our President Don Amott and the then Mayor of Derby Paul Pegg presented a number of awards. The winner of the best building was awarded to the University of Derby for their amazing Sports Centre—well worth a visit! My thanks go to David Ling and the team for their selection of winners and runners up. A great deal of time is spent on visiting and selecting all those who are represented in the awards.
It is always a pleasure to welcome new members to the Derby Civic Society and we all hope to meet you very soon at one of our social events. We can offer another varied programme of talks and visits for 2016/2017. To all existing members please remember to renew your membership from August 1st. I do believe that we are one of the best valued societies in the City in terms of membership fees. If you have an email address please email it to MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY Robin Wood ([email protected]) as this will help reduce postage costs, always, it would seem, on the increase – many thanks
I end my column by saying a BIG THANK YOU to our Activities Chairman Dave Parry who after many years in the role has decided to step down at the September AGM. On saying that Dave has organised our next schedule of events and has said that he ‘will not be disappearing!’ Dave, as you all know, has performed a sterling job for the Civic Society for well over twenty years. We are now looking for someone to take on that role therefore of you are interested please contact Secretary David Ling (Tel 01332 551484). If necessary, it could be done by more than one person collegiately. Whoever takes on the position is guaranteed help and support by the present members of the Civic Society Council – we look forward to hearing from you.
An Osnabrück street view; it looks strangely like Sadler Gate! [Louise Grimadell]
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An ornamental timber-framed and jettied façade, possibly 16th century. [Louise Grimadell]
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Another street view. [Louise Grimadell]
NEW MEMBERS
Corporate
Amanda Strong, Mercia Image Ltd., The Sidings. Duffield Rd. Industrial Estate, Little Eaton,
Derby, DE21 5EG
Individual
Guido Basile, Edlaston Hall, Edlaston, Derbyshire DE6 2DQ
Margaret Daniels,73 Lime Grove, Chaddesden, Derby, DE21 6WL
James M. Dean, 1 Harringay Gardens, Derby, DE22 4DE
Kalwinder Singh Dhindsa, 33 Breedon Avenue, Littleover, Derby, DE23 1LR
Mr. & Mrs. Patrick Fullarton, 356, Stenson Road, Derby DE23 1HF
Mike Hudd, 32 White Street, Derby, DE22 1HA
Rachel Morris,c/o Derby Cathedral, 18-19 Iron Gate, Derby, DE1 3GP
Mr. & Mrs. John MacDonald-Mackenzie, 24, White Street, Derby DE22 1HA
Kathleen Mosley, The Old Bakehouse, 4, Chestnut Avenue, Chellaston, Derby, DE73 6RW
Lynn Pearson, 9, The Poplars, Gosforth, Northumberland NE3 4AE Peter J Seddon, Northworthy, 11 Louvain Road, Derby, DE23 6DA
Mr & Mrs. Brian & Diane Wilson, Apt. 4, The Hayes, Leek, Wootton, Warwick, CV35 7QU
Change of address
Revd. Canon Paul Brett, 23, Stothert Avenue, Bath, Somerset BA2 3FF
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CLOCK ON!
The Spot saga gets worse. It was transformed from a notable road junction in 1906 when C B Birch’s statue of Queen Victoria was put there, paid for by super-rich refrigeration tycoon Sir Alfred Haslam and unveiled by King Edward VII and the then Mayor Sir Edwin Ann. She
looked imperiously down St. Peter’s Street, a wholly appropriate, dignified and decorative
addition to a very unremarkable part of Derby. Then, in 1927, it was decreed that public loos should be provided there – very necessary in an age when such basic necessities were considered a sine qua non of civilised life, unlike today, where we have our astonishingly negative council shutting them all down to save paltry sums of money, not to mention de-funding almost every aspect of our traditional culture.