Open House

At Open House weekend, once a year, all sorts of interesting places open their doors to the public. This year, Walthamstow's offerings included a hipster popup bar and a trendy house extension. It has to be said, there were not many venues locally apart from places that you can just walk into anyway, like the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum, but a little can go a long way. Nothing to compete with getting to visit the revolving restaurant at the top of the BT Tower (you have to apply on a lottery basis and I finally got lucky this time) but interesting enough.

We visited Sideshow first, the temporary bar space on one of the demolition sites next to Blackhorse Road station, a spin-off from Blackhorse Workshop that is only there until the end of the year. Although it is open for coffee in the mornings and as a bar a couple of nights a week, I hadn't seen it before, and the architects were there to explain about the place. It's colourful, a series of plywood walls painted in bright primary colours, with zigzag tops to remind us of the factories that have been demolished all over the area. The bar has a roof but most of the space is open to the sky. There are tables and benches, various bits of art to look at, a metal fence to lock your bike to. The colour is uplifting, as is the indoor-outdoor feeling on a fairly cold morning. The star turn though, is the Heath Robinson-ish ball race contraption. Turn a huge rubber tyre and steel balls slowly rise way above your head, propelled by a very long archimedes screw (like a wood screw but much bigger) until they reach the tipping point. From there they race round a complicated array of tubes overhead, making a lot of noise but, since the tubes are mostly opaque metal, it's impossible to work out where they are - you can only guess from the sound, and look out for them hurtling through the clear plastic bits. When the balls get down to the lower levels, there are levers you can pull to let them go a bit further, until they get back to the beginning. Worth a look on a normal opening day, probably a nice place to drop in when they open in the evening. Catch it before it closes and the excavators move in.

The other venue was quite different, a private house that has had a drastic overhaul of the sort you expect to see in Islington, not in Walthamstow. Or did until recently. Originally a quirky Warner house with tiny rooms, the back of the house has been extended to make a spacious kitchen / living room with big glass doors opening out to the garden. Upstairs, a new bedroom extension juts out from the back of the house, a tall bright space internally, on the outside clad in trendy charred timber. Charred timber is literally burnt black on the outside instead of being painted. It's burnt somewhere else, before being nailed on to the outside of the building. I was sorry to see the downstairs part of the extension - although it's also black - is not charred but painted, perhaps because all that burnt wood will blacken anything that touches it. The combination of old and new does work, up to a point. You have a sense that the original rooms are very much secondary, and there is inevitably something a bit jarring about the juxtaposition of old and new. One of the original front rooms is an office, the other is really just a way through to the back. But it helps having some old furniture in the new part. A bit of inconsistency makes for a more interesting place to live, and it's certainly a cut above the standard kitchen extensions and loft extensions you see all over Walthamstow.

Designing the town centre

On Friday I joined a group touring the High Street with members of the council's design and development team, an event that was designed to show off the many development sites in the area. The most interesting discovery was that the council have an office on the top floor of the Scene, a corner flat with great views across London. We met there for coffee and introductions before setting off to look at the quiet private courtyard for residents of the Scene. It's a car-free development. Is it true that (as rumoured) after three years tenants can get a parking permit? Nobody knew the answer but they thought probably not.

I spent two hours with an assorted bunch of architects and a contractor or two without really discovering what the purpose of the tour was or who it was aimed at. But as a resident it was at least a chance to make a point or two about the Mall proposals. We got to discuss (briefly) the loss of public space, 150 year old trees likely to be cut down, and the lack of joined-up strategy for the overall space including the bus station and Natwest. Vague plans for an overall strategy were mentioned but it certainly isn't at the stage of hiring designers to work out an acceptable solution, an alternative to the Mall's commercially driven proposals.

Isn't the value of the current square and garden their scale, large spaces flexible enough for all sorts of activities? No, the response was that a smaller space could be better designed and would provide somewhere to arrive at rather than just passing through. No, the trees are suffering from being too close together. The Scene is obviously a nice place to live and enhances the end of the High Street, tall but not too tall. But surely tall towers without their own public space are not going to enhance anything? I missed my chance to mention Grenfell Tower, but in any case we didn't get any response on that as far as I could tell. But it was pretty noisy, maybe I missed something when a refuse truck pulled up alongside our little group.

We looked at the shopfront improvements at the St James end of the market. Nothing to criticise there (except that whoever designed the new shopfronts ought to know that window sills need to slope so the rain runs off, otherwise they will go rotten). It's paid for by the council and lottery money about 50-50, about £3 million overall. Looks like money well spent (except for the window sills).

