Context 169 - September 2021

C O N T E X T 1 6 9 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1 21 FROM THE BOTTOM UP to arms which Peter Burman and I curated for Roy Strong.We had an amazing success. Grants for historic churches were announced within a month of the exhibition opening. Now some very big buildings were coming our way, notably Battersea Power Station in 1978. It was clear that even if we got them listed, we would not save them unless we had a solution. So with the architect Martin Richardson we prepared a scheme for converting the power station into a sports and leisure centre. In 1982 Richardson obtained planning permission and the electricity board was persuaded to sell the building. It has been a rollercoaster ever since. With major input from Historic England the chimneys have been rebuilt (many believed that once gone they would never be replaced). In the spring of 2021 3,000 workers are on site, and the restored and converted power station is due to open in 2022. In 1980 we launched our scheme for Billingsgate Fish Market, recruiting two rising stars from the Richard Rogers office, Ian Ritchie and Alan Stanton, to draw up a scheme. We showed how the preservation of the market could be financed by building on the lorry park next door. With Trevor Osborne we were the underbidder. SAVE has tackled a long series of building types. First had been railway architecture, with an exhibition in 1976, followed by Satanic Mills in 1979. We did Curtains!!! with the founders of the Theatres Trust, and a series on hospitals and asylums. Another with a powerful impact was Deserted Bastions , on naval and military architecture. This led us to tackle the mighty Peninsula Barracks in Winchester. Working with architect Huw Thomas, we drew up a scheme for residential use, obtained planning permission and found a developer in the depths of the early 1990s recession. The new millennium saw us battling to save two country houses of superb quality and fighting the destructive Pathfinder project – dubbed ‘bulldoze the north, concrete the south’. More than 100,000 northern terrace houses were singled out for clearance and thousands had gone. A succession of SAVE directors, Adam Wilkinson, Will Palin and Clem Cecil, led the battle, which reached its climax with the Welsh Streets in Liverpool, 400 late-Victorian terrace houses, including Ringo Starr’s birth- place.To gain time, SAVE outbid the council for the last house, which had belonged to Ringo’s auntie. We fought off a public inquiry and a compulsory purchase order. Communities secretary Eric Pickles ruled in our favour, and a grudging Liverpool City Council finally transferred the houses to Place First. They are now all lived in again. In 2007 we learnt that the National Trust for Scotland had failed in its attempt to buy Robert Adam’s Dumfries House in Ayrshire and its wonderful collection of early Chippendale furniture. In retrospect it looks crazy but SAVE launched an appeal for £25 million to acquire the house, 2,000 acres and the furnishings. We had reached £18 million in pledges, with a further £5 million earmarked from Historic Scotland, when Christies said that time had run An aerial photo of the Welsh streets, Liverpool, saved from demolition (Photo: Pathfinder)