Crooked House rebuild would be ‘very complicated
and costly endeavour’
Black Country Living Museum, which displays recreated
historical buildings, says it is not able to save demolished Staffordshire pub
Jessica
Murray Midlands correspondent
Fri 11 Aug
2023 14.00 BST
Ever since
it burned down and was then demolished last week, there have been calls for the
Crooked House pub in Staffordshire to be rebuilt from scratch.
Andy
Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, told the local council he wanted to see
it “rebuilt brick by brick (using as much original material as possible)”, and
a Facebook group calling for it to be rebuilt has attracted more than 10,000
members.
Historical
pub buildings have been successfully rebuilt before – the Carlton Tavern pub in
Maida Vale reopened in 2021 and was rebuilt brick by brick after being
demolished without permission.
But while
doing so is not impossible, it would be a “huge endeavour”, said Andrew Lovett,
chief executive of the Black Country Living Museum (BCLM), an open-air museum
made up of rebuilt historical buildings about four miles down the road from
where the Crooked House once stood.
After
dozens of calls for the BCLM museum to intervene and save the pub, Lovett
issued a statement this week saying that unfortunately the organisation was not
in a position to “save, let alone relocate, the building”.
“It’s a
very complicated and costly endeavour and that’s one of the reasons we’re not
in a position to just suddenly drop everything and go and get the Crooked
House,” he said.
This week
marked the start of the rebuild of Dudley’s Woodside Library on the BCLM site.
The library has been painstakingly moved, brick by brick, from its original
home.
“We have to
number pretty much everything, from the rafter to the bricks, and take
everything down one by one,” Lovett said. “The bricks get loaded in reverse
order on to a pallet to help with the rebuild process at the other end. We
don’t call it demolition, we call it dismantling, and the whole process took
about six months.
“But
Woodside was built in 1894 so you will get bricks and stonework that have
deteriorated and are structurally no good. Sometimes, you can substitute a
brick from an inner part of the building, or we have to get stonemasons to
replicate things. Particularly if it’s sandstone, which is quite porous, it is
susceptible to rain and frost and cracking, and inevitably you end up having to
replace it, it’s unavoidable.”
Last year
the BCLM opened the Elephant and Castle pub, a recreation of an Edwardian pub
which was unexpectedly demolished in Wolverhampton in 2001 before it could be
listed. They used photographs and archive material to recreate it as faithfully
as possible, and asked local people to donate any old pub memorabilia,
furniture or alcohol bottles they had.
“It was
only possible really because we had architectural plans and photographs,”
Lovett said. “We were also able to talk to the last landlords and families that
lived there and say, ‘where was the bar, what did it look like?’ It takes a lot
of effort but if you get it right, it can really trigger memories for people.”
He said one
of the main challenges of recreating old buildings was making sure they
complied with current building regulations.
“There’s
quite a big staircase in the Elephant and Castle, a beautiful wood one, but it
didn’t meet fire regulations so there has to be a metal one underneath,” he
said. “And, ironically given the Crooked House, we have to spend a lot of money
making the ground safe to build on since we’re in a former mining area.”
The BCLM
has taken on such a challenge before, however, when it recreated Jerushah
Cottage, also known as The Tilted Cottage, by building it on a foundation at a
10-degree angle. “It can be done, we just had to lay a foundation deliberately
at that angle so that when the building was put up, it was 10 degrees off,”
said Lovett.
“Some
people think we’re bonkers the effort we go to get the tiniest details right
when we rebuild. But it’s those things that trigger memories and we get very
emotional responses from people when they see it. If you’re slapdash about it,
using the wrong screws or brass fittings, then it just undermines the whole
process.”
Why this lament for a burnt-out pub? Is it
because Britain seems a bit of a Crooked House these days?
Marina Hyde
The fate of a historic landmark has certainly struck a
chord: neglected and then reduced to rubble. Uncanny isn’t it?
Fri 11 Aug
2023 16.18 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/11/crooked-house-burnt-out-pub-historic-landmark
Has anyone
seen Adam and Carly Taylor, owners of the Crooked House on Himley Road in
Staffordshire? The Taylors took ownership of the historic wonky pub just over a
fortnight ago, only for it to be gutted by fire nine days later. Within 48
hours of the night-time blaze, which has sparked national outrage, the
structural remains of the Crooked House were hastily reduced to rubble by a
digger – without council permission. Which has also sparked national outrage.
