Easter Adjournment

Matt Rodda Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. May I start by commending the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for her work in championing the rights of people who face persecution—both Christians and others around the world—and by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), who is campaigning on a number of important fronts? Not only do I wholeheartedly support that, but many of my own residents face the same enormous difficulties with the high cost of housing in London and the south-east, and people face enormous overcrowding in Reading town centre.

I want to take this opportunity to champion a very important local campaign in Reading and Berkshire. I have been pursuing this for some time and have had enormous support from the right hon. Member for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma), Reading Borough Council and many local groups in our community. It is the campaign to save Reading gaol and to turn the famous Victorian gaol into an arts and heritage hub, so that we may celebrate the heritage of Oscar Wilde and the other important national and local heritage that is part of the gaol and the surrounding site, for the good of the community, to celebrate diversity and to support the LGBT community and the arts across Berkshire and the wider UK.

I want to update the House briefly on where I am with the campaign, but also to point out some of its important features and urge the Government to support the local bid for an arts-based solution for the building—it is currently mothballed—rather than the commercial redevelopment favoured by the Ministry of Justice, which would like the Victorian building to be turned into a hotel or possibly into luxury flats. As anybody who has been through our area recently will have seen if they travelled on the train, or as colleagues from Wales who travel on the motorway may have seen, Berkshire is dominated by a large amount of urban development. Many flats are being built, but we do not have a major hub for our wonderful arts community to perform in and put on stage productions. We have some centres, but they are dispersed around the town and the area. Similarly sized cities and towns in the south-east of England, such as Brighton, Oxford and Southampton, have large arts organisations based in purpose-built theatres, and much bigger centres than the ones we have in Reading, although we are the second largest urban area in the south-east of England after the Greater Brighton area.

I turn to the history of this important site. Reading gaol was the county jail for Berkshire. It was built on the site of Reading abbey, a major medieval building that was one of the largest abbeys in England in medieval times. It was founded by King Henry I and was a centre of pilgrimage throughout the middle ages. Indeed, Henry I is believed to be buried there. Rather like Leicester, Worcester and a number of other medieval towns and cities—I am sure this applies to Scotland and Wales too—we have a monarch buried in our town centre.

The gaol was designed by the architect who designed Pentonville and St Pancras station. It is a masterpiece of Victorian gothic architecture. Anyone who walks past it or goes in will see scenes that remind them of “Porridge”, if, like me, they are a fan of it—younger Members may have dabbled in UK Gold and seen it fleetingly. Reading gaol has all the echoes of a Victorian building; people can walk through it and feel that presence. It is rather grim in some ways, but it is historic and very important.

The gaol was opened briefly in 2014, and was used for art installations. An amazing arts organisation called Artangel used each individual cell to house installation art. It also put on performances in the prison chapel, and it had a number of other activities. It was incredibly powerful. I walked along one of the metal landings, which are reminiscent of “Porridge”, behind a very famous BBC arts presenter—I will not name him—and it was quite wonderful to hear what he said. As I said, we suffer from a lack of institutions to support our amazing local art scheme. He was on his phone to his friends back in London, and he said something along the lines of, “I’m in Reading, in the gaol, and it’s actually really rather interesting.”

Like many towns and cities around the country, we suffer from a lack of support from the national arts establishment. It would be wonderful to see that sort of provision permanently in our town. It could be a venue for local young people, community groups and charities. We have had a lot of interest from the local LGBT community, which wants to use part of the building as a hub for its activities, and other historical and community groups would like to take part in the same way.

The tragedy is that although Reading Borough Council has put in a bid for the wonderful building—we have also had an offer of help from Banksy, who put a mural on the wall of the gaol about 18 months ago, to enormous excitement, and there is the possibility of other support from philanthropists—unfortunately we do not have the go-ahead from the MOJ to start negotiating. It is instead working with a preferred bidder, which is sadly a commercial developer. The site has had a history of somewhat disappointing commercial bids constructed around the idea of gutting the old building or changing it dramatically, so we would sadly lose the history.

