Proud villas left to crumble due to neglect

✒ THE Herald Express recently reported on the Hotel Virginia planning application refusal.

Architect Daniel Metcalfe remarked that “we can’t simply say that because something is old it demands preservation. This is a highly defective, rotten building.”

Mr Metcalfe is a qualified member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, naming himself as a conservation architect as an AABC (Architects Accredited in Conservation of Buildings).

However Historic England strongly recommends the gold standard Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC) qualification as essential for a heritage advisor to give quality counsel on preserving and enhancing buildings like the Hotel Virginia, situated in a protected conservation area.

Mr Metcalfe’s assertion “this is a highly defective rotten building” suggests his client is not paying heed to Heritage England guidelines on managing risk to vacant historic buildings which states the best way to protect a building is to keep it occupied, even if the use is on a temporary or partial basis.

This highlights a current malaise by some owners of Victorian villas in Torquay, later converted to hotels. Owners today wish to engage a willing architect to profit by a major residential redevelopment on a cleared site, regardless of the building’s significant cultural heritage, by not carrying out good elementary house-keeping to reduce the risk of deterioration or damage. Keeping the building secure is the owner’s responsibility. It can be imagined some are even hopeful for a fire as, notoriously, at the Shedden Hall Hotel.

That hotel became derelict in 2012 and since then had been entered and vandalised by delinquents and damaged by a number of fires, eventually becoming that highly defective rotten building.

Then, still inadequately protected from trespassers, it was destroyed in a major fire, clearing the way for a planning application. A similar scenario of neglect and fire is playing out at the unoccupied Victorian Coppice Hotel.

Torquay’s planning authority has often ‘rewarded’ an irresponsible owner by allowing an incongruous new design in a designated conservation area.

At the Hotel Virginia, a refusal was appropriate in again, a conservation area. Mervyn Seal, chairman

Torbay Heritage Trust