Defence Heritage Planning, Architecture and Public Participation

 

Great Quadrangular Storehouse Sheerness Dockyard

The Sheerness Dockyard Preservation Trust plans to publish an elegant art book containing the album of archive quality photographs taken in 1976 by two architectural students Mary Weguelin-Yearley and David Alsop to commemorate the Great Quadrangular Storehouse which once dominated Sheerness Royal Dockyard - just before it was lost to demolition. The Storehouse was one of the largest and most significant dockyard buildings; part of the large model of it to aid construction between 1823 and 1826 is on display in Sheerness Dockyard Church. The book is dedicated to publicising the tragedy of the demolition, championing a remarkable building that should never have been lost.

Read more here (PDF).

 

"What does one do with a historic dockyard?" Defence heritage sties repurposed as exemplars of regeneration.
Naval Dockyards Society Transactions 18 (April 2025).
Celia Clark PhD

This article outlines developments since publication of my book Barracks, Forts and Ramparts: Regeneration Challenges for Portsmouth Harbour's Defence Heritage (Tricorn Books 2020).

Read the article here (PDF).

 

Civic Offices, Guildhall Square Will it be demolished – or reused and retrofitted?

"The greenest building is one that's already built". Preserve and reuse – or destroy and rebuild? Losing the UK's twentieth century building legacy – and sustainable ways to save and repurpose it.

Useful, reusable buildings such as the News Centre and the Tricorn which embodied our communities' history, identity and aspirations are currently being lost and their embodied carbon wasted by demolition. Every year 50,000 UK buildings are demolished and in 2022 222m tonnes of waste were produced; 63% of this was waste from construction, demolition or excavation. If the UK is to meet its target of net carbon zero by 2050, this disposable culture needs to be reversed. The president of the RIBA says we need to make a concerted effort to realise the full potential of these buildings and take retrofit seriously. "It's a case of thinking about yesterday's building, putting in today's technology so we can use it tomorrow." Existing buildings are an untapped economic and social opportunity. The RIBA's 2023 Built Environment report's slogan is 'System Change not Climate Change', making the case that the built environment must drastically reduce its carbon emissions to work towards net zero, sharing best practice, with social justice at the heart of the action.

Read the article here (PDF).

 

This article, published in the Naval Dockyards Society's newsletter Dockyards in December 2024 explores the historic Venetian arsenals in the eastern Mediterranean.

Read the article here (PDF).

 

Portsmouth Society talk: Wednesday 16th April at 7.00pm; Royal Maritime Club Queen Street Portsmouth.

"The greenest building is one that's already built". Preserve and reuse – or destroy and rebuild?
Losing the UK's twentieth century building legacy – and sustainable ways to save and repurpose it.

Useful, reusable buildings such as the News Centre and the Tricorn which embodied our communities' history, identity and aspirations are currently being lost and their embodied carbon wasted by demolition. This disposable culture needs to be reversed if the UK is to meet its net zero target. Existing buildings are an untapped economic and social opportunity. This talk explores local and national examples of sustainable reuse.