Lastly we walked over towards the South Grove site. Interestingly, there was talk about developing the dire bus park area behind the High Street, bringing that to life with new uses. Then the tunnel under the railway brought us into the old industrial area. The garages were all busy, and demolition of one large block is well under way. Nothing decided yet about the long-derelict pub. This site between the railway and South Grove is earmarked for tall blocks, which will be perhaps a bit like Tottenham Hale. What about the loss of business premises? Yes, they have to move further and further out. Could the small garage inits be turned around so they don't face the new residential area? NO, they are part of the land designated for development. Aren't there any plans to provide affordable business units elsewhere in the borough, perhaps where industrial areas could become denser? Well yes.. sort of, nothing definite though.

I would have liked to know more about the new requirement for significant planning applications to go to a design panel, but discovered nothing useful except that it happens. It was a frustrating morning. The team have obviously considered all the issues before, but the event (which to be fair wasn't designed for that purpose) provided only a hint about the reasoning behind the current official policies. Walking around provides immediacy but it's not really the best situation to discuss and understand the pros and cons of complex issues.

Another one bites the dust

This is the big Art Deco factory building in Burwell Road. It's the biggest feature of a little complex of industrial buildings, not the elaborate Victorian architecture that would perhaps be listed, but simply solid brick buildings with big Crittall metal windows, metal roof trusses and lots of rooflights. Nothing fancy apart from the decorative street frontage, but the buildings have a solid dignity that could have formed a basis for something really interesting, perhaps a mixture of flats, shops and studios, a place with a real sense of identity that would be an asset to this end of Lea Bridge Road. That isn't going to happen though. The site was sold for development, the developers applied for planning permission for flats, and despite highly vocal opposition, planning permission was granted without any serious modifications to the densely packed tower blocks that were drawn up. What is going to be built on the site is just flats, too many flats appallingly shoe-horned into the space to maximise profits. The last tenants have gone, and now the demolition machines are working their way across the site, leaving this imposing structure until last. It's unlikely to be a great place to live, let alone 'affordable'. The little two-storey terraced houses across the road are going to be diminished by the close proximity of very much taller buildings - and it is no justification to point to the familiar presence of the factory even if it is twice the height of the houses.

In a parallel universe, old buildings like these would be an asset, even when their usefulness as factories and workshops is over. All over the country, old industrial buildings have been rescued and turned into thriving popular areas, using the inherent qualities of no-nonsense industrial buildings to enhance ideas and enterprises that don't fit easily with modern development. Camden Lock made it work by using the old warehouses, stables and workshops for the thriving market. Covent Garden and Spitalfields markets were due to be demolished, but instead became successful as a different kind of marketplace. Borough Market, better managed perhaps by the long-established Borough Market Trust, simply made the transition bit by bit, acquiring some modern additions that blend in with the whole sprawling, hectic phenomenon. In Clerkenwell, businesses and flats occupy the old commercial buildings. But it takes a particular combination of development control, economics and enterprise to make that sort of thing work: buildings and land with little in the way of cash-in value, or protected by listing or conservation status, and often, enterprises working on a shoestring while they becomes established. Walthamstow's industrial buildings are mainly doomed simply because the land they occupy is so valuable, and except in rare cases there is no statutory protection. A huge swathe of buildings along Blackhorse Lane and Sutherland Road went in the last five years, with just two buildings - Gnome House and Blackhorse Workshop - left as inspiring examples to show what might have been. At this point I don't think there is anything major left to demolish.

Burwell Road, photographed November 2016 (above) and February 2017

Architectural limbo

Right next door to the Victorian extravagance of the Bell pub in Forest Road, this little architectural gem goes un-noticed. Clearly, nobody cares about it at the moment, it's just a roof over the fish and chip shop and some no doubt awful flats upstairs. The crass metal facade of Tesco Express next door really doesn't help (although that is not Tesco's fault, it used to be Jewsons the builders merchants), boiler flues are crudely bodged through the fabric of the building, and if all those satellite dishes are not illegal they ought to be. Even so, the architectural quality is rather outstanding, crisp bold details carved in good quality limestone, set off nicely by the red bricks. The original shopfront is long gone, but the upper floors are basically intact. Date, at a guess, around 1910, a time when buildings were almost extravagantly substantial, if not always outstanding as architecture. It sits stranded between the pub yard and the single storey supermarket, as if waiting for better times.

