‘It’s not all castles and historic houses’ | Q&A with Gavin Sorby

An estimated two percent of buildings in the UK are listed, which equates to around 380,000 nationally important heritage assets – making it a sector with significant impact. Place Yorkshire spoke with the managing director of heritage architect firm Buttress to discuss the trends shaping the sector now and in the future.

What will Buttress be focusing on at UKREiiF? 

We’ve got a pretty broad spectrum to hit, to be honest, so it’s always a bit of a challenge for us, but we are focusing a lot on something we’ve built on for 35 years – retrofit, which used to be called refurbishment, but now it’s changed its name to become more trendy. Because we’ve been working on heritage buildings for so long, we’ve always done it and we sort of take it for granted. Now, with the sustainability element to it as well, it’s becoming quite an interesting discussion again, and so retrofit’s a big a big part of it for us, as is heritage consultancy.

We’ve got our biggest delegation going this year and we’ve got the stand, but we’re also speaking at a couple of events as well. We’re talking about our UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings pilot at our exhibition stand and we’re sponsoring Historic England’s investment prospectus, and speaking at that, on top of our own event – we’re hosting a panel and trying to respond to the question, ‘what will the heritage of the future will look like?’ Which is an interesting question.

On that topic, what does the heritage of the future look like?

I think it’s a very broad question, and you could probably speak to 100 people and get 100 different answers. You could take a view that a lot of the heritage we’ve got now is just lucky that it survived, and a lot of people believe it’s because it’s old – and there’s some truth in that.

There’s another group of people that will save a whole spectrum of things, so they’re not just looking to save what’s good. 
They’re looking to save some of the bad and the more lowly – it’s not all castles and historic houses. It’s houses that people with no money might have lived in, or 20 people with no money might have lived in… so it’s a wide spectrum. 
It can be from the quite humble to the quite grand. Personally, I think good architecture will last.

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Do you think the more humble buildings are worth keeping as a record of history?

Things get listed for architectural or historical interests, and they might not have architectural interest to the same degree, perhaps, but they do have heritage interest. There are buildings in Manchester that are old farm buildings with pitching holes, where they used to stand on a cart and throw hay through. That’s all part of Manchester’s history, but it’s not architecturally fascinating to look at. I think there’s a case for saving all sorts of things, but not everything.

We will have someone from Historic England on our panel, and I think how they would select things will make for an interesting discussion.
There’s no right or wrong. If you’re a developer, are you just there to make money, or are you there to give something more? If I was a developer, I’d like what I build to be there in 100 years, 200 years. I’d like it to be the heritage for the future and making a contribution to wider society.

Sustainability, as you said earlier, is a huge part of the industry now and goes hand-in-hand with heritage and retrofit, rather than ‘demolish and rebuild’. Does this emphasis help with the argument for retaining heritage aspects in a building? 

We try to guide clients, but you can’t take them where they don’t want to go. There’s more willingness now to go on that journey. As we’re seeing planning officers and planning authorities ask for sustainability statements and justification for demolishing an existing building, particularly a concrete one, it’s certainly a greater consideration.  We will always consider what opportunities exist for reuse and retention of a building or structure. There are moral questions around retention and the embodied carbon in what can be retained. We will always have a ‘retention first’ approach, however sometimes that simply does not provide the best outcome for the site and wider community.

I think the world’s changed. When people are looking at decarbonising estates, an organisation or an authority will look at all the buildings they have in their portfolio and they’ll say, ‘we need to decarbonise’ but then they’ll put the harder heritage ones to one side and deal with the straightforward ones first. They’ll put the heritage ones into another pile, and we can do that. [Those buildings are] not a worry to us.

What are the main trends impacting the industry, or challenges in the industry at the moment, that you expect to be talking about at UKREiiF?

There’s a few things going on. AI is big in every industry at the minute, and it’s certainly big in architecture and how we use it, what we use it for, and how we check that what it does is actually right. There’s some amazing AI solutions out there that are phenomenal, but also phenomenally expensive – and do they actually do what they say they will? I’m very skeptical, but that could be because I’m really old.

So, AI will come up, and Net Zero has been there for a while and has been the big focus at UKREiiF for the last two years, to the point of being repetitive. We’ve got our own route towards that and it’s a much bigger part of what we do now… It’s about community, and putting people more at the heart of things. When you’re looking at where where people live, the environment they live in, it’s not just their house or apartment – it’s what’s outside the front door: do they feel they belong somewhere? 
When you walk out that front door, does it look like that place, or does it look like 3,000 other places? There’s a lot of focus around place-making.

Hospitality is key – whatever business you’re in, