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CIVIC SOCIETY INITIATIVE
What is the Civic Society Initiative?
In essence the purpose of the Civic Society Initiative is a simple one – to establish the means
within twelve months to ensure provision of a national voice and support for the civic society
movement.
The loss of the Civic Trust has prompted a groundswell of support for the civic society
movement. Messages of support and practical offers of help have been received from a large
number of professional bodies, local authorities, voluntary and charitable organisations and
others. Over 500 civic societies have already said they want to be kept in touch with the
future arrangements for supporting societies and providing a champion for the movement.
It is clear that many share the view that the civic society movement is too important for it to
lose its national voice. The role of societies and local community action is as important now
as it was when the Civic Trust was set up. This is the sentiment at the heart of the package
of measures now being put in place to allow a range of options for the future health of the
civic society movement to be explored and assessed.
A full range of options will need to be examined but three things are clear:
• the civic society movement needs an independent champion
• the movement needs to be supported as a network where the voice of individual
societies and local groups can be strengthened
• the future needs to be rooted in what the societies want and they need to drive the
way forward.
The core package for establishing the Civic Society Initiative which has emerged is as follows:
• one year’s funding donated by the National Trust for Tony Burton to lead the Initiative
• office accommodation and in-kind support donated by CPRE (in London) and the
RIBA (in Liverpool)
• a charitable ‘home’ to receive funds and provide governance through the North of
England Civic Trust
• a civic society convention supported by Blackpool Council and hosted by Blackpool
Civic Trust in October 2009.
English Heritage will deliver Heritage Open Days in 2009.
The Civic Society Initiative will take an open approach and explore a full range of possibilities
for the movement and include development of the mission, vision, values, funding,
governance and name of a new organisation, or the means to do this, if it is determined one is
required. The outcome will be a set of proposals combining immediate practical viability with
a 3-5 year plan of the future. There will be a sounding board drawn from the civic society
movement and beyond.
Current Issues as at April 2009
Planning
Through
its Development Committee, the Society reviews planning applications
and comments appropriately. The Society does not necessarily take a
view on all proposals.
Issues of current concern to the Society are:
Local government reorganisation - impact on planning and conservation. Early fears that the disappearance of all the district councils in Wiltshire and their replacement by one body, the new Wiltshire Council, would mean a centralisation and consequent remoteness of planning and conservation services proved to be largely groundless. In February 2009 the Society organised an open meeting, where the new authority's Director of Development Services, Brad Fleet, gave assurances that officers under both headings would continue to work from Salisbury, under a local set-up very similar to the previous one. Claims about efficiencies and other benefits to be expected from the new structure will be evaluated as time goes on, but for planning at least there is no particular reason to expect any decline in performance. There are some remaining question marks about the impact on conservation, whose profile within the new authority was not helped when a proposed post at Trowbridge for an officer with county-wide responsibility for this service, under Brad Fleet, was scrapped for budgetary reasons. The three local conservation officers remain in post, but it is not yet clear whether they will be able to draw on the work of outside consultants for some of their functions, particularly conservation area appraisals. The loss of this resource would have a significant effect on the timetable for the completion of the appraisal schedule, and the Society will continue to monitor the claim that the switch to the new council will save money but nevertheless be nothing but beneficial in all its impacts.
Wilton Road - The Old Manor site. The Old Manor Hospital site comprises two areas of land, separated by the Wilton Road. By far the largest is that on the south side of the road, which contains three listed buildings and a listed fountain. The part on the north side contains a further two listed buildings, and all the site is within the Salisbury conservation area. In the 1920s and 30s the Old Manor Hospital was, according to one account, the largest private mental hospital in Europe. It was taken over by the state in 1954, at which time it had 672 beds, though this had reduced to 288 beds by 1978. Since then, of course, approaches to mental health care have radically altered, and the current facilities are very different. On the south side of the road, completion in 2003 of three new mental health care buildings on the eastern side has left land on the western side surplus to the original NHS requirements for the site. This includes the main former hospital building, the Grade II listed Finch House, and other buildings which deserve to be retained.
