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At the beginning of this year, in a change of tack, Trustees submitted the first of two planning application attempts which sought to build two large glass penthouses on top of the historic Grade II listed Old Market building in Hove. Approval of this plan would have set a dangerous precedent giving carte blanche to anyone to make unusual changes to listed structures just on the basis of ‘needing the money’. The first application was refused and in September the revised application was also refused. Tellingly, planning committee Member, Cllr Paul Steedman, stated that he was not convinced by the claimed financial need.

In the wake of these refusals, a petition seeking grant support from the council is now being introduced before every event by Old Market manager and trustee Stephen Neiman. He explains that the Old Market does not receive any funding from the council, nor from the Arts Council. He readily admits the Trust covers the cost of its operations, but says it is unable to clear its “historic debt”. An electronic petition (lodged on the council’s website) states that the requests for funding “have been met continually by both organisations stating that although they are supportive of the arts and community use of the building, they cannot support a project with such a capital deficit.”

Superficially it appears to be a reasonable request for some financial assistance – but is it all it seems? Prospective signatories are given the impression that neither the Arts Council nor the council have ever donated a penny. Even Delia Forester, ex-Labour councillor and ex-deputy chair of planning, takes as read this supposed lack of public funding in her letter of support for the two glass penthouses.

It is in fact an ungrateful slur on both organisations. In 1999 The National Lottery (through the Arts Council) donated £1 million to the Old Market Trust – at the time, the largest donation to an arts project in the South East. Furthermore the only significant condition was that there would be a clawback should the Old Market be sold within a 10 year timeframe. Those 10 years expired on 11th March 2009 – around the time the Old Market Trustees registered the planning application for the glass penthouses.

In 1998 the Labour administration provided the Old Market Trust with a loan of £275,000, to be repaid in 10 equal instalments. In 2001 that debt was deferred to 2006. Further funding 

came in the form of a £585,000 grant from the 
Single Regeneration Partnership, administered through Brighton & Hove City Council.

The Labour-run administration, in which Delia Forester was a key player, went even further in 2004. Council finance officers Catherine Vaughan and Peter Sargent presented a report to councillors recommending that the loan should be converted to a grant. Their reasoning was that should the Old Market Trust become insolvent Brighton and Hove City Council would be unlikely to retrieve the £275,000, and as they had already distributed the money to the Trust it would “have no additional financial impact on the council”. The report concluded that “The council therefore has no financial gain from pursuing repayment of the loan”. Spurious logic, but the report was approved, and the unpaid debt wiped out.

These actions helped to significantly reduce the “historic debt” to just over £1 million. In 2007, local businessman, Jonathan Bigg, entered into an agreement with the Old Market Trust to take 250-year leases on areas within the Old Market building with the intention of sub-letting them as office space. For this he paid the Trust £1 million, a sum he maintains Stephen Neiman and the Trustees assured him would clear their debt. Having given the money, he then learned that the Trust intended to build two glass penthouses above the areas he had just leased. When he discovered that their motivation behind the glass penthouse plan was again to clear this debt, he was told that his £1 million had made no impact on the debt and that the Trust remained in exactly the same position as before. He asks – quite reasonably – “where has the money gone?”

With stories floating around about late payments to staff it seems at least one person is sitting pretty in all this and that is the Old Market’s artistic director, Ms. Caroline Brown. In 2005 Ms. Brown took home £32,500, and in the following year £35,000. In 2007, supposedly at a time of intense financial pressure due to the Old Market debts, her salary rose sharply to £60,535, coupled with expense claims of £17,500. In fact Ms. Brown’s salary makes up a large chunk of total outgoings on salaries. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Ms. Caroline Brown is actually Mrs. Caroline Neiman, the wife of Old Market manager and trustee Stephen Neiman.

It seems a shame that the Old Market could close its doors soon – it is undoubtedly a superb and successful venue marred by the seemingly poor financial decisions of its trustees. We invite readers to form their own conclusions.

Related posts:

1. The Old Market: A Tangle of Conflicting Loyalties and Remits
2. Old Market Update
3. Royal Alex Update

But the Regency Society was the leader of the pack, attracting serious expertise to its ruling Committee. In recent years this has come to mean attracting expertise with unattractive agendas. Predatory developers, architects and politicians, looking to serve their own interests by standing for and being elected to positions on the ruling Committee, have increased the danger of a diluted or abandoned conservation remit.

How could the members of the Regency Society have allowed people like that to gain major positions of power on their Committee, neutralising the credibility of The Regency Society as a conservation voice! By next AGM it will just be an asset-rich club, protecting and advancing the careers of architects, politicians and developers.

For most Regency Society members (other groups work in a similar fashion), membership has been all about the tea and biscuits, the wine and chamber music in the Royal Pavilion at AGM, the garden party, the lectures, the coach trips and the £60 dinners. There is little interest or involvement with boring old planning.

