One of the curious things about the property world is how, although heritage property invariably carries a premium, that premium is so much at the mercy of how recent history has treated the area in which a heritage property lies.
In Plymouth, the historic naval dockland area of Devonport has some of the best Napoleonic era buildings in the country, commanding extensive views of the Tamar Estuary and the sea, among generous open space. But, blighted by declining maritime employment and much post WWII public sector development, these areas fall well short of the values they would achieve if overlooking the Avon Gorge in Clifton.
Yet in Bristol, too, areas of finely crafted 18th Century terraces and squares, only a few hundred yards from that City’s regenerated retail centre, lie under-used and still in decline, largely because once isolated by the City’s ring roads and urban motorways, regeneration and revaluation has been made much more difficult.
Much of my working life has involved finding ways of bringing new money into re-invigorating historic areas where the economy that saw them built or kept them going in a previous century has slipped away. Always, on such sites, it has been the premium heritage buildings can attract that pulls them back, if it can be shown how they can be part of a new place, addressing the needs, for living and working.
Some years ago a housebuilder won a national competition for a derelict industrial site in the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site in Shropshire, but stood down from the bid fearing surrounding residential sales values were too low. Planning permission having been secured for a housing scheme that created a new urban setting for the famous Coalport China Factory for its owners, a charitable trust, the site again came to market and was purchased by a local housebuilder with much more confidence in the values that particular scheme could achieve. Once built, it achieved a premium of 30 per cent even on those valuations, because, on a river in a heritage context and with a well-researched market mix, it offered a quality of life experience very different from all prevailing post-war housing around.
In so many towns and cities there are areas developed in the 19th Century or right up to the 1960s that are significantly under-valued now against their proximity to regenerated town and city centres, whose locational advantages or architectural character are ripe for rediscovery.
This phenomenon typically happens where one town has felt the economic pressures of another. Stoke on Trent, the home of the Potteries, lost out as those industries declined because nearby Newcastle under Lyne saw growth in the service economy. Similarly, the county town of Gloucester declined as nearby Cheltenham expanded, attracting new service and office based employment, but it is not hard to see where future growth and investment opportunity now lies. Now, with new levers of influence, significant land ownerships by RSLs, de-regulated social sector rents, the increasing long term interests of institutional by-to-let and the many new infrastructure and investment tools created by government, there are a whole new set of regeneration forces to use to make effective interventions. They can unlock these under-valued assets and in doing so create the confidence that these will be good places for private sector interests to invest in again too.
For those dealing with Listed Buildings do remember where if a works contract for permitted alternations was commenced before 21 March 2011 the onset of 20% VAT can be avoided until 20 March 2013. There are special provisions too for long running re-construction projects.
About the author
Edward Nash trained at the Royal West of England Academy and his early career was spent within a rural practice where he specialised in Conservation and Urban Design. He started Nash Partnership in 1988 and over the years he has focused on Sustainable Communities, testing projects for their environmental, social, cultural and economic viability.
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