10/04/2006

Period homes for everyone!

Libby Purves, The Times

Shock horror - Venice is restoring old buildings for the low-paid to live in. It should happen here.

NEVER MIND Silvio and Romano: here is something else interesting from Italy. Like other recent Italian stories it has links to the judgment of our own politicians; it is, however, prettier than the Mills-Jowell affair . It is a house in Venice - 792 Calle delle Beccarie to be precise, though its friends call it the San Giobbe House. They will be shown round it at an architectural book presentation in May.

The San Giobbe house is a leap of faith, and an example to the weary Western world. It is one of those anonymous vernacular buildings, 18th-century on a 16th-century base, that make the city such a treat to wander or glide around: a jewel box of water-dappled plaster. The city's slow decay and - crucially - its gradual depopulation by working Venetians left the house sad, dilapidated, used miserably by squatters. This made it ideal for a bold social and architectural experiment.

The Venice in Peril Fund, more usually associated with saving monuments and co-ordinating research on the tidal barrage, decided to urge a new treatment. It paid for detailed plans and scholarship concerning every historic feature of the building, and persuaded the municipality into a beautiful and practical restoration that turns the house into four flats. These - wait for it - will not be sold to tourists but offered to Venetian families on the waiting list for social housing. The ground-floor flat has been created and made flood-proof for a disabled user.

Despite the economically humble nature of its tenants, the house has been restored far better than most. Original terrazzo floors remain, and instead of using rigid concrete the team used flexible lime mortar to let the building breathe. The paint is traditionally gentle, window and door frames original; lime plaster has been used appropriately and a new system washed the corrosive salts from the old brickwork rather than replacing it with hideous mass-produced industrial bricks. The aim was to demonstrate that sensitive restoration can be done at a low cost; but the extra and glorious twist is that this was done not for rich dilettantes or romantic foreign tourists, but for ordinary working Venetians. The municipality, encouraged and helped by Venice in Peril, has taken a step towards not only the physical, but also the human, regeneration of the city.

Zip northward now, to the "Tardis Terraces" in Preston and Manchester Moss Side, where instead of taking the John Prescott dream to heart and knocking down traditional terraced houses wholesale, a company called Adactus used innovative and clever design to improve the insides of houses usually dismissed as poky and unsuitable for modern life. It used loft conversions, double-height living spaces and modern facilities; it plans to knock some twos and threes together into larger family homes. Each house converted costs less than demolition and building afresh. The smaller ones will sell cheaply or be available for "shared ownership". Thus with modern amenities, ordinary working families can live in something which is part of the national heritage and identity. Which is appropriate, because they too are part of that identity.
 
It seems a far cry from the devoted architectural historians of San Giobbe to the groovy Tardis Terraces of Preston, but the two should take heart from one another. Time cannot stand still, not anywhere, yet much of a nation's history and personality lies in its humbler buildings. It is unwise to trash things wholesale (unless, like Kim Il Sung of North Korea or Ceausescu of Romania, you actively want to destroy national character for murky political reasons).
 
Britain's stock of vernacular buildings from before the first war is still under threat: both from bad conversions and from demolition by impatient and uncreative councils that would rather commission dreary Lego blocks and name them after local bigwigs. Important industrial buildings, lovable pubs or redundant churches often get saved for re-use, but the harmony between Victorian terraces and such buildings is important too. No point saving the church and the pub if they stand in a futurist wilderness.
 
Yet John Prescott's Pathfinder programmes, with more than £1 billion of government funding, is panting to demolish perfectly viable houses. One group of academics claims that 400,000 Victorian houses are at risk; we know that 10,000 are going. The Treasury continues to make Britain uglier (and fill the landfill sites with rubble) by stubbornly charging VAT on house refurbishment while giving new-build a zero VAT rating: yet some new-build will last barely 20 years. Lord Rogers of Riverside's architecture and urbanism panel criticised much recent "regeneration" as both clumsy and wasteful. We all know towns and cities where developments 15 years old look grimy and sad; and from train windows we have all seen brick streets which at first glance are graceful, but which as you get closer show boarded windows awaiting the bulldozer.
 
It is strange that this should be, in a country so culturally nostalgic. But as usual there is a weaselly class issue here: only those who can pay for grace may have it. The poor must be grateful for gimcrack blandness. The upper-middles fight like tigers to inhabit bits of history; they rescue fireplaces, cherish beams and outbid one another for navvies' cottages with endearing brickwork. From Spitalfields to Suffolk, from croft to crescent, estate agents ratchet up the price when they spot a bread-oven alcove or a leaded light.
 
Why not put the same respect into social housing, like the San Giobbe team? Of course some buildings wear out, and of course we need some new; but we are turning parts of Britain into a dreary Ceausescu wilderness of blockhouse architecture, wilfully cut off from history. Why not slant VAT in favour of frugal re-use?
 
Why not have public housing we can all be fond of? No point muttering "What have they done to deserve it?": even the most extreme middle-class self-interest should remind us that we all have to look at the outsides. And some publicly owned exteriors, frankly, are enough to make you slit your throat.