Architecture and the Built Environment

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, we are all very much in debt to Sir Terry, but we are also in debt to the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for drawing this important report to our attention and securing this all too brief debate.

When I wake up in the morning at home in Lincoln, I look to the front, to one of the most glorious buildings in Europe. But if I go to the top bedroom and look down the hill, I see some of the worst excrescences of the 1960s and 1970s. Round the Brayford Pool, where the university has developed wonderfully, some of the buildings are, frankly, deeply disappointing. They are on the site of wonderful Victorian warehouses that would have made the most marvellous student accommodation.

I will talk very briefly about the heritage aspect of this important report. I remember over 40 years ago when I first became involved in the heritage movement those marvellous words of Sir John Betjeman, who galvanised people:

“Goodbye to old Bath! We who loved you are sorry.

They’re carting you off by developer’s lorry”.

Of course, it was his stinging verse that helped to reverse that trend. We need to be conscious of the enormous value of our historic built environment. We do not want a repetition of the tearing down of the terraces of Liverpool, the rape of Worcester and Gloucester and the despoliation of the lower town in Lincoln 40 or 50 years ago.

What I hope we can take from this report, among other things, is the message that it is often still better to adopt and adapt than to tear down. There is a great deal to be said for trying to get life back into our cities. Where there is life, there is less crime. So much could be done to adapt and build over the shop, as it were. So much could be done to bring well designed new buildings side by side with adapted older buildings to give pulsating life to our towns and cities.

It is to this that Sir Terry’s report points us. He has sections on the economic benefit of heritage. He has sections on the importance of our historic built environment. If in the few minutes that each of us has at our disposal tonight we could help to underline some of the messages of this seminal report, the noble Baroness will indeed have performed a signal service.