Banner Drop to Save Churchill House

bath | local government | news report Thursday March 29, 2007 13:59 by Pink

Local protest to save yet another bit of Bathonian architecture gains strength. Activists scale Churchill House before popular march through to Guildhall, to pressurise councillors to save the building from misguided redevelopment.

From 7 am on Thursday 28th March, two activists scaled scaffolding and banner-dropped in defence of the threatened Churchill House, in Bath. The former electricity generation centre for the city, the large building on the corner of Dorchester Street was built in the 1930's, of Bath stone, but is now looking to be the next in the of a string of poorly conceived developments – just like the much-lamented Bath Spa Project and the Western Riverside developments.

A petition/campaign 'Save Churchill House' [http://www.savechurchillhouse.co.uk/] has been doing the rounds in Bath for at least the last 12 months, as the building is cited for reincarnation as a shiny new bus station; whilst promising people that the new structure will still be largely based around the old art-deco facade, recent wrangling behind senior council closed doors have now resulted in the most bizarre of plans: they want to construct a weird, gasometer-like monstrosity. Whilst the council has failed to pacify the local population with all sorts of obscure and nonsensical justifications, you can guess that the real bottom line will most likely involve the exchange of large amounts of cash.

Whilst the campaign had seemingly dwindled away to nothing of late, it suddenly burst back into life last Saturday when, from out of the blue, just shy of 600 people marched in its defence! 600 people! We're talking the biggest demo in Bath for years, probably bigger than numbers seen on the announcement of the Iraq invasion… Since then, local press have been all over the issue. This Thursday, today, there will be another demo, meeting outside the besieged Churchill House at 5.30pm, and moving on to the Guildhall at 6, where the council will be convening inside to determine its fate.