Walthamstow has a reasonable architectural heritage - thousands of solidly-built terraced houses, some good civic buildings, the remnants of some fairly unexciting country houses - but not so many buildings like this, ordinary commercial buildings with a bit of class. We can't afford to build anything like as good now, for complicated reasons which I suppose come down to all the things people didn't have and didn't even aspire to in 1910, but do now. All the more reason to value what we do have, a wealth of decoration and craftsmanship that can't be replaced, and saves the modern city from uniform contemporary blandness.

Discussion point: wanting buildings like this to be cleaned up is arguably a sign of creeping gentrification, but does this sort of mess really represent some kind of gritty authenticity?

Filling a gap

We're getting used to seeing large buildings shoe-horned into every available corner of Walthamstow. Here though, someone has decided to build a little house, set back from the street and cautiously nestled up against the shop next door, where a much larger three-storey building would fit right in. I've no idea if that's all the planning department would allow, or whether the developer considered alternatives. Either way, it would be great to see the Forest Road / Palmerston Road corner rounded off with houses, to replace the hideous advertising hoarding that dominates the crossroads, and perhaps this is a start.

Brutalism, love it or hate it

Walthamstow has very little in the way of seventies concrete architecture, which a lot of people think is a good thing, but there is renewed interest in the Brutalist architecture of the period. For example, there is a thriving Brutalist Appreciation Society on Facebook, as well as books and exhibitions on the subject. Most of the old residential towers in Walthamstow have been demolished, and there are only a few buildings that fit into the category. In the whole of Walthamstow there are just two proper high-rise towers left, both of them transformed by a facelift in an extravagant postmodern style dating, at a guess, from the early nineties. In both cases the facelift itself looks dated now, but I suspect most local people would prefer that to the raw concrete original.

This abstract mural panel is a remnant that didn't get the postmodern treatment, part of the boundary wall of the St David's Court tower. There are two long panels on the corner of Wood Street and Forest Road, looking a little lost in a landscaped left-over patch, along with a fake Victorian clock and a circular planter, a space that's not really doing anything useful (but on the plus side, it's not just adverts and fly tipping). The cement panels remain as a reminder of the seventies craze for all things concrete.

Coming soon, more on the Brutalist style and what’s left of it in E17.

Green Open Homes

A handful of Waltham Forest residents opened their doors to the public last weekend for the third Green Open Homes event. I wasn't expecting it to be especially fascinating but I was completely wrong. Quite apart from the excuse to nose around other people's houses, it was impressive to see so much creativity and enthusiasm for the grass roots of green enterprise. I went to six houses and only just managed to fit them all into a Sunday tour, grappling with a complicated schedule of opening times. First up was Nicola and Oli's pebble garden on Billet Road. They both work for the Institute of Making, so have some connections, among which was getting Monty Don (the TV guy) to design the garden. There's no grass or weeds, just weathered timber and smooth seaside pebbles (recycled from an exhibition), galvanised water tanks used as planters, and a lounger made out of an old futon base.

At Andrew's house in Northbank Road, I forgot to ask about the green insulation and underfloor heating features, getting engrossed in the reclaimed furniture, this blue Art Nouveau-ish dresser being the most spectacular piece, displayed to advantage with dried flowers and a backdrop of children's drawings. The garden here, though, is notable for the stacks of useful junk: several bicycles that could be made to go, a good sized wood-fired oven, and a large plastic tank that will be used for collecting and re-using rainwater.

On Chingford Road, Sue and Michael were faced with appalling damp in their newly-bought house and tackled it by putting in insulation and heat-recovery ventilation throughout. You would never know, it's so well integrated. Sue (who is an environmental consultant by day) explained how the thickness of insulation left just enough space for the sofa and a piano in the living room - otherwise they might have had to make the insulation thinner. They also built a kitchen using bought units but the worktops and cupboard fronts made out of plywood and recycled floorboards. It has amazing pull-out corner shelves and lots of nice unique features. Their side extension (the drying room) has stained glass windows from Ruby Stables and two Victorian-style drying racks, to avoid wasting energy on a tumbler dryer.

