Contents

Gunwharf
Millennium Exhibition
St James Hospital Grounds
Incinerator
Connaught Drill Hall
Broad Street
ASDA/Walmart
City Plan
Design Awards
School Buildings
Campaign for the Arts in Portsmouth
Thanks

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Gunwharf

As you all know Gunwharf is now open to the public, though more shops and the cinema are yet to open. Though still on our agenda, it has not been an over-riding pre-occupation, since most of it was already settled. The general reaction has been favourable; people think it compares well with Southampton's enormous West Quay. We still think we were right in some of our criticisms: while we like the tall mall and the marvellous new view out of the harbour entrance, the design is disappointing, especially along the waterfront with its coarsely detailed canopy.

We also pressed for some living accommodation mixed in with and above the shops. This would not only have given a mixed development, a current 'flavour of the month' in the new City Plan, it would also have added interest to the dull roofline and provided residents with marvellous views and the opportunity of roof gardens visible from passing ships. The City Planning Officer agreed with us; but apparently it was the financiers who vetoed it. Whatever the government may recommend, the big providers of funds apparently don't like putting their money into mixed developments.

We were sad to see the archaeological remains buried out of site for ever, and we still regret that such a small number of old buildings have survived. Among them the Vernon Building (Customs House) stands out splendidly awaiting its opening as a Gale's pub; while the Vulcan Building, the Grand Storehouse of 1814, is being magnificently restored by Berkeleys at great expense. At the moment they plan, unfortunately, to use it as offices. We still believe that it should be a public amenity for what is a new quarter of the city. We have tried hard to find a more suitable new use for it. The very fine internal spaces would be marvellous for a museum or art gallery.

We took up the suggestion of Michael Underwood, the architect in charge of the restoration , who had said "Why not a Tate of the South?" by writing to Sir Nicholas Serota after his Dimbleby lecture, when he had said that there was a shortage of venues for the display of modern art outside London. He replied in friendly fashion, but his directors had decided that there were to be no more Tates in the near future.

We also arranged for Lord Palumbo, Chancellor of the University and a property developer, Professor Michael Ellison, former president of the Landscape Institute, and Sir Colin Stansfield Smith, former County Architect and Professor of Design in the University, to be shown over the building in the hope that they would come up with ideas. As I say we have our criticisms; but with that marvellous site how it can fail to be a great attraction?.

We can only hope that it does not steal too much trade from Southsea and the City Centre. How viable another huge shopping scheme on the site of the Tricorn will be is another concern. According to the City Planning officer, dualling Hope Street will put paid to Pitt Street Gymnasium. The DCMS have still not answered our repeated request to list it, and the Hampshire Buildings Preservation Trust have not agreed to support a feasibility study to breach the dockyard wall instead.

The Millennium tower controversy has continued throughout the year. We had remained, forlornly, an objector to the Transport & Works Act application, necessary to authorise any building in the harbour. After a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing permission was granted in February. So there are apparently no legal or administrative obstacles. What clearly is still holding up progress are the doubts about the commercial viability. Can it ever really be made to pay?

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Millennium Exhibition

For some members the main activity of the first part of the year was the preparation of our major photographic exhibition Portsmouth 1945-2000 , for which we obtained a Millennium grant of £4,500. We spent slightly more than this, making up the deficit from the Society's funds. The exhibition was created by a small dedicated group of members and others including the photographer Garrick Palmer, the designer John Phillipson, and Bill Hutchin and Colin Denahy of the University's Department of the Arts and Media who devised the soundtrack.

The exhibition was first shown in St Agatha's Church, then later in the Mountbatten Gallery and again in a slightly curtailed form in the library of Portsmouth College. We are reluctant to see the product of so much hard work just disappear. We have hopes of getting the material published as a book. Bruce Oliver has been active in trying to interest publishers in this idea. He has found several who are very enthusiastic: it is a marvellous record; there's a huge demand for this sort of thing; the quality is very high. But so far none of them is prepared to put his money where his mouth is.; but Bruce is persisting.

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St James Hospital Grounds

In the last few days we have learned of our victory - at least victory in the first stage - of our campaign to save some of the grounds of St James Hospital from being built over. After a lot of preparatory work by Dr Caroline Scott who chaired a specially set up Trust and her associates and with, the full support of the Society, an application to have part of the grounds registered as a village green was put in to the City Council, who are the registration authority under the Common Land Registration Act of 1965. This was examined in a public inquiry in February.

We were very fortunate to be represented at the inquiry by John Saulet, a local solicitor very experienced in public inquiries, who gave his services free. We are very grateful to him. The objector to our application, the Secretary of State for Health as owner of the land, was represented by a barrister, Mr J. Hobson QC; who suffered from the disadvantage of not being a local man and not knowing the ground well. John Saulet was more than a match for him.

The inspector has ruled in our favour for the larger and most important part of the application site, the area known in the inquiry as the football field, enclosed by fine trees on the right of the main drive. As far as we know this is a first - the first application ever made to register a part of a hospitaI grounds as a village green - certainly the first successful application.

