CONTEXT 187 : MARCH 2026 25 INFRASTRUCTURE WESSEX Greg Venn, a recently retired local authority conservation officer, is a trustee and vice chair of the Somerset Building Preservation Trust. Jane St John Webster is project coordinator at the Somerset Building Preservation Trust. Delinquents, an English parliamentary body set up during the Civil War to raise funds by fining ‘delinquents’ who had fought for the Royalists. The building has had a difficult time in the last 25 years, with two appeals for subdivision into flats and commercial uses dismissed, and multiple inventions have been made by the local authority, threatening urgent works notices. Fortunately the threats were heeded by the owner at the time, who generally carried out the work required, and only one urgent works notice had to be served. SBPT approached the private owners and worked with Somerset Council, which acquired the building with the help of Historic England, and handed it back to the trust for restoration on a long lease.With the support of the Architectural Heritage Fund and Historic England, SBPT is undertaking a period of project development. The aim is to rescue the building from further neglect and deterioration by finding new uses and redeveloping it in a way that places 9 Fore Street at the heart of the community. The trust is developing relationships with potential future partners and anchor tenants, and working with the local community of Chard throughout the process. By creating activities and engagement that connect people with the building’s heritage, we are helping to foster a sense of ownership and place, ensuring the best possible outcomes for both the building and the community that will use it. In the meantime, SBPT has been able to drawn down grants, principally from Historic England, to build capacity, survey the building, remove asbestos and attend to the water ingress. We are now looking to address structural issues to the Court Room buildings. Initial conservation work on the wall painting, including dendrochronology which tells us that the floor beams date from 1544, has been funded by the Vernacular Architecture Group. The trust runs the William Stansell Historic Building Awards to promote and encourage exceptionally high standards of design and craftsmanship. Introduced in 2000, the awards are named after William Stansell, who died in 1987, the fifth generation of the family building and development business which was founded in 1823 by his great-great-grandfather, also William Stansell, with the main sponsor being Tauntfield. The awards, given every two years, highlight the contribution that well-designed and conserved buildings make to their surroundings. The scheme also covers new-build structures in an historic setting. The challenge we face as a small building preservation trust is not just finding the grant providers and competing for the pot of money, but finding the match funding. We remain imaginative and look to secondary grant providers for help; we seek crowdfunding or online donations towards a particular stage or repair; and we call on the expertise of our trustees and advisors to avoid unnecessary costs or work by our contracted architects and other professionals. Our main challenge in the next five years will be to fund our day-to-day operation. We have historically received funding from local government partners which we can not depend on in the future. Unlike some other building preservation trustss, we do not own property and so do not have an income. To give buildings that might be lost new life, we need to find a regular income, and would value some form of discussion on a national basis. SBPT runs an information campaign by leaflet and on its YouTube Channel https://youtu.be/ Ee8WvBXf3-w A window and ceiling plaster at No 9 Fore Street A drone image of No 9 Fore Street (Image by Architectural Thread and Lewis Brown)
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