The houses in Penrhyn Crescent are a model of what social housing once was, spacious with huge gardens. Rebecca and Luke were particularly showing their solar shower and composting toilet (although Luke was keeping a low profile). The shower is wonderfully Heath Robinson. The water is heated by two big radiators painted black, inside a glass-fronted box up on a flat roof. Rebecca demonstrated how nice and warm the water gets, even tough it was an overcast afternoon. Visitors were offered the chance to try it, although I don't think anyone actually took up the offer. I didn't ask all the questions in my mind about the composting toilet, but discovered some of the reasons for making it - "a sort of hippy background" and a stay on an organic farm in South America, and simply "why not?" Both the toilet and the shower are partitioned off in the ramshackle conservatory that doubles as greenhouse, bike shed and workshop.

I visited Headway Gardens, which is a completely different kind of project. John Struthers masterminded this self-build development of ten family houses build on land once occupied by 50 lockup garages. It looks likely to kickstart another project of the same kind: members of the new Family Foundations project were around to explain the project and show people around. A hugely worthwhile scheme - I'll try to write more about this another time.

I'm beginning to see a pattern in artistic Walthamstow homes, white walls with objects and artworks imaginatively arranged, and a mixture of Ikea and recycled furniture - but also living spaces diverted to practical uses. Charlie's house in Billet Road is no exception. She's tackled a house in appalling condition with amazing energy, and made the downstairs (at least) into a wonderful mix of workroom and lounge, full of colourful lampshades (part of her upcycling business), crusty German pottery and colourful recycled bits and pieces. An inspiring end to what turned out to be quite an exhausting day.

An attitude to change

Last year, everything between the Standard and Gnome House was flattened, leaving a whole stretch of Blackhorse Lane with no buildings on the west side. It’s opened up a whole new vista of sky that wasn't there before. You quickly get used to that sort of thing, and begin to take it for granted that there is an amazing view every time the day ends with a break in the clouds, a red glow on the horizon and the clouds lit up pink, the sky shading through subtle shades from orange to deep blue. In the daytime, it’s the sort of big sky you get at the seaside, houses and shops along one side and nothing at all the other side. At least, like the seaside with a hoarding blocking off the view of the actual sea. This is temporary, of course. The buildings were demolished because new flats are going up, and soon enough they will be tall enough to block the view again, and then I suppose we will feel deprived of the previous open-ness for a while, until the new streetscape becomes familiar. It’s happening all over Walthamstow, with probably dozens of new development sites in the pipeline, large and small, averaging five to seven storeys and some of them much higher. The net result is going to be more buildings and less sky, a radical shake-up in the familiar landscape that has hardly changed for a long time.

The changes are a complicated equation, representing investment and improvement, but also loss of affordability and familiar places changed beyond recognition, a sense that things could go many different ways but the way it’s actually going is driven by profit, not necessarily by what people want to happen. So far, it’s mainly industrial sites that are being redeveloped, but the process is not stopping there, and is becoming increasingly controversial as the sites are closer to public attention. Two snooker halls and the derelict cinema in Buxton Road to become flats (hopefully the Embassy will only be converted, not demolished). More flats taking over the entire South Grove car park and industrial area, including some very tall buildings. Huge towers crammed onto a site on Lea Bridge Road, overlooking the marshes. A proposal to expand the Mall including a 27 storey tower and other buildings covering nearly half the Town Square Gardens. Not least, the whole Marlowe estate including the recently completed plaza and playground about to be demolished.

Some proposals are positive, nearly all need a healthy dose of criticism to try to shape them closer to what is appropriate. There is no point simply objecting to every change. It’s worth remembering that Walthamstow was more or less countryside a little more than a hundred years ago, and if capitalism in the form of property development hadn't changed things drastically, most of us would not be living here now.

Town centre consultation

Last weekend I caught the tail-end of the Walthamstow Town Centre Consultation event at the Mill. These events are a rare opportunity to understand the scope of the changes simmering below the surface, which you would otherwise only know about from snippets in the local press and on social media, or when hoardings and scaffolding go up. It's also a chance to say what you think. This exhibition shows, not specific proposals by developers, but a masterplan summary of all the sites that are opening up for development. The plan was produced by Cambridge architects Fifth Studio, who produced the information boards on show - they are still available online here, and the feedback form is here. Local consultation is a planning requirement and to some extent it's just a box-ticking exercise, but development on this scale is too important to just sit back and see what happens. The following is more or less what I wrote on the forms on the day.