A specially convened sub committee of the City Council decided unanimously to accept the report and to register the land as a village green. It seems likely in view of the great value of the site as building land that there will be an appeal by way of judicial review. That may be an expensive matter for us - or it may not. If it is, then as this will be very much a test case, we shall hope for support from county and national organisations.

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Incinerator

We are still waiting for the result of another public inquiry which took place over more than four weeks in September and October 2000 into the proposal for an incinerator in Quatremaine Road. For the purpose of the inquiry we merged our case with a number of other objectors under the leadership of Michael Burgess who had been chairman of the Anchorage Park Neighbourhood Forum. As part of this Roger James gave evidence on behalf of the Society.. It is a test case, and as with the St James case, it will influence decisions pending all over the country.

Part of our case was that under arrangements made by Hampshire County Council before Portsmouth became its own waste disposal authority the capacity of the Paulsgrove tip and the Quartremaine Road recycling centre were largely taken up with waste from county areas outside Portsmouth. Without this obligation and with a much more intensive effort at recycling, Portsmouth could comfortably cope with its own waste for at least the next twenty years without any incineration.

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Connaught Drill Hall

A current concern is with the Connaught Drill Hall, the prominent and imposing castellated building in the city centre marking the southern face of the shopping area. The building belongs, not to the MOD, but to a trust. It has been largely empty since the Territorial Army left two years ago.. Its only use has been as an overflow sorting centre for the Post Office at Christmas. I reported last year that the Trust had informed us that they had made no decision as to whether to sell it or find another use for it under their control.

Then out of the blue early this year came a planning application by a private company to demolish it and replace it with two tower blocks of 11 and 14 storeys to house cluster flats of student study-bedrooms, more than 600 in all. The agents for the Trust say that all last year they were trying to find a buyer for the intact building without success.

The University's plans are to concentrate as far as possible in the centre of the city and to be able to house in their own hostels all first year students. If the Connaught goes ahead they will, with the aid of the tower block now going up on the Jimmyz site in Winston Churchill Avenue and the conversion of Chaucer House in the city centre be well on the way to their aim.

This aim, though not necessarily this particular application, is approved of by the Planning Department because it should free up a considerable number of family houses at present occupied by students. We have objected to the application and have applied to the DCMS to have the building listed. Meanwhile we look for new uses.

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Broad Street

There are three sites in Broad Street, Old Portsmouth, which have concerned us greatly during the past year. One is Lucas's sailmakers building on the east side. They have now moved out and sold the site. The planning Application for housing on the site was approved in outline by the Development Control Committee but rejected in detail. It was too much like Spice Quay, the adjoining residential block. The planners and English Heritage wanted something modern. The developers contacted Deane Clark for advice; he put them in touch with a firm of London architects, Panter Hudspith, where his son works.

Simon Hudspith asked us to arrange a small meeting of locals and Society members to look at his preliminary design. He showed a model of his scheme to a meeting in Roger James's house, overlooking the site across the Camber, consisting of one of the ward councillors, the chairman of the Spice Island Association, the chairman of the Old Portsmouth Neighbourhood Forum. We made suggestions for minor modification of the design which he will now put forward for planning permission.

The second site is immediately north of Lucas's - the City of Portsmouth Preserved Transport Depot of old buses and a tram run by a trust of volunteers. They were under pressure from the city's property department to move out so that the site could be sold for further housing. The museum, for that is what it is, is open on alternate Sundays for people to look at the buses and have rides in them. It is a very popular venue, attracting the many people who come to Broad Street and the Camber just for the pleasure of wandering around., looking at the boats and admiring the view.

The Museum causes no nuisance to residents and is ideally placed there. Recently the matter came before the Resources Management Committee of the Council. The councillors were unanimous that the museum should stay where it is and sent the officers off to work out the details - terms of lease etc.

The third and biggest site has been the source of most aggravation. It is the whole of the right hand side of Broad Street from the far end at the Point back to the car park and café. The first design, for housing but with a restaurant facing out over the harbour at the far end, was rejected by the planners.

The next design was in a pastiche Victorian style with two blocks back to back, one facing the street and one the outer Camber enclosing a courtyard with car access to garages. This was objected to English Heritage as well as ourselves; and now we are awaiting the production of a conservation area appraisal for the whole area., followed by an architectural competition for what is a very prominent and historic site We have gone on record as being against pastiche for this site and in favour of truly modern design.

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ASDA/Walmart

The planning application for ASDA, supported now by their new owners Walmart, was a matter on which we tried to take a strong line. The new building they applied for was to extend further to the west than the existing Bridge Centre building, pushing the car park also further to the west, thus causing re-alignment to the west of Holbrook Road; and this in turn meant the obliteration of the valuable strip of public open space between Holbrook Road and the houses of Bridgeside Close.

In our stand on this case we followed the advice of our committee member Charles Burns who has a particular expertise in the economics of the retail industry. Charles pointed out that ASDA could get all the extra retail area they required (and which their application would give them) without going outside the existing site simply by inserting a mezzanine floor, as in fact Charles had ascertained Walmart were doing in their newer stores in the USA. They could also get all the extra car parking they need again by going up to two or three storeys.