At the moment, people can walk into Oscar Wilde’s cell and spend a moment there thinking about how he was treated, and about his amazing writing and his ability to turn what happened to him into incredibly powerful prose and poetry. If the gaol were changed dramatically, we would sadly lose that. That would be an utter tragedy not only for Reading but for people from across the world, who visit his house in Dublin and the cemetery in which he is buried in Paris. Sadly, a great piece of artistic heritage would be lost, and that would be a shame. It would be deeply disappointing for us and the country as a whole. I urge the MOJ to have another look and to reconsider how it manages procurement.

We have had a number of meetings, most recently towards the end of last week when the deputy leader of Reading Borough Council talked to the MOJ about this important issue, but it is still refusing to budge. We would like the MOJ to think about it deeply. We understand that under the Government procurement rules, a Department has to receive best value for selling off buildings and land. However, is it not possible to think about the wider context? We are not expecting any special favours; the MOJ just needs to look at it in the round and to see the possibility for this amazing building. We are hopeful that we will be able to offer a suitable sum to pay for the level of capital receipt needed for the site.

I urge the MOJ to think again and to work with Reading Borough Council, me, the right hon. Member for Reading West, and local arts and community groups to redevelop this wonderful site. The MOJ has spent a long time thinking about it, and the building was mothballed back in 2013, so in many ways it is high time for another look—indeed, it is somewhat overdue. In a meeting with the MOJ, the right hon. Member for Reading West made the point that if we consider the upkeep of the gaol during that time, a lot of money has sadly been lost to the public purse, because of how the MOJ mothballed it and has not been willing to engage in a more thoughtful discussion about its reuse.

As I am sure the Minister is only too aware, it is also Government policy to reuse historical buildings, and in a creative way. Other Departments, such as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, are fully behind such an approach to heritage buildings, so I hope that, given the wider thrust of Government policy, it will be more than possible for the MOJ to look at this and to reconsider how the project is being discussed.

I will briefly mention one or two other community issues; they are also on heritage, given that I already spoke about social work in our community in the previous debate. I want to point out the potential as community buildings of some other, currently derelict sites in the Reading area, Cemetery Arch in particular. It is an amazing early Victorian building in the eastern part of our town that has the scope to be redeveloped and turned into something for the whole community. Proposals are being looked at the moment, and I thank residents and others who completed my survey.

We also have the exciting opportunity of the former BBC listening post. The hon. Member for Congleton might well be familiar with its work, because she is so abreast of foreign policy. Caversham Park was the site of BBC Monitoring. News of many recent historical events that happened in remote parts of the world was first broken from there, including—I know she is interested in Iranian society and history—the Islamic revolution in 1979. The very first reports of it were translated by Persian-speaking staff at the BBC.

The Caversham Park site has been empty for some time. Similar to the gaol, there is enormous potential for it to be redeveloped. Thankfully, there is a very sympathetic developer, Beechcroft Developments, which wants to use the old building as a piece of sheltered accommodation, together with flats for people who can look after themselves and are somewhat older. I support its efforts and those of Reading council to preserve the building, reuse it and turn it into something useful, with community access to the amazing parkland near the site.

My final local example on a similar theme is in Woodley, the other town in my constituency. Woodley was famous as the airfield where Douglas Bader was injured before world war two. It also featured in the war as an important site for manufacturing aircraft and for training of personnel. There is some scope for reusing some of the airfield buildings on the site and I thank the local volunteers taking part in that project.

I have talked a lot about local history in our area. To sum up, I point out the importance of community. I have been talking about one aspect of that. We are all are discussing different aspects of our local communities and the importance of them in our lives and our work. I thank you, Mr Vickers, for the opportunity to speak today. I could talk about many other things in my community, but I am sure other Members would prefer that I did not. This has been a wonderful opportunity to talk about one aspect of life in Reading and Woodley, and I thank others for their contributions, which have been many and varied. I look forward to enjoying a happy Easter, and I wish a very happy Easter to all Members present.