For the committed conservationist, however, membership has been about protecting heritage, Grades 1 and 2 Listed buildings, the Regency era Brunswick Townscape (mostly listed buildings) and the cultural story of this nation along the thread of time. Architecture is certainly High Art to the Starchitects of our time and for me, these areas of listed buildings merit the term “Artscape”.
“My turn! My turn!” the Horribles shrill, bug-eyed, teeth bared, fame and wealth on their minds. They want these buildings “euthanized” and see ambitions thwarted by their taking up space THEY could be using. “Get off the stage! My turn! My turn!” And the cultural markers that tell the visitor what country they are in, what town, city or village they are in are just so-much “brown field site” to them.

In recent years leading members of the various conservation-agenda groups have “intermarried” so to speak. They have propped up each other’s dwindling memberships by joining each other’s groups. They have aged and died. They have not been replaced with new members possessed of their deep respect, wish to learn and understandings of history and heritage, their educational strengths and grit in defending the riches of heritage this country so proudly shows off to the tourism trade. The dwindling numbers of them desperately prop up each other’s conservation remits and become haunted by the dilution and marginalisation of conservation. Social memberships and the brazen infiltration by predators for whom conservation is optional has bred deep despair. And a lot of empty hand-wringing.

At the time of the Old Market’s February planning application to put 2 glass box penthouses on the roof of the Grade 2 Listed Old Market, the convenor of the Regency Society’s planning group was former Labour councillor, Delia Forester, a woman who used her position on the planning committee on March 23rd, 2007 to provide fulsome support for the Frank Gehry colossus on Hove seafront. She led the majority Labour Party vote which gave it planning permission.

How did someone like that become convenor of the planning group at the Regency Society? A weak constitution helped allow it. The supine, tea & biscuits credulous membership voted her (and others) onto the ruling committee and thence to the planning group, the credibility of the Regency Society being of no concern to them.
How was it right that the Chair of the Regency Society was also an Old Market Trustee? How is it right that the Treasurer of the Regency Society, Stephen Neiman, is also the Old Market Trustee raising this glass boxes planning application? Should he not have resigned from the Regency Society to do that? Entanglements and loyalties so deep that you can barely see the join have meant that the move by the Old Market Trust to put big glass boxes on its Grade 2 Listed roof compromised the Regency Society’s conservation remit. Or did it?

Ahead of the 2009 Regency Society AGM, and using her Brighton University email account instead of Regency Society letterhead , Delia Forester, convenor of the Regency Society planning group, Labour politician & architect, registered fulsome planning consultation support on behalf of the Regency Society. Nervous breakdowns, angst and hysteria ensued when this became known. Loyalty to Stephen Neiman, however, led to old stagers staying their hands and not objecting as they would otherwise have done and then getting in a state about it. Remit vs. Loyalty to a close & valued colleague and mate.

Why did she (with others in commanding positions in The Regency Society) do all this? Why not start their own group? Why destroy the Regency Society’s remit and credibility? How was it even possible to do so? Putting on a military hat, I would say that taking out the leader is the best way to topple the rest. And so it came to pass.
Over at the Hove Civic Society, conflicts of loyalty, angst, rage and shattered alliances tested their commitment to conservation to its limit. One of its two members on the Council’s Conservation Advisory Group resigned over this one application. The Hove Civic prevaricated, vascillated, hung back but finally moved to a position of objection – but with blood on the floor.

This story was repeated all over the shop.

At the Regency Society AGM, regime change led to the new Chairman withdrawing Forester’s Regency Society response to the Old Market application for the two glass penthouses, declaring to the Council that because the Society was divided, there would be no response. No response to an application affecting a listed Regency building in a massively listed Regency townscape. The infiltrators had done their job and taken out the conservation movement’s leader group.

Embarrassed and mortified, torn between hurting Old Market Trustee and applicant, Stephen Neiman, or hurting the listed building, the amenity groups were like chickens trapped in the coop with a fox. Only the 11th hour intervention of the London-based Georgian Group sobered everyone up.

The Old Market is saved from glass boxes for the moment. But now the time for reckoning has come. And it is clear that the Regency Society membership will not make the effort to defend the conservation remit by learning anything other than who will be playing what at the next AGM chamber concert. It is clear too that, unlike the Brighton Society, which allows anyone to be a member, but bars politicians, developers and architects from Committee membership, the Regency Society has failed to write a Constitution which protects itself from destruction of its remit & respectable purpose.

Related posts:

1. The Old Market: Financial History
2. Royal Alex Update
3. Royal Alex Site Update

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During these meetings, Jo Thompson & Gill Thompson (no relation), made clear that the rejected option of complete demolition was not on the table, and that any planning application would have to involve retention and conversion of at least the main Royal Alex building. Also the green space in front of it must be preserved.
A poorly publicised exhibition was then held at Hove Town Hall during the last week of October. On display were five options, ranging from retention and conversion of all the buildings on the site, to complete demolition and redevelopment. There was no indication that the latter option was out of the question, and just included for ‘control’ purposes.

