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The Times - Period homes for everyone! by Libby Purves
Shock horror - Venice is restoring old buildings for the low-paid to live in. It should happen here

The Venice in Peril Fund, more usually associated with saving monuments and co-ordinating research on the tidal barrage, decided to [turn] the [San Giobbe] house into four flats. These — wait for it — will not be sold to tourists but offered to Venetian families on the waiting list for social housing. The ground-floor flat has been created and made flood-proof for a disabled user.

Despite the economically humble nature of its tenants, the house has been restored far better than most. … The aim was to demonstrate that sensitive restoration can be done at a low cost; but the extra and glorious twist is that this was done not for rich dilettantes or romantic foreign tourists, but for ordinary working Venetians. The municipality, encouraged and helped by Venice in Peril, has taken a step towards not only the physical, but also the human, regeneration of the city.

Zip northward now, to the “Tardis Terraces” in Preston and Manchester Moss Side, where instead of taking the John Prescott dream to heart and knocking down traditional terraced houses wholesale, a company called Adactus used innovative and clever design to improve the insides of houses usually dismissed as poky and unsuitable for modern life. It used loft conversions, double-height living spaces and modern facilities; it plans to knock some twos and threes together into larger family homes. Each house converted costs less than demolition and building afresh. The smaller ones will sell cheaply or be available for “shared ownership”. Thus with modern amenities, ordinary working families can live in something which is part of the national heritage and identity. Which is appropriate, because they too are part of that identity.

It seems a far cry from the devoted architectural historians of San Giobbe to the groovy Tardis Terraces of Preston, but the two should take heart from one another. Time cannot stand still, not anywhere, yet much of a nation’s history and personality lies in its humbler buildings. It is unwise to trash things wholesale (unless, like Kim Il Sung of North Korea or Ceausescu of Romania, you actively want to destroy national character for murky political reasons).

What exactly is she saying about Mr Prescott, there? (cackle)

No point saving the church and the pub if they stand in a futurist wilderness.

Yet John Prescott’s Pathfinder programmes, with more than £1 billion of government funding, is panting to demolish perfectly viable houses. One group of academics claims that 400,000 Victorian houses are at risk; we know that 10,000 are going. The Treasury continues to make Britain uglier (and fill the landfill sites with rubble) by stubbornly charging VAT on house refurbishment while giving new-build a zero VAT rating: yet some new-build will last barely 20 years.

Period homes for everyone! (…Even Americans!)