For half a century, SAVE has been fighting against needless and wasteful demolition of historic buildings of all types and ages across the UK. In that time we have spoken up for thousands of buildings.
Scroll to view some of our key milestones over the last 50 years.
Destruction of the Country House exhibition triggers public outrage
Roy Strong’s seminal Destruction of the Country House exhibition opens at the V&A Museum in London, drawing attention to the 1,600 country properties demolished over the preceding century.
The exhibition has a huge public impact and the foundations are laid for the creation of SAVE the following year.
To mark European Architectural Heritage Year, a group of journalists, architectural historians and planners rally together to campaign publicly for endangered historic buildings. This leads to the founding of SAVE Britain’s Heritage by Marcus Binney.
A 40-year preservation battle begins for what will become the largest building in SAVE's history. SAVE lobbies the government to stop Battersea being demolished when it is decommissioned in 1983, and secures the first planning permission for reuse. After many false dawns, the power station has now been painstakingly repaired and is the centrepiece of one of London’s liveliest shopping and leisure destinations.
SAVE submits a proposal to the Central Electricity Generating Board to convert Bankside Power Station into an art gallery, successfully halting its demolition. In 2000, Bankside reopens as Tate Modern, which is now the most popular contemporary art gallery in the world.
SAVE sets up the Barlaston Hall Trust and purchases the stunning but dilapidated Palladian villa in Staffordshire for £1. That's less of a bargain when you factor in its chronic subsidence and the water gushing through the roof. Following two public inquiries and a lawsuit against the National Coal Board, SAVE wins compensation for the subsidence. The house is repaired using these funds and sold in 1992 to new private owners who continue the restoration.
Barlaston is one of the biggest success story in English heritage. As Marcus said: 'It is a landmark case in the history of preservation and serves to illustrate how perseverance can win against overwhelming odds.'
SAVE establishes its own Buildings at Risk (BaR) register - a national database of listed and unlisted buildings that are vacant, derelict or drawn to our attention by members of the public and conservation officers. The BaR register currently has more than 1,400 entries and is pivotal in raising awareness of buildings at risk across the UK and promoting their reuse.
SAVE publishes Bright Future: Reuse for Industrial Buildings - an illustrated colour guide to practical ways of reusing mills, warehouses, maltings and other industrial buildings. Demonstrating buildings' potential for reuse has been an intrinsic part of SAVE's DNA from the start.
Founded in 1907, the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, with its extraordinary aerospace test structures, is the cradle of British aviation. In 1999, SAVE and Farnborough Air Sciences Trust began campaigning to retain 8 acres of buildings here, demonstrating how using part of the area for housing could generate funds to restore the wind tunnels, portable airship shed and other unique structures. The campaign led to the restoration and upgraded listing of the 24ft wind tunnels, transonic wind tunnel and airship shed. The site is now open as a museum.
Span 4 at Paddington Station is an elegant 1916 addition to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s much-loved train shed. For years it was hidden from public view by a crash deck in the hopes that it would be forgotten about and its replacement with a 40-storey tower would go ahead uncontested. SAVE alone campaigned for its retention, arguing that Span 4 and the London Street deck were of interest in their own right as cleverly-designed additions to the original. At the last moment, Network Rail relented and the train shed is now restored for all to enjoy.
SAVE publishes a hugely influential report, Pathfinder, exposing the government's controversial Housing Market Renewal (Pathfinder) policy for the shameful community demolition and clearance scheme that it was. In 2011, the policy is finally scrapped.
In a dramatic save, just days before the contents of Dumfries House in Ayrshire were to be lost in a private sale that would have ‘broken all records for British furniture’, SAVE helps to raise enough funds to purchase the estate. It opens to the public for the first time in 2008 following a thorough restoration.
As Liverpool emerges from a year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, SAVE opens a crucial exhibition that takes a sobering look at how the city’s historic buildings are being left to rot and demolished in the name of “regeneration”.
SAVE wins a historic legal battle against Lancaster City Council that effectively changes UK planning law. Following the ruling, building owners and developers must put any major demolition plans through an Environmental Impact Assessment process before they can legally proceed.
Led by Marcus Binney, SAVE establishes the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust, a charitable body that sets out a strategy for the future of the largest stately home in the world. The grade I-listed building is in a parlous state, with subsidence from old mining tunnels just one of challenges. Almost unbelievably, post-war open-cast coal mining on the estate reached the house's back door in the late 1940s.
Less than a decade after the trust's creation, Wentworth Woodhouse is a booming visitor attraction and a vibrant cultural and employment hub.
The SAVE team hires an army of Lady Gaga lookalikes to take our protest to Parliament – and the world’s media.
We go on to win the public inquiry. The General Market is now being converted into a new home for the London Museum
SAVE launches a fierce campaign that results in King’s College London voluntarily withdrawing its plans to demolish the “little houses on the Strand”. A stunning new pedestrianised piazza later opens in 2023, following SAVE’s initial proposal in 2015.
SAVE pursues a high-profile campaign against the demolition of historically important buildings in Grimsby’s fishing docks – otherwise known as the Kasbah. The case goes to the Court of Appeal and generates national alarm, resulting in the remaining buildings in the Kasbah being designated a Conservation Area one year later.
Following a huge campaign to rescue the building from demolition – fought successfully through high profile public inquiries in 2014 and 2008 – Smithfield General Market is announced as the new home for the London Museum.
SAVE, along with Historic England and local campaigners, wins a major public inquiry, saving one of England’s finest cathedral cities from a harmful redevelopment involving a 20-storey tower block that would have destroyed Norwich’s medieval city skyline.
George Mayer-Marton’s Oldham Mural (1955) and its home, the Holy Rosary Church in Greater Manchester, is saved and awarded grade II-listed status following a long-running campaign led by SAVE and the artist’s great nephew, Nick Braithwaite. To achieve this, we secure support from international arts organisations and galleries across the north west, as well as Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, and Nick Serota, former director of Tate.
Hundreds of terraced houses in Liverpool, once condemned by the government's controversial Pathfinder policy, are adapted and transformed to provide a variety of 2, 3 and 4-bedroom homes, with the facades carefully restored. Since SAVE took up the case in 2006, we have worked with local people and architects to prove the houses were worth saving and could be adapted to modern needs. In 2014 we won a hard-fought public inquiry that resulted in the Secretary of State overturning the recommendations of his planning inspector and rejecting the demolition plans.
SAVE’s founder and president, Marcus Binney CBE, is honoured with the prestigious Europa Nostra award in recognition of his lifetime of heritage activism. The jury call Binney “a daring, courageous and fearless leader who has set the standard for heritage campaigning over the past 50 years.”
