Happy birthday, SAVE! The charity that’s helped save some of the UK’s biggest landmarks turns 50

Tate Modern, Battersea Power Station, Wentworth Woodhouse: just some of the buildings we might have lost without SAVE Britain’s Heritage

Monday 23rd June, 2025

SAVE Britain’s Heritage, the charity that has spearheaded some of the UK’s most effective heritage campaigns and had a hand in saving some of our biggest landmarks, turns 50 this week.

Tate Modern, Battersea Power Station, South Yorkshire’s stately Wentworth Woodhouse, Salt’s Mill in Saltaire – all still standing thanks to the intervention of SAVE, along with countless other buildings across the UK, big and small.

SAVE has been at the forefront of the movement to rescue – and crucially reuse – historic buildings for half a century.

We want to use our 50th birthday as an opportunity to equip a new generation to care for the buildings they love. We’re staging a programme of national events, culminating in November with a lecture hosted by the V&A. We’ve made a film about our work and launched our Act Now! Tool Kit, a practical guide to empower local campaigners. We also have a new website and a new look – a strong platform from which to fight the next 50 years of campaigns. This week we’ll unveil 50 new additions to our Buildings at Risk register. A few free tickets are still available for Wednesday's launch. And keep an eye on our social media channels @savetoreuse for some great stories.

Henrietta Billings, director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, said: “In this our anniversary year, we are launching a renewed drive to grow SAVE as a popular, campaigning movement. This campaign will reinforce and enhance our leading voice in the protection and transformation of old buildings.

“The challenges we face are daunting yet exciting, especially where we are successful in mobilising the wider public to support and engage in our movement. Together we can ensure the restoration, revitalisation and reuse of thousands of remarkable buildings that will become beacons of social and economic prosperity and environmental sustainability, for the benefit of people, places and planet. Together we can make a difference.”

Marcus Binney CBE, founding president of SAVE, said: “SAVE has been on the front line saving fine historic buildings from neglect and decay for the last 50 years. It has been a continuous campaign to find new owners and uses and a new life for a huge range of building types. Again and again we have challenged the demolishers’ chant that old buildings are ‘at the end of their useful life’. It is my good fortune over half a century to have served successively as chairman, president, executive president and president again. SAVE’s ability to attract talented staff and a brilliant series of directors ensures our mission burns bright.”

How it started

SAVE was established in 1975 by a group of journalists, planners and architectural historians who recognised the urgent need to take action. In the 1960s and 70s our towns and cities were threatened by mass demolitions to make way for new roads and large-scale development. We nearly lost Covent Garden, Soho and Whitehall – and did lose many buildings, especially in cities like Birmingham and Glasgow. Meanwhile, country houses were being bulldozed at the rate of one a week because of changing demographics, tastes and the tax regime. No one was aware of the scale because it was happening far from public view. In 1974 Marcus Binney and John Harris staged an exhibition at the V&A, The Destruction of the Country House, whose centrepiece was the Hall of Destruction, filled with tumbling pillars and photographs of more than 1,000 big houses that had already been lost. It caused a sensation. The public were in tears. A year later SAVE was born out of the outcry.

Since then, we’ve saved not just country houses – though we did save Wentworth Woodhouse, reputedly the biggest house in Europe, with a facade twice as long as Buckingham Palace. Our remit is any building, of any type or age, anywhere in the country, listed or unlisted – and we have saved thousands of them, from cinemas, churches and railway stations to cotton mills, warehouses and terraced houses (including Ringo Starr’s birthplace). 

How we work

As a small charity, we have to pick our battles. But our mission has always been clear: to fight for buildings facing demolition, decay or neglect.

Evidence clearly shows historic buildings can be catalysts for economic growth, community development and environmental sustainability – yet 50,000 buildings a year are demolished. This is a waste of both embodied carbon and embodied memory. Sustainability has always been central to SAVE’s work, and through one of our biggest recent cases – M&S Oxford Street – we brought heritage and carbon emissions jointly under the spotlight at a planning inquiry for the first time, influencing an industry for good.

From the start SAVE has worked through the media to raise the alarm about urgent cases. We often get calls with just hours to spare before the bulldozers are due to move in. We are lucky to have lawyers and engineers among our network who leap into action to ward off the immediate threat, while we alert press and public. We often work with architects, engineers or developers to create alternative visions intended to spark debate and show alternatives to demolition are possible – such as after Battersea Power Station was decommissioned in the 1980s.

Much of our work happens behind the scenes, methodically through the planning system (from writing letters to squaring up to well-resourced opponents at public inquiries) – and where necessary and funds allow, through the courts. It looks different for each building, but we’re always trying to change the narrative that demolition is inevitable and rally support. Sometimes we help establish a Building Preservation Trust that can raise funds. Very occasionally we buy a building ourselves – such as the dramatic moment during a public inquiry in 1981 when we were challenged by a desperate opposition lawyer to buy derelict Barlaston Hall in Staffordshire for £1. Marcus Binney didn’t flinch. We bought the grade I-listed Palladian house and pursued the Coal Board for compensation for subsidence so we could fund roof repairs. Once water-tight, we sold it to new owners who painstakingly restored the interiors. It was recently put on the market again for £3.5 million.

Big saves

Over the years, our work has led to some of the most significant conservation victories in the country. These include:

The rescue of Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire: We set up a Building Preservation Trust, recruited the chair and put together the business case that persuaded the government to provide a crucial grant that acted as a catalyst for renewal.

The saving of 400 Victorian terraced homes in Liverpool, now preserved and updated for families after a public inquiry we successfully led. 

We fought and won two public inquiries to stop developers bulldozing Smithfield Market in London – and even sent a gaggle of Lady Gaga lookalikes to take our message to Parliament, and the world’s media, with placards declaring: “You’d have to be Gaga to demolish Smithfield!” The Central Market is now being restored and converted into a new home for the London Museum.

Other buildings you might not know SAVE helped save include: Dumfries House and Mavisbank House in Scotland; Tyntesfield near Bristol and Calke Abbey in Derbyshire (now both in the care of the National Trust); a “concrete folly” in Somerset built by the pioneer of Portland cement to showcase his wares (making restoration exceptionally tricky) – a case supported by Damien Hirst and Keith Allen; Leeds’ remarkable Egyptian Temple Works; All Souls in Halifax; Union Chapel Islington (now a popular music venue); Span 4 at Paddington Station; Billingsgate Market; Bristol Temple Meads Station; Peninsula Barracks in Winchester; and RAE Farnborough, the cradle of British aviation.

We were the first to suggest that the decommissioned Bankside Power Station could become an art gallery. Twenty years later Tate Modern opened its doors. We lobbied behind the scenes to save Battersea Power Station from demolition when no one could see a future for it. Similarly we staged an exhibition, Satanic Mills, arguing at a time in the late 1970s when no one else could see their potential, that the great Pennine cotton mills could and should be reused. Many have since been successfully converted into housing, offices and creative space by imaginative entrepreneurs and developers, including Salts Mill in Saltaire, Lister Mill in Manningham, Bradford, and Dean Clough Mills in Halifax, their towering chimneys once again beacons of civic pride.  We proposed turning the traffic-snarled Strand-Aldwych gyratory into a public piazza around St Mary-le-Strand Church (now realised). We published a report, Departing Stores in 2022, drawing attention to the plight of the nation’s cherished, but increasingly shuttered, department stores – and celebrating examples of reuse. It inspired the winners of the 2024 Davidson Prize to dream up ideas for their revival.

ENDS