We maintained that the planners should enforce this and not yield to the pressure to expand all on ground level. The Portsmouth Environmental Forum completely agreed with us and said so. The planners and the ward councillors who regarded the scheme as the saviour of Fratton Road as a shopping area were terrified that a tough attitude would frighten them off and they would go elsewhere. Charles assured us from his reading of what was going on in the USA that. Walmart's attitude was typically one of threat and bluff. Unfortunately it worked for Portsmouth councillors. As well as the obvious reasons for not wanting the store to spill over across Holbrook road, we thought there was a principle of scale involved.

Low level sprawl should not be allowed in central areas where a city rather than a suburban scale should be enforced.. We used as examples how in earlier years planners had behaved in regard to Waitrose in Southsea and Tesco in the city centre. What would those areas be like now if those stores had been allowed to spread their shops, storerooms and car parks all at ground level?

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City Plan

We have not yet completed our study of the new City Plan; but we shall by the end of the month submit detailed comments. We are doubtful about the wisdom of compiling the Plan in this novel way - largely by electoral wards. It seems to come to grief especially in St Thomas where Somers Town, Southsea shopping centre and Old Portsmouth are regarded as one area with statistics such as population density, number of houses in private ownership, etc., averaged over such very disparate neighbourhoods.

Charles Dickens is another example of the same thing - Portsea being lumped together with the central shopping area. Similarly Pauslgrove contains Port Solent as well as the large residential area.

We don't want our comments to be just a list of objections. There is much that we approve of in it. Here I shall mention some things we are unhappy about. In our response to the earlier consultation as to what the Plan should contain a year ago we asked for more attention to Sustainability and Local Agenda 21. Also we asked for extra railway stations and Paulsgrove and Farlington are to be earmarked in the Plan.

In the earlier consultation we pointed our the desirability of a permeable city for pedestrians and pointed to the many barriers there are, especially in the south of the city, dividing Southsea from the city centre, Portsea from the Dockyard, the city from Gunwharf, the university area of Portsea from the city centre.

We would like to see breaches in all these barriers and the total removal of what we call the 'toblerone' barrier in Winston Churchill Avenue. A breach in the Dockyard wall near Bonfire Corner could bring the fine houses of the Dockyard into the city.

We had also asked that the Plan should make provision as far as possible to avert conflicts between one department of the council and another so that they did not act against each other. The planners routinely consult the City Engineer; but they do not for example consult the Arts Office about public art and the architects or any others on matters of aesthetics.

There is an current example of what I mean. A site in Exmouth Road which could provide at least some car parking, even if only for staff, for the Kings Theatre is likely to be approved for housing in an area which already has if anything too much housing. We do want to single out for approval the plans for the Johnson & Johnson roundabout, converting it to traffic lights - a case of planners daring to tread on the City Engineer's territory!

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Design Awards

We decided not to carry out our usual annual design award competition this year, partly because of the rather thin entry with no obviously outstanding winners; but mainly because of the pre-occupation of several of our key members with the exhibition. We do intend to judge your entries this year. Please let us have some.

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School Buildings

We lament the loss of Cottage Grove School, one of the two first Board School built in Hampshire under the 1870 Elementary Education Act, which is now being demolished.

However there is good news of New Road School, the other one of the two, where work on the conversion of the front part to houses by Mick Morris is now likely to go ahead after a change of owner. One unfortunate result of the admirably thorough public consultation in Portsea is the application to demolish the old 1880s Board School, Kent Street School, which if shorn of its many recent more accretions would be seen as a fine example of late Victorian architecture.

We understand that residents were equally divided on this particular part of the plan and so we are opposing the demolition and applying for the building to be listed. If government targets for sustainability mean anything, throwing away such a substantial building would be a real waste. We think the building could easily be reused.

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Campaign for the Arts in Portsmouth

Many Portsmouth people have been very concerned at the very large proposed cuts in the arts, leisure and sports funding - to the extent of the closure of Cumberland House Museum and the refusal of the county's offer to sell the Kings Theatre for £1. In November we formed a pressure group, now called the Campaign for the Arts in Portsmouth. We are hoping to persuade the Chamber of Commerce and Southern Arts (or their successors) to help fund an independent review of art activity - as in Bristol.

At the Council's tax-fixing meeting in February the cuts were partially reinstated; but much more remains to be done to improve the public realm - not least in raising the quality of public art and improvement in the standard of design approved by councillors and officers at the Development and Control Committee. King Charles's statue in the Square Tower is tarnished, schools such as Priory have to fight to get essential maintenance done and Eastney pumping station is in a deplorable state.

We are delighted by the new millennium promenade as its links along the harbourside are opened. Our underlying justification has always been to campaign for a raising of civic pride. We need to see more of it manifest.

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Thanks

As usual I have to thank the executive committee for their very hard work and marvellous support, and particularly John Holland, editor of the newsletter and keeper of our new web site. We hope soon to welcome back Betty Owen after her hip operation. Over the years she has consistently gone every week or so to the planning department to look at the applications and advise us on them. I only hope that it wasn't that that wore out her hip! And of course I thank you the members for keeping us going. I hope you think we have been worth it!

Celia Clark, April 2001