A new twist in an old story
Birmingham has suffered too many cases of valuable old buildings being expediently demolished
IN Bartholomew Row, near Birmingham’s Millennium Point, is a terrace of 18th century Georgian houses that somehow escaped the indiscriminate clearance of the inner city in the 1960s and 70s.
They were latterly the light fitting manufactory of Christopher Wray, before being boarded up and left empty for several years. They have now been converted into student flats by an unusually enterprising developer, Simon Linford.
When they were built in the mid-18th century, facing the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s Chapel, the houses would have been occupied by middle class families of some wealth and status.
But as happened elsewhere in Birmingham, the industrial revolution overtook them. The families moved further out of town, shopping wings (narrow manufacturing workshops) were built over their back gardens, and a variety of businesses occupied the site.
There was a malthouse, a ginger beer maker and several businesses manufacturing metal products. By 1928 the whole complex was occupied by a metal-stamping business, which was eventually bought by Christopher Wray.
When I visited the buildings about 12 years ago, after Wray’s departure, it was an extraordinary Dickensian slum. Two centuries of additions and accretions had produced a dense, confusing maze of gloomy and underlit spaces. The whole complex was listed at grade II in 1992.
Linford and his architects have pursued a policy of removing as little as possible of the old fabric, just enough to make habitable what remains. The result is very complicated, but possesses a lot of character. The original three-storey houses at the front are now largely separated from the industrial shopping behind by a yard, and the shopping has been converted into 13 flats. The houses are yet to be converted in a second phase, and these will become shared student houses.
Joined on to No.12 is a new 15-storey building containing more student flats. This was completed last year and is the enabling development for the conversion of the listed buildings. It produces income which helped to pay the considerable costs of the conversion – bridging what is called the “conservation deficit”.
On the ground floor of the converted shop are extensive common spaces which will be shared by students in the new building as well as by those living in the conversion. So the students in the tower will experience two very different kinds of accommodation, linked by a connecting doorway. Next year, in phase two, they will also have a bar in the basement, where previously Christopher Wray’s drop forges noisily stamped out brass light fittings.
There is obviously a big contrast in scale between the tower and the houses. But this is partly resolved by placing the tower towards the back, and extending a three-storey section of it forward, next to the houses. This moderates the contrast in size between new and old, to some extent.
The principal architect for the overall development is IDP Group, of Coventry. The conservation architects responsible for the detailed execution of the conversion of the listed buildings are APEC Architects, of Birmingham. The old fabric that is retained is valued for its time-worn patina, and is not concealed unless that is unavoidable. New fabric that has been added is clearly distinguished from the old. So where old internal brick walls were roughly whitewashed, the paint remains.
New brickwork inserted is left unpainted, to make a clear distinction between the two.
One part of two-storey shopping plus a basement was leaning, so had to have a hefty steel frame inserted to hold it upright. The steels are left exposed, just as are old timber roof trusses inside flats, and old cast iron windows. New technology is used where appropriate: all the bathrooms are prefabricated pods, made in a factory in Hull, and craned into place. This is all good conservation practice.
It is important to point out that this process is not restoration. History is being revealed and is being made legible for the first time here. But the buildings are not being restored to a previous state. What is being done is the addition of another layer in the buildings’ complex 250-year history, but grafting it on, intelligently and creatively, to previous layers, making a unique architectural document in the process.
Neither is it cheap. Every one of the 13 flats is different, some fitted ingeniously into shapes built in the 19th century for different purposes, and on a variety of different floor levels. Air ducts and electricity conduits are fixed across existing surfaces, not hidden away. This requires extra planning and spending.
Resolving issues of the structural stability of leaning walls, the achievement of fire separation and sound insulation between flats, and the enabling of safe emergency escape routes, while at the same time respecting the historic character of the buildings, is a complicated and time-consuming process.
But it can be and has been done; money can be made from it, and the result is worthwhile in every way.
It is an exemplary development, and I hope that its lessons can be learned by others.
Birmingham has suffered too many cases of valuable old buildings being expediently demolished and replaced by new buildings of lesser quality, where a more intelligent strategy would have been to do what Simon Linford has done here, recycling and re-energising.
In my previous column, I reported the absence of any winning buildings in the West Midlands in this year’s RIBA national awards. I think Bartholomew Row may be one to look out for in 2020.