But still no public sign of the Taylors. Normally in a case such as this, you
would expect to see the owners weeping on the local TV news about their loss and
the cruelty of it. Yet even as the story goes international with a big write-up
in the New York Times, Adam and Carly are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they are
simply too devastated to come before the TV cameras.
We should
note right from the get-go that the couple have not been identified as suspects
– indeed, the local police show impressive commitment to modernspeak by
announcing that they “continue to engage” with the owners. A way of putting it
that suggests the force “reached out” to the pair, “opened a constructive
dialogue”, and “hope to land on the same page” in due course. We must wish them
all the best with their investigation, at the same time as encouraging any
Belgian or deerstalkered detectives to make their way immediately to the Dudley
area to assist with inquiries.
In the
meantime, given the fire is being treated as arson, could the cops not perhaps
persuade the Taylors to front a public appeal for witnesses? I am sure that
anyone currently withholding information would only have to take one look into
the red-rimmed eyes of either Taylor to realise that any titbit, no matter how
small, should be given to the police in the hope that it provides the crucial
lead and permits the force to crack this most mysterious of cases.
As it
burned last Saturday night, it seemed almost as if the fates were conspiring
against the survival of the Crooked House, which – and you should see this
merely as an instance of Jungian synchronicity – lies next-door to a quarry and
landfill site of which Mr Taylor is a former director. Firefighters who were
called out to the blaze by the public say they found it difficult to access the
building as large mounds of dirt were blocking the access road.
Then again,
the saga has not been without its happy accidents. The Taylors were incredibly
fortunate to have a 14-tonne excavator already on site, the vehicle having been
hired the week before the fire. The owner of the hire company has himself now
come under attack via social media and email, and says that had he known this
was going to happen he would “probably have done something different,” adding,
“but I’m not Mystic Meg”. Quite so, and which of us is?
No sooner
had the Crooked House gone up in flames than furious people were calling for
the unique pub to be rebuilt brick by brick – a task that is now considerably
more difficult after the building’s complete destruction by the excavator.
However, it is not entirely without precedent. A few years ago, the Carlton
Tavern in London’s Maida Vale was illegally bulldozed by developers. Following
a tireless and impassioned local campaign, it reopened in 2021 after
Westminster council had forced the owners to rebuild it “in facsimile”.
Meanwhile it’s possible the whole affair is unfolding surprisingly for the
Taylors, who own various quarry and development sites, have gutted and shut a
pub five miles away, and seem unlikely to have forecast that their personal
tragedy would catch quite so much attention.
The word
“undermine” is now used figuratively, but started out hundreds of years ago
connoting the literal business of rendering something unstable by digging
somewhere beneath its foundations. That was what made the Crooked House crooked
originally – it was positioned within the bounds of Himley colliery, and
under-mining caused the subsidence that eventually resulted in one end of the
pub sitting 4ft lower than the other.
But perhaps
the reason the Crooked House’s destruction has struck quite such a chord is
that it taps into that very prevalent sense that things in this country are
being figuratively undermined. You hear a lot these days about dysfunction in
the public realm and far beyond, as well as people’s sense of powerlessness
about it. Photos from the former pub site show locals stumbling around the pile
of charred bricks. The general vibe is of people standing in the rubble of
something they cared about, and there not being a whole lot they can do about
it. Symbolic/relatable/extremely on the nose – take your pick. One of the
dominant moods of the age is that something is being got away with.
Set against
that, regrettably, must be the knowledge that however much people loved the
Crooked House, it wasn’t quite enough to visit very often. The pub’s former
landlord this week spoke of the ultimately doomed task of keeping it going
through last winter, when on many days only “a handful” of people would step
through its doors. A reminder, perhaps, to check in on our favourite local
places as we might on elderly relatives. The Crooked House was certainly
elderly, having stood in some form since 1765.
As for the
Taylors, could the couple please present themselves before a TV camera at their
earliest opportunity? After all, speaking of concern for welfare, I’m sure a
nation very much wishes to check in on them.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
‘People are sick of having our heritage knocked
down’: how the Crooked House saga became a state of the nation story
Fate of Black Country pub could serve as catalyst for
campaigns to preserve a flawed but colourful past
Jessica
Murray Midlands correspondent
Sat 12 Aug
2023 17.02 BST
When Paul
Turner started an online petition calling for his local pub in the Staffordshire
village of Himley to be saved after it was sold to new owners, he was expecting
only a few hundred signatures. Then the Crooked House pub burned down, making
headlines around the world.
“I expected
it to be just a few names, but we’re approaching 16,000 signatures now,” said
Turner. “It has turned into something completely different. The amount of
support we’ve had has been unbelievable.”
When locals
awoke on Sunday morning to the news that the pub, famously wonky due to mining
subsidence, had burned to the ground the previous night, there was mounting
anger.
As more
details emerged, suspicions grew. The road to the pub, which had been sold to
new owners nine days previously, was blocked with mounds of earth so fire
engines were unable to get close to the burning building.
Online
sleuthing increased, and other details seemed almost unbelievable. Prior to the
pub being sold, a band had been booked to perform on that same Saturday night
of the fire. Their name? Gasoline and Matches. (They have since released a
statement saying it was merely an unfortunate coincidence.)
There was
already nationwide concern over the blaze, but the events of Monday caused a
huge outcry. While Staffordshire police were releasing a statement saying they
were reviewing all evidence to investigate the cause of the fire, a video
appeared online showing a digger knocking down the remains of the building.
South Staffordshire council disclosed that they had spoken to the owners but
did not agree to a full demolition. It also emerged that the digger had
allegedly been hired and brought on site before the fire took place.
All that
remains is a pile of rubble, along with scattered placards from locals who have
been staging protests at the scene, demanding that the pub be rebuilt.
“I really
hope we can get it rebuilt. It’s not just about the pub, I think people are
sick of having our heritage knocked down, and losing buildings that we just
shouldn’t be losing,” said Laura Catton, who was landlady at the Crooked House
from 2006-2008.
Like many
locals protesting at the site on Friday evening, she had fond memories of her
time there. She met her husband at the pub, and had her first child while
living there.
“My life
would be very different without this building,” she said. “It was such a
special place. You would walk in and instantly feel drunk because you’re not
upright – well you are upright, but the building wasn’t.”
A
grandfather clock appeared to be at an angle but was actually perpendicular.
Customers would be handed a marble to roll along the bar and it would appear to
be rolling uphill.
“That’s
what everyone came to see – the bottles rolling up the tables instead of down,”
said Emma Smith, from nearby Kingswinford.
“My nan and
grandad brought me when I was little, and I’ve brought my kids here. Everybody
knows the Crooked House, it’s part of Dudley, part of our history, and now it’s
gone. There’s a lot of questions that need answering – everyone is so angry.”
Crooked or
slanted buildings were not uncommon in the Black Country, once famed for its
abundance of coal and thriving mining industry. “But they were usually knocked
down,” said Chris Baker from the Black Country Society. “This one became an
institution over the last century. It was one of the few remaining signs of the
industry, of how things used to be.
“But for
me, and for many others, it had become a metaphor. It was the sort of thing my
mother used to say: when dad put up a shelf, ‘it was as straight as the Crooked
House’. It had entered into the local consciousness; even if you had never been
there, you knew about it.”
The
building started life as a farmhouse in 1765 on an estate later owned by the
Glynne family – the original name was the Glynne Arms.
Coalmining
led the property to sink by several feet, and it only survived with the support
of buttresses. It became known as Crooked House or Siden House – in Black
Country dialect, siden means “side-in” or crooked – and was officially renamed
in 2002.
“It was one
of those things that feels like it belongs to us. It doesn’t matter who the
owner is, it belongs to the Black Country,” said Turner.
The new
owner of the Crooked House is, in fact, ATE Farms, a property company
controlled by Carly Taylor and registered at the same address as Himley
Environmental, which runs a landfill site next to the pub. Her husband, Adam,
is a shareholder and former director of Himley Environmental.
With
international media attention and calls from politicians for action, locals are
confident the issue won’t be left to lie, especially when other councils have
set a precedent that owners can be told to rebuild pubs when demolished without
permission.
Andy
Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, has been particularly vocal, saying he
was “laser-focused” on ensuring the pub is “rebuilt brick-by-brick … and not
consigned to history”.
The saga
also cast light on the number of pubs demolished in recent years, and there are
growing calls for tougher planning legislation to prevent it from happening
elsewhere.
“This needs
to lead to legislation which prevents this sort of thing happening in other
areas, because there are a lot of traditional pubs that need protecting,” said
Turner. “This one was crooked, this one was unique, and maybe this is the one
that can get everybody’s attention and hopefully protect other pubs.”
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