A design brief was produced in 2000 to direct the future of the whole site, driven by the expectation that the primary use of any surplus land or buildings would be residential, and the Society made the point, then and subsequently, that any such development needed to be of the highest possible design standards. The conservation area designation for the site theoretically gives the Council the power to require this, though of course views may differ as to what constitutes good design, and the planning system is in any case not an ideal tool for achieving it, particularly given the key role almost invariably given to the profit motive. Matters at the Old Manor were then complicated by the surplus land being passed to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, for the specific purpose of enabling the construction of 'housing for key workers'. A lengthy period of subsequent inaction was eventually explained when it emerged that several NHS-related users had been identified who were interested in having premises on the site, and in 2005 the case for it to be passed back to NHS use was accepted. The surplus land and buildings on the south side of the Wilton Road then became the responsibility of the Wiltshire and Swindon LIFT, or Local Improvement Finance Trust, one of many such organisations now involved with NHS development projects. A period of apparent activity and the promise of specific proposals for the site was followed by one during which no news emerged, until it became apparent that the LIFT approach to the site had been abandoned. The intention is now apparently to use part of the land, through some mechanism as yet unclear, for a new building housing two Salisbury GP practices, both of which feel their current premises to be unsatisfactory. There is no indication that this would involve any of the existing buildings, for which some sort of action is urgently needed. They are boarded up and decaying, including the listed ones, and the whole site has a derelict and forlorn appearance. This unfortunately includes the listed Kennet Lodge, right at the eastern end of the site near St Paul's roundabout. This changed hands some time ago, with the intention that it should become a Quaker Meeting House, but so far lack of funds has prevented its new owners from putting their plans into practice, even though relevant planning consent was given some time ago. Early in 2009 a revised scheme was approved, and some action may finally be seen, although the Society felt that the treatment of the listed building was somewhat less sympathetic in this scheme than in the earlier one.
In 2006 the Society identified one of the currently unlisted buildings on the land, the ballroom, as being worthy of particular protection, and asked English Heritage to consider it for listing. The ballroom was built in 1868/9, and is remarkable for the purely Georgian style of its main features, when one much more typical of the mid-Victorian period might have been expected for a building of this type. The English Heritage assessment ignored this aspect of the ballroom, identified it as a fairly commonplace example of a not especially rare building type, and recommended that it should not be listed. Its conservation area location gives it some protection, for instance requiring an application before demolition could be carried out, but not the same scale of protection that listing would have conferred. It is to be hoped that the ballroom's obvious merits will ensure that it remains, little altered, in whatever new use pattern eventually emerges for the site.
Surplus land and buildings to the north of the Wilton Road are in different ownership, that of the Salisbury Foundation NHS Trust, rather than the Wiltshire Primary Care Trust which owns the land to the south. This northern part of the site is unlikely to have any future health care use, and the owners are expected to seek permission for housing development on it, having reached agreement with the court authorities to share the access road to be created off the Wilton Road for the new courts building immediately to the west. A building on this part of the site was also identified by the Civic Society as arguably being worth listed status. Llangarren, a house of c. 1850, was felt to probably reach that level of architectural and historical interest in its own right, but with a case made even stronger by its relationship with the two Paragon buildings which front the Wilton Road just south of it. These are already listed, and the fact that Llangarren is of the same date and part of the same group appeared to the Society to make the case for listing it more or less watertight. English Heritage unfortunately took a different view, feeling that Llangarren itself had been too greatly changed, and that its relationship to the Paragon buildings had been too compromised to make listing justified. Again, a conservation area location means that demolition would need consent, always unlikely to be readily given for the whole building, though an unattractive 1930s extension might well be seen as dispensable. The situation has now been complicated by a fire which gutted the original part of the building, and its future remains unclear. This northern part of the site shares the derelict appearance of the southern one, with both Paragon buildings now entirely boarded up. The state of the Old Manor site is close to being a disgrace to the city, particularly given how long it has now endured, and a speedy resolution for the whole area is urgently needed.
Conservation area appraisals Salisbury District Council has a statutory obligation to carry out appraisals of all its 70 conservation areas, resulting in documents which will set out the particular characteristics and merits of each of them, and provide a framework for new development which will meet the required criterion of 'preserving or enhancing' their character. While this process has been underway for some time for a dozen or so of the village conservation areas, the scale of the Salisbury one had discouraged a start on its appraisal, until the Council's vision project made the need for it difficult to ignore. The consultants carrying out the initial village appraisals (subsequent ones are in the hands of the Council's own conservation officers) are now working on one for the Salisbury conservation area, which has already been seen in draft form. The final version is likely to be a document of some interest, but it is as yet unclear how useful it will prove to be as a tool for influencing development within the city. Recent contentious proposals, not currently being pursued, proposed building on an undeveloped site in St Ann Street, generally accepted as the finest street in the city. It seemed unlikely that the fairly brief reference to the area in the draft conservation area appraisal would be able to contribute much to a debate in which some very strong opinions were raised, though in other less contentious cases the document, once completed, may come into its own.
Meanwhile four village conservation area appraisals, those for Dinton, Hindon, Amesbury and Steeple Langford, have already been through a consultation process and are now formally adopted, and will be referred to when relevant planning proposals come up. Five further appraisals, covering Tisbury, Downton, Durrington, Wylye and Broad Chalke, are going through consultation, and eventually, unitary reorganisation permitting, all 70 conservation areas should be backed up by appraisal documents. Whenever it has the necessary local knowledge, the Society will seek to comment on them as they evolve.
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