1. Town Square and gardens, the Mall and library
Proposal: expand the Mall into a substantial part of the the gardens. Demolish the bank to open up a view of the old library and make more open space on that side.
Of course the Mall would like to expand, but reducing the open space is going to be unwelcome. The open spaces work well at the moment, with a nice variety of large and small spaces. This would make the gardens into a neat rectangle, not necessarily an improvement. The side of the library already has a rather nice modern entrance, but opening up the side of the building would probably mean replacing that with a bigger structure to cover the whole side. The playground would of course be relocated, but this sounds very disruptive and would really only benefit the Mall. As an alternative, the garden entrance to the Mall is pretty awful and could be replaced with something modern, perhaps taking in Poundland and going to an upper shopping level, without taking more than a narrow sliver off the gardens.

2. High Street and Market
Proposal: Shopfront improvements.
This has been done to many shopfronts in the borough, and it's generally very successful. Affordability must be the most important factor here, to keep a thriving economy of independent businesses.

3. Hoe Street / High Street
Proposal: New 'luxury' apartments already under way on the Church Hill corner, future redevelopment of the flats and clock tower
The aim here is a cluster of relatively high-rise buildings to go with the Scene, a development that has had a hugely positive influence on the town centre. It's difficult to argue with, as long as the new buildings have retail uses at ground level. Two-storey Hoe Street is going to look increasingly quaint as this kind of development takes off, and eventually no doubt most of it will be replaced. The clock tower is quite a local landmark and I'm not alone in hoping the council be make clear undertaking to preserve it. The wavy canopy is, sadly, almost bound to go. I hope at the very least the Specsavers advertising hoarding will be banished.

4. Station / Hoe Street
Proposal: Replanning the traffic intersection to become a pedestrian-friendly street.
This is an ambitious town planning proposal that is extremely sketchy at present, but would link the two parts of Hoe Street that are currently separated by a sort of mini spaghetti junction. Can only be positive. Although the proposal I've seen for the site alongside the station is appallingly clumsy bit of identikit architecture. It's hard to see why the station itself isn't redeveloped as a proper modern building. At the moment, despite the recent half-baked restoration, it's still a crappy suburban station, hardly the pride of the Victoria Line as it ought to be.

5. Mission Grove
Proposal: Multi-storey blocks of flats, general improvements.
There isn't much to be said about this. The main site for redevelopment is the old cinema on Buxton Road, which is likely to become a tall residential building. I don't know how the planning department decide how many storeys to allow: generally the developers want at least five, which is going to tower above the poor old Warner houses alongside. The council car park is among the sites simply highlighted a redevelopment potential - which should be uncontentious once everyone has seen sense and decide to cycle to the shops.

6. St James Street / South Grove
Proposal: shopfront improvements, massive redevelopment on the car park and industrial estate.
Again, a massive hoarding that should have no place in a decent town centre, and ought to go. Riley's snooker hall is going to be developed as flats but I don't think plans have been submitted. It's a wonderful Art Deco building and surely it will be converted, not replaced. There's a planning proposal for what was called the Morrisons site, until they pulled out. This is even taller. It may not be a bad thing to create a cluster of taller buildings here, but the plans show the entire industrial estate wiped out. Planning policy used to be entirely opposed to removing anything that provided employment, but now the mantra is housing, housing and more housing. But it's not just about jobs. Walthamstow is just starting to attract creative enterprises of all kinds, the sort of thing that needs affordable space to get started, and where is the space for that in the plans? The only sort of buildings that can provide that are exactly the old, neglected properties that are being systematically eliminated from the whole of Walthamstow. Nipped in the bud?

Local group Architects E17 are working hard to become a regular influence on local planning decisions, regularly reviewing planning applications and local policy documents, like the one that formed the basis of this consultation event. They send out a regular newsletter which is a useful way to keeping tabs on developments.

Pile driving

A giant piling rig has been in action on Blackhorse Lane this week, putting in the foundations for the first phase of construction on the Mandora redevelopment site. It works like a giant corkscrew, drilling holes that are filled up with reinforced concrete to make a solid base for the new buildings. I'm not hoping for anything other than inoffensive blandnesss, from what I've seen in the way of annoyingly vague visuals illustrating the finished complex, each computer-generated version blander than the one that preceded it. This first phase will be a huge student housing block with 527 beds, most of them in 'clusters' - something like a shared flat, at a guess. There will be a sensible four storeys on the main road with shops on the ground floor, but further back inside the site the highest will be seven storeys. Steel frames are likely to start going up after Christmas, but practical completion isn't scheduled until August 2017, which probably means even longer in practice, a whole two years of construction.

