Restoration drama: My battle to make the grade with listed building

Just over a year ago, I bought my first heritage building in the UK: a sizeable and handsome early Victorian villa, subdivided into 25 flats and with a blue plaque on the front recording the famous historical personage who had lived there. Best of all, there were some gorgeous reception rooms that I was able to keep for my own private use.

The building was a little down-at-heel and all the flats needed refurbishment. I had to learn quickly what restrictions the property’s listed status placed upon me.

Generally speaking, the rule seems to be: conserve wherever is reasonably possible and replace with the same wherever you can not. None of this was particularly onerous to me. I truly love the building and I excitedly bought up every book I could find on its famous former owner (a statesman and general of the early- and mid-19th century). I exhaustively investigated too the history of the surrounding area.

The ambitions of those charged with the preservation of heritage buildings and my own desire to fully restore this beautiful building could hardly be more aligned, I concluded. Yet bureaucracy does not quite work like that and I quickly discovered all manner of headaches I had not quite envisioned.

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Restoring a heritage building inevitably involves various compromises between the original design on one side and modern tastes and technology on the other. For example, if your building has a lot of decayed single-glazed timber windows, are you going to replace them with the same windows – highly energy inefficient – or with double-glazed windows designed to look like the originals?

If the latter, will you be restricted to using timber or would a PVC window that appears to be timber suffice? In many cases, deciding where the line is drawn through this grey area lies in the hands of the local authority’s “listed buildings officer” and inevitably their opinions and inclinations can radically differ from person to person.

I soon discovered that my “listed buildings officer” was the ultimate in sticklers. Not only was the possibility of double glazing dismissed, but documented proof required that any window could not be saved. If necessary, the building’s windows would have to be extracted and transplant surgery with exactly the same type of timber performed, before being put back in place, all at eye-watering cost. I almost expected that the officer would demand that I trace the exact forest that the windows were hewn from and send me to it for replacement timber.

Intense scrupulousness

Now you might think that this intense scrupulousness with heritage buildings is no bad thing. But my building in the UK is a mere common or garden Grade 2 listed building, not the architecturally more important Grade 2 star or the supremely valuable Grade 1 listed. The net result of dealing with a listed building officer making exorbitant demands is to increasingly persuade the owner to avoid making repairs at all.

I was variously told that I could not use gloss paint anywhere in the property despite it already having been used (and as a contractor bemusedly asked, what did they want you to use – mid-Victorian lead-based paints?) and that a planning application was required to put down block paving on the drive.

When I came to restore the beautiful ceilings of the reception rooms, I had planned to reproduce the colour scheme (light grey and gold) of the delightful diningroom of the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London. But that would not have been allowed – I either had to leave it as it was (white) or else undertake paint archaeology on the ceiling and pay a heritage restoration company to work out what exactly the ceiling had looked like in 1850. But what if I didn’t like the gaudy pinks that were popular at the time? I decided to play it safe and keep it white.

Safest way

Is it really the case, though, that heritage building officers behave like this because they truly care about the property or just that they find demanding the ultimate in restoration works the safest way of ensuring their decisions are beyond reproach and their job secure?

The greatest casualty of this obstinate officialdom are the heritage buildings themselves. Just a few doors down from my building is a magnificent Grade 2 listed mid-Victorian terrace with no less than two blue plaques on it. The terrace is falling to pieces: the windows are decayed, the paint is peeled everywhere, weeds grow from gutters and the roof. Listing a property does not require that beautiful buildings are kept in good order: it seems perfectly fine if they go to seed.

The management of listed buildings should surely concentrate more on promoting the general good upkeep and presentation of our architectural heritage than on making onerous, unreasonable demands on those making these precious buildings flourish in the modern age.