Keeping The Faith

24 Feb 2006

The St Peter’s Building Preservation Trust has had a difficult two years. One of the Trust’s member’s explains how it plans to step up its campaign.

It has become a badge of honour to those who hold the work of Gillespie Kidd and Coia (GKC) in esteem to condemn what has happened to St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross. Patrick Hodgkinson, writing in the Mac Journal dedicated to GKC, said: “We would expect such a building to be adequately guarded by its owners rather than permit the organised vandalism which caused its death mask.” In the same publication, Gavin Stamp, the architectural historian and critic, wrote: “The abandonment of so much built capital, let alone of such an astonishingly sophisticated and powerful realisation of the ideas which had inspired Glasgow’s most celebrated modern firm of architects, really was an avoidable tragedy. The problem, perhaps, is not Gillespie Kidd and Coia but Scotland.”
Registering one’s protest as St Peter’s Seminary slides to its inevitable destiny seems to be the one thing that we can do. This attitude has been confused by an appreciation of the building as a ruin. Isi Metzstein, who along with Andy MacMillan formed the senior design team of GKC, has posited the idea of the seminary as ruin. “I rather enjoy the idea of everything being stripped away except the concrete itself – a purely romantic conception of the building as a beautiful ruin,” he said in Dianne Watters’ work, Cardross Seminary. The building is enjoyed by a huge number of people who appreciate the romantic experience of the building’s forms giving way to nature. Elsewhere in this issue, Richard J Williams places the building in a context of appreciating modernist structures as ruins.
However, we have to be incredibly careful about these two very natural responses – a feeling of helplessness and an aesthetic appreciation of the building in its current state. They could reconcile us to losing the building forever. The St Peter’s Building Preservation Trust was founded because the directors valued the architecture of St Peter’s. They subsequently realised that even “a romantic conception of the building as a beautiful ruin” was going to be impossible with the Archdiocese of Glasgow treating it as it did. The archdiocese’s suggests they would like the building to disappear completely. Re-use is still a possibility and yet as every day of inactivity passes, this possibility becomes harder to imagine. We would like to remember the singular grace of the building in whatever form we can.
John Deffenbaugh, Dan Dubowitz and Penny Lewis formed the St Peter’s Building Preservation Trust in 2004. The first meeting was held at Babbity Bowsters in Glasgow and attracted a wide range of interested individuals including Rob Joiner, RIBA Client of the Year, Sebastian Tombs of the RIAS, Liz Davidson of the Merchant City Townscape Heritage Initiative and Eleanor McAllister of Clydebank Re-built. The trust was given insightful legal advice from Moray Thomson of Shepperd and Wedderburn.
Early discussions about the purpose of the trust were fraught, but there was general agreement that the building should be saved and re-used, and this has been the guiding principle of the group ever since. Early attempts to strike up a dialogue with the Archdiocese and its agent, the developer Classical House, met with a frosty response. Classical House was already preparing a planning application for the development of the site and was not interested in the trust until Historic Scotland suggested that an application for listed building consent to change the seminary in to a consolidated ruin should be supported by an independent trust that had the best interests of the building at heart. In spring 2004, Classical House asked the trust to give support to its application and to agree to take ownership of the building once the land had been developed. Classical House’s plan was to build 29 speculative houses close to the college and to strip the seminary, closing off the upper floors and demolishing the convent block. The plans were drawn up by a team of consultants that had no track record in dealing with a historic building and bore a striking resemblance to the plans that had been rejected by a Reporter following a public inquiry a few years earlier. Although the Trust had reservations about the proposal, the trust believed that by working with the archdiocese it could influence the consolidation of the building. It could find a new user and access public funding such as Heritage Lottery.
However, it became clear that the archdiocese was not interested in entering into a dialogue with the trust. “Our support was needed to satisfy Historic Scotland. We were just being used,” recalls one trust member. The trust put together a team of consultants to look at re-use and to prevent further deterioration of the building. At the same time, the trust asked the Church for assurances that stabilisation would not damage the seminary and for a commitment that it would be the new owner. It was to no avail. SPBPT withdrew its support for the planning application. Shortly after, the Twentieth Century Society raised formal objections to the plans. They were joined by other organisations including the Civic Trust.