Only financial considerations were taken into account, although the District Valuer had not completed his assessment by the time of the exhibition. The exhibition appeared to be biased against the conversion option – complete demolition was the only option showing not so much a profit as a smaller loss. This is largely due to the Council in effect continuing to tax profit that does not exist, by requiring the provision of 40% affordable housing.  Coincidentally, the day before this exhibition started, there was a conference on land economics and valuation at UCL, which was attended by many of the best brains in the country. The conference unanimously concluded that the economic model that aims to build ‘social housing’ using the super-profit from development is for the time being dead; it was rather aptly referred to as ‘bubble economics’, and it was firmly stated that the bubble would not be around for the foreseeable future.

Local architect Mr. Graham Towers, who has more than 30 years professional experience of urban housing design and development, has found that the Royal Alex exhibition was incorrect regarding the numbers of flats which could be achieved in the different options. His calculations, based on a detailed and realistic comparison with the Taylor Wimpey planning application, show that more flats could be achieved in a conversion scheme than claimed in the exhibition, and fewer flats created in a new-build scheme.

The exhibition also did not take into account the fact that the large roof space in the existing building could be utilised for additional flats, as has been pointed out to Jo & Gill Thompson by Mick Hamer, who coordinated the MCHA case at the public inquiry in June.

Discussion of the planning brief for this site is pencilled in for the environment cabinet of 17 December. The MCHA is pressing for discussion of the brief to be deferred until the meeting of 26 January to allow time for a proper feasibility study by a qualified and experienced conservation architect, and to allow time for all stages of the public consultation to be completed. Otherwise there is the risk of yet more doomed planning applications followed by another time consuming and costly appeal. This is unfair on the community and also unfair on the developers, who need a clear and unambiguous brief this time.

Related posts:

1. Royal Alex Site Update
2. The Old Market: A Tangle of Conflicting Loyalties and Remits
3. The Old Market: Financial History

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The sight and smell of the overflowing bins is truly disgusting and a serious health hazard – some residents have already spotted rats amongst the torn sacks. Let us not forget that many communal bins are sited directly outside people’s homes. What I find truly amazing is the dire management decisions taken by CityClean. Whilst the filth has been piling up around the communal bins over the past few days CityClean caged trucks could been seen driving around the central area, but only collecting the waste from litter bins. Would it not be more intelligent to task these workers with collecting the hundreds of strewn sacks around the communal bins? One would have thought that would be common sense.

Perhaps it is time for CityClean and our council to follow the lead of Jersey Council who disposed of communal bins as a failed and costly experiment. Furthermore with the lower ranks of the CityClean workforce threatened with massive pay cuts it might be more appropriate for our city council to dock the over-inflated salaries of CityClean management, who have clearly demonstrated their hopeless lack of competence and propensity for creating city-wide problems.

Some good news is that the strike has been delayed by 28 days, apparently after the personal intervention of the new chief executive, John Barradell. We shall have to wait and see if they can hammer out a long-term solution.

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Mr Barradell’s appointment was unanimously supported by a cross-party committee of councillors. With this impressive background you may think that Mr Barradell has some very definite views about how our city should move in the future. It seems not: he was very firm about his belief that he was there to implement the decisions of the city’s elected representatives, not to pursue his own agenda. One thing that has emerged from the meeting from council leader Mary Mears was the desire to improve the Queen’s Road section of the city being, as it is, a “gateway” into our city from the train station. “At present when you walk out of the station you really don’t see the best of Brighton and Hove”, Mr Barradell observed.

The need for family homes was also discussed, as at present the numerous conversions of family sized properties into multiple flats are driving many families out of the city to places such as Newhaven and Peacehaven.
Mr Barradell does seem to have been somewhat thrown in at the deep end, right into the middle of union arguments over pay cuts for CityClean workers and a government inquiry into a major development on the Marina, housing issues, and general problems associated with the credit crunch, but his background and demeanour indicate he is a man who should weather these problems with relative ease. 

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“City of Culture” Bid

Lord Tebbit and his wife Margaret, who was paralysed in the bombing

25 years on and people again gathered in the Grand Hotel to witness the unveiling of a plaque in memory of those who lost their lives. Lord Tebbit and his wife, who was paralysed by the blast and confined to a wheelchair for the past 25 years, were in attendance to speak of the dedication and selflessness demonstrated by the emergency services that night.

Whilst the structural scars of the Grand healed quickly it was clear that was not the case for many present, who still suffered from the emotional scars of the attack. Although a sombre occasion Lord Tebbit raised the mood considerably with several quips, such as referring to when everyone present meet again “in another 25 years”. 

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