My parents own a ~250 year old stone ex-miners cottage. The building is listed, i.e. “protected”. It had been left in disarray for years, and eventually developers bought it, renovated it and then sold it on to them.
Unfortunately, the local council cannot seem to accept that the house is a home, and not a museum. They had to fight tooth and nail to get a loft conversion and only on the condition that it wouldn’t be used as a bedroom (only as storage :rolleyes: ). They aren’t allowed to attach a porch to their house nor a conservatory, and a lady further up the row isn’t even allowed a shed in her garden!
Now, the local council owns an ex-stately home, Haigh Hall, which was the ancestral seat of the Earl of Culraven and Balcarress. For the past few summers, I’ve worked there when I’ve been home from university. Here’s a picture of the hall. The hall was given the highest protected status, meaning it virtually could not be touched. Here’s where things get interesting.
The hall looks fine from the outside, at a distance. However, once you go inside, the whole of the interior has been gutted. The local social services outfit have had offices installed, the park estate manager has had offices installed and the whole of the top floor is left in ruin (half the rooms upstairs have no windows, leaves are blown in and left to rot, occassionally someone like me is sent up to sweep them out before a visiting party comes and tours the rooms). What SHOULD have been left as a museum has been turned into a set of offices and a tacky wedding/conference venue.
The same people who like to play mini-Hitler with the property of others allow themselves to desecrate what was once a beautiful building. The very people who are left in charge of local planning permissions are the exact same people who should never be allowed in charge of anything.
A weak rant I know but something I had to get off my chest.
While US/Canada/Australia/NZ-style zoning isn’t that great either, at least you have a clear way of knowing of what can be done by right, and what requires special permission or review. In most cases, at least.
To American planners, UK-style planning would never fly; it’s too arbitrary, which the courts don’t like. The alternative is having a comprehensive plan implemented by zoning, but it’s considered one of the things that contributes to urban sprawl; many suburban communities have zoning codes that require very large minimum lot sizes. Zoning is also much less flexible than UK-style planning - that is, outside of “roll your own” planned unit development zoning. To explain all of that would take a few horus, though.
Ha ha, that’s only true about America if you don’t live in a “historical neighborhood”, say. And then they have the balls to come by your house and say, “Well, we’re not sure we want you to build a garage, because most people around here seem to park in carports or on the street.” There’s a guy down the street who, honest to goodness, has a garage built out of old realtor signs, but that’s grandfathered in.
Okay, so it’s a city law thing, but it does burn my biscuits. I want to improve the place, tastefully!
An obligation to obtain planning permission for building work on a listed building is not the same as an obligation to maintain that building. Now, the listing bodies in England (the local authority or English Heritage) actually do have the power to enforce owners of listed buildings to maintain them by means of Repair Notices. But those are only ever used in the most extreme cases, mainly because they need the local authority or English Heritage to threaten a compulsory purchase; the last thing those bodies want to be lumbered with are rundown properties requiring extensive repairs. So in the case of Haigh Hall, the owners, the local council, aren’t really under any legal obligation to maintain it in tip-top condition. (English Heritage, on the other hand, has implicitly criticised them by putting Haigh Hall on its Buildings-at-Risk register, a register that exists precisely because there is little that English Heritage can do in such cases.) Nor are your parents under any greater obligation than the council to maintain their listed building.
But the local council do have a statutory obligation to enforce the planning system. And there’s a reason why those decisions are left at local level, which is that the alternative would be to let English Heritage take all the decisions from London. The current system is a compromise. The councils get to administer the rules in most local cases, but English Heritage gets to administer them in those cases that it, English Heritage, thinks to be of national or regional importance, as a check against individual councils that happen to insufficiently zealous. Everyone agrees that some councils have had appalling records of protecting historic buildings, but there’s also a balance to be struck with the interests of local democracy and the powers of English Heritage are specifically designed to limit the damage in particularly outrageous cases.
Nor does the change of use of Haigh Hall indicate hypocrisy on the part of the local council, who would in any case have had to get the permission not from themselves but from English Heritage. (In fact, as it was bought from the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres in the late 1940s, any alterations may have been made when the listed buildings system was still in its infancy.) You see, turning it into a ‘museum’ would probably have been the dumbest possible option. It’s an interesting but hardly exceptional example of a nineteenth-century country house of the type that exist in large numbers throughout Britain. That’s why it’s English Heritage listing is Grade II*, which is not the ‘highest protected status’ nor does it mean that ‘it virtually could not be touched’.
No one believes that most such houses can become museums. Only the exceptional ones, whether because of their architectural merit or historical associations, or because they have important exhibits, are ever likely to work as such. Haigh Hall was probably never going to be one of those. So, like most other examples of the type, the issue is whether there are other viable uses. Experience actually suggests that this is usually the best way of perserving large but not very distinguished country houses. Of course, it depends on finding the right use, but conversions into council offices, wedding and conference venues (‘tacky’ or otherwise) and/or golf courses have all proved successful models elsewhere. It’s not as if all local councils have good records of maintaining country houses that they do preserve as museums.
And isn’t this exactly the reason why the system needs overhauling? The owners of an historic building are under no obligation to keep it in good repair yet homeowners aren’t allowed a porch or conservatory? What concern is it of the state whether a home owner puts a porch on their house or not, provided it is safe? Where has this asinine idea come from that old buildings should be protected from their owners?
I apologise for micharacterising the protected status of HH, I had been given the impression that it had been granted a much higher status than that.
What’s the purpose of listing a building, presumably because of its architectural value, if the owner can mess in whatever way they want with it?
Presumably, your parents knew that the building was listed. They knew they wouldn’t be able to make whatever modifications they would fancy. If they had an issue with this they could have bought another, non listed house.
I’ve no issue with the government chosing to protect buildings of historical and architectural importance, and enforcing it. Otherwise, a lot of our historical heritage (be it in the UK or n France) would have dissapeared to be replaced by skycrappers or standardized concrete houses or would have been disfigured by “convenient” additions. Is anybody obligated to live in these historical houses/neighborhoods?
Also, aren’t there some perks for the owners of listed buildings in the UK? There are some in France, in particular when it comes to repairs.
But these buildings aren’t being listed for their architectural value, they’re being listed because of their age. There’s nothing remotely interesting about the architecture of my parents house, it’s a stone terraced house of which there are lots in the local area.
But the objections are absolutely absurd. The house we live in used to be two seperate houses which were knocked together to form one. Where’s the logic in allowing this but not allowing a conservatory? There isn’t. People espousing these ridiculous planning regulations forget that the houses are being used as homes, which they were designed for and not as living museums.
Of course you haven’t, you aren’t paying for their upkeep.
Like Edinburgh castle and virtually every other “historic building”, a building that has seen numerous extensions over many centuries? Why was it OK to extend in the past yet suddenly it’s not?