Despite an objection from Historic Scotland, Classical House and the Archdiocese seem committed to this destructive proposal. They are unwilling to adapt their plans. They argue that this is the only formula of uses that can work commercially. In spring 2005, the trust expanded its board to include Gordon Murray, Gordon Gibb, John Deffenbaugh Senior and myself. Over the past two years it has held a number of events and initiatives that have attracted support from a wide range of individuals, including film-maker Murray Grigor and artist Toby Paterson. The trust’s main aim is to identify a new user for the building before vandalism makes demolition a necessity.
St Peter’s Seminary reminds the archdiocese’s hierarchy that within living memory of the current Archbishop, its organisation was buoyant. As Watters has pointed out, reorganisation within the Catholic Church immediately after the war coincided with a wider social context where slums were demolished and the inhabitants rehoused in new towns, which needed new churches and new priests. A recommitment to the state provision of schooling, which included specialist Catholic schools, led to an increase in congregations.
It was an Indian summer as it turned out. By 1980 the seminary was abandoned. The Second Vatican Council, convened in 1961, advocated a change in the way that the priesthood was trained. Rather than learning its trade in secluded seminaries the Church now wanted it to learn among the laity, in universities or in communities. At the same time congregations went into decline. It is all too much for some people. On one internet message board, filled with images of the dilapidated building, one individual gives a typical response to the condition of the building. “I see these photos of a derelict and neglected college as truly symbolic of the dire state of the Church in Scotland itself,” writes the individual. Others concur. Of course the Church would like the land for development but the listing prevents this from happening. The subsequent obstinacy of the Church to react to that listing in a positive way shows what meaning the building has for it.
To the mighty, a ruin means failure. In an article written by Ruaridh Nicoll in the Observer on 29 January, 2006, Ken Crilley, estates director for the Archdiocese of Glasgow, made the plaintive remark, “it wasn\'t our fault someone listed it as category A”. Of course, it is very much the fault of the Church that someone listed it as category A. At one time the Church had the vision and the ambition to commission a wonderful building from GKC. In 1992, when it was listed, Historic Scotland acknowledged the success of that endeavour. It may seem unfair that someone has to deal with that but the Church is only reaping what it sowed. What seems even more odd is that the Church is not moribund. In 1900 the Catholic Church in Scotland had 475,000 members. It’s now got something like 700,000. It isn’t a beleaguered organisation; it only thinks of itself as one. The reasons why the Church feels under threat when it actually isn’t are obscure and this is not the place to go into them. Suffice to say that the current intellectual and cultural climate of the Catholic Church in Scotland under Archbishop Conti is at a low ebb compared with Archbishop Donald Campbell’s tenure.
And the trust is struggling to live with an ageing archdiocese, which on one hand sees its own waning influence in the ruins of St Peter’s and on the other sees it as a means of asserting itself. The Church is still a powerful organisation in Scotland and it still likes to prove its virility on the issue. Despite the trust’s request that Argyll and Bute Council use the mechanisms under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) (Scotland) Act 1997 to coerce the archdiocese to do so, it has been reluctant. Historic Scotland seems cowed by the archdiocese as well.
Crilley has criticised the trust for not coming up with anything constructive for the site. If he’d actually meet us then he would know what he was saying was untrue. We’ve constantly struggled to find a positive conclusion to the building’s story. When the trust tried to bring the BBC TV programme Restoration on board, the archdiocese refused. We have tried continually to come up with alternative uses but faced with an intransigent owner and toothless policing bodies, our plans fail. Potential end-users are deterred by the archdiocese. Only this week we were approached by individuals with the Heritage Lottery Fund informing us anonymously that there were certain grants we could apply for, only if the owner didn’t object. We couldn’t take up this offer because of the Church’s intransigence.
For the trust’s original members it has been an excruciating two years coming to fully that the Church does not want to save the building. We are confident, however, that progress can be made if pressure is put to bear on both the Church and Historic Scotland. We look forward to making some difficult decisions about what we actually do with the place after that.