Jonathan Morrison
Griff Rhys Jones: ‘It’s depressing Keir Starmer is so ill-informed about heritage’
The comedian on what the government has got wrong about building, why he’s campaigning to save Liverpool Street station — and building a bat hotel
‘I’d like to take Angela Rayner by the hand and walk her through King’s Cross,” Griff Rhys Jones says. He has just returned from filming in America’s Bible belt for a new TV series, Griff’s Southern Charm, and for a moment it seems the comedian, campaigner and all-round national treasure — he wears many hard hats these days — might be struggling with the effects of jet lag when opining on Britain’s new deputy prime minister. But no.
“Originally King’s Cross was going to be utterly razed to the ground, but it’s full of fantastic listed buildings and they were able to bring in urban planners [the architects Allies and Morrison] who brought a new vision, retaining the old buildings and allowing new buildings to be integrated with them. I remember going there and thinking: it’s like a whole new quarter in London. It’s a success, with hotels and shops and business and growth. And it was done all within the context of preserving the heritage. It shows it can be done.”
As anyone who watched Rhys Jones’s Restoration series will know (it ran for nearly six years between 2003 and 2009 and saved the Hackney Empire) heritage is something that the 71-year-old is passionate about. He believes we all should be, but not for the usual reasons: nostalgia, narrow-mindedness, neophobia. In fact, it’s really the future he’s worried about: how we make our cities better places to live and work in, even how we welcome outsiders. He has a plea to issue and something of a manifesto.
“New is not necessarily bad, but old is not bad either,” he says. “When they say that people arriving from abroad need a nice modern gateway to London, I don’t think that’s true. I think people coming in from Stansted on that misnomer, the Stansted Express, Italians in particular, would much, much rather walk into a beautiful Victorian station than a modern Swiss station or a refurbished concourse.”
The station that Rhys Jones is talking about is, of course, Liverpool Street, on top of which Network Rail is attempting to build offices. The first cloth-eared proposal, by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, which tried to plonk a giant white tower above the roof, was recently seen off by a miscellany of heritage groups led by the Victorian Society, which Rhys Jones has been president of since 2017. Network Rail has come back with a second proposal, this time by a firm called Acme, which is arguably as bad. Is he confident of defeating it too?
“Yes. But it’ll take patience. Look, you go on TripAdvisor and the one thing everyone says about Liverpool Street is that the disabled lift is broken. Yet Network Rail say they’ve got to destroy the concourse to make it accessible — why not just fix the lift? The argument they’ve given is BS.
“Network Rail have been ordered to make more money out of their property by the Department for Transport, but they’re just going after the low-hanging fruit. Because obviously if they build offices in Bishopsgate, they’ll be able to make more money. So the second proposal has come back from Acme, with these washed-out watercolour artist’s impressions where the office blocks are almost the same colour as the sky. Any inquiry should go: ‘We cannot accept this as evidence.’”
It’s clear he’s steadying himself for a long battle, but there is a model. The town of Hadley, in Shropshire, pulled off an unlikely victory against Tesco. “They wanted to take the allotments to build a vast Tesco. And Tesco came in with their plans and they managed to get them rejected. So Tesco moved the car park six inches to the west and came back. And this went on and on and on. But they won. They just had patience.” The supermarket was, in effect, banished to the bypass.
Marks & Spencer’s flagship store on Oxford Street (REX FEATURES)
But the omens are less favourable than they were. Back to Rayner. The first big decision by the new government, at least in terms of heritage, was to give Marks & Spencer permission to demolish its flagship Oxford Street store, rather than refurbish it. Michael Gove, the former communities secretary, had blocked the proposal to replace Orchard House, an art deco building, with a modern block, but Rayner has now overturned this, infuriating environmentalists as much as anyone after it emerged that the scheme would release 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
“Recycling good historic buildings should be at the heart of policy,” Rhys Jones says. “You get the sense that Keir Starmer and Rayner have this idea that they need to outlaw nimbyism. It’s actually because of a lot of nimbyism that London is such a successful place. All those plans to demolish Fitzrovia in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for six-lane highways were defeated because lots of lawyers lived there — now it’s very desirable.” In fact, Rhys Jones and his wife, Jo, mostly divide their time between a house in Fitzrovia and one in Suffolk. “But it happened to poor Glasgow, because a lot of lawyers don’t live in Glasgow.”
If he could sit down with Starmer and Rayner, what would he tell them?
“I travel all across Britain and I’d like to say: you need to be aware that conservation is commercially very valuable. It gives an area its character, it creates places where people want to live and work.
“It’s not just about preserving an old building, it’s a record. A record of the continuity of this town that we live in, and a reminder that we are only looking after it for a bit. I always say that conservation is about the future, certainly not about the past. When people come to this town in 50 years’ time, are they going to curse us for wrecking stuff? The really distressing thing is to see the town centres that were swept away in the name of progress. And we can never get them back.
“It’s not about saying ‘no more expansion’, it’s just about recognising heritage is part of the equation. There’s this idea that if you remove restrictions, hey, you’ll finally get growth — I don’t think that will happen. Starmer and Rayner need to listen to more people; it’s depressing they’re so ill-informed.”
Ironically, although Rhys Jones has been called a nimby, in reality he is anything but. He has put his money where his mouth is by redeveloping multiple buildings himself, including a farm in Wales, the house in Suffolk and several properties in London, including an old factory that he turned into flats. It’s something he learnt from his father. “All my life I’ve really invested every single penny that I have into restoring property,” he says. “And it is restoring. I haven’t taken any greenfield sites and built anything, so I’m wholly committed to the idea of recycling. I think even the most unpromising space can be recycled.
“But I’m totally open to the idea that we need to build new houses and I’ve never stood in the way of that. When people come to me and say, in various places near Ipswich, ‘They’re taking the areas around us and they’re going to be building a lot more houses,’ I’ve always had to say, ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m rather in favour of them building more houses and you’re unfortunately living in an area which is being designated for that purpose.’ But there are lots of disused offices that could be turned into homes too. So it’s complicated.”
As, of course, are the planning rules he’s become so intimately acquainted with. He gives an example close to home: repurposing a barn at the Trehilyn Estate in Pembrokeshire, Wales, with his architect son (his daughter runs a jewellery business) involved building a bat hotel.
“They said a building we were developing had bats and it needed a survey. So you have to wait for a year while the survey goes through. Even though the bats were fine before the humans arrived. But OK. Then they said you have to build a bat hotel. So we built a bat hotel. Made of stone. With an entrance just for bats. And then we moved on.
“And there was another building that I finally decided we needed to redo because it’s made of breeze block. They said, ‘You’ll have to have another bat survey.’ What? We’ve built the bat hotel … But we had to do it. So I understand that planning could be simplified, but at the same time it protects the green belt, the national parks, stops people building on floodplains and the like.
“It is a complex tapestry which deals with a lot of issues; you can’t cut it like a Gordian knot. Somehow we’ve got away from the idea that urban planning can be good: it just needs to be more thoughtful.”
Surprisingly, Rhys Jones remains a pragmatist when it comes to the seemingly eternal fight between profit and preservation, but he is ever ready to issue a call to arms. “Look, the point is that we can’t just let developers have it all their own way. The success of Britain is dependent on working on what is good, not working on what’s just new … It’s down to all of us to preserve our heritage.”
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