Enjoy the big sky effect while it lasts - since the Mandora office building was demolished we've been able to appreciate some spectacular sunsets, the sort of unobstructed view you don't usually get in London.

Walthamstow's unloved clock tower

The clock tower at the top of the High Street marks the spot where a German V1 rocket dropped into a crowded market day morning, demolishing the old drapers, the fish and chip shop and many other established businesses, damaging but not destroying the Granada cinema and causing many casualties. The destruction wasn't cleaned up immediately, and it was twenty years before the new parade of shops was built at the crossroads of the High Street and Hoe Street, the new civic building rising above everything else at the corner. The flats are still occupied but the rest of the place is disused now, apart from the occasional Hoe Street Central pop-up and three or four other shops. Most of the shop windows are empty, the public hall isn't used and the clock came to rest at twenty-five to four one day and hasn't moved since*. The tower is pure Festival of Britain, an uncompromisingly modernist and thoroughly brutal slab shape with a shallow barrel-vault roof, typical of the fifties and already a little dated by the time it was finished in 1964 - the year the Beatles released 'Can't Buy Me Love'. It's decorated with heraldic designs on one side, geometric tiles on the other, and clad in a grey stone that manages to look like raw concrete. Tastes change in architecture as elsewhere, so the design doesn't really fit in with notions of fifties chic, and the finishes look somehow mean by modern standards, all except for the shields with their mysterious symbolism fired onto clay tiles. What makes it special, though, is the open loggia inviting you to climb maybe a hundred steps to enjoy the view over the rooftops of Walthamstow, open to the elements but sheltered from rain or sun. Perhaps just a symbolic invitation, since the doors are decidedly locked and even if the building was open, it would probably be deemed a health and safety risk, but an invitation none the less. It's ugly but also a reminder of the past and how things change, a landmark we recognise without really noticing, and perhaps worth appreciating a little more.

*Post-release note: several people have pointed out that the clocks do in fact keep perfect time, and apparently the hall is rented out to a private company. But I'm hearing hints that the place may come back into public use again.

Clock this

The Clock House at 13 Pretoria Avenue is just one of the eighteenth-century villas built by wealthy families around Walthamstow village, at a time before all the terraced houses sprang up, replacing the orchards, market gardens and country estates. The area was favoured by merchants, early commuters who could live in style and take a conveniently short coach ride to the City to attend to business. The journey, about seven miles, must have taken no more than an hour.

Waltham Forest council's website has a page devoted to the listed buildings of the borough. It describes the Clock House as "Grade II: Regency style detached villa, erected in 1813 and the original Walthamstow home of the Warner family. Originally set in extensive landscaped grounds fronting Marsh Street (now High Street)". There's a china plate at the Vestry House museum showing a view of the house in its original park setting. Those landscaped grounds surrounding the house were soon developed, though, as Walthamstow became more built-up. The Warner properties along Pretoria Avenue were built in 1888, coming right up to the edge of the house, and Mission Grove was driven through what would have been the front garden. The grand entrance now looks rather out of place so close to the street.

I photographed the house as part of my project to document some of the interesting buildings in the area, and posted the photos on Flickr. Walthamstow man Dan K saw this one and sent me a link to his own photo of the house, with comments sent in over the past few years. A lady by the name of Amanda ("almost 44!") says "I was born and brought up in Walthamstow... We lived in Pretoria Avenue and Chewton Road - in Warner properties (and bought our house in Pretoria from Warners). I expect it's all changed there now - we moved when I was 16 and I haven't been back since my grandparents passed away in the 90s. I miss it - but don't want to go back because I fear it's changed out of all recognition." If nothing else, those new flats behind the house would be a surprise, but otherwise Pretoria Avenue can't have changed very much since then. She continues, "I remember seeing an old photo of it looking very grand in a park like setting - it belonged to the Warner family and I guess it was their home. When I was little it used to be a flour factory and I remember a HUGE chute at the back where sacks of flour used to be shot down to waiting lorries".

The present owner bought Clock House in 1999 when it was used as a warehouse, and spent a year restoring it as flats. He had a hard time convincing the council to allow the change of use, and had to comply with stringent Listed Building requirements for the way the work was carried out. The side of the house had been made into a two-storey advertising sign with lettering made of cement render, which you might think of as an interesting part of the building's history, but that had to be removed. The original stone portico was completely missing, and a new portico was built, no doubt at huge expense, to a historically accurate pattern based on old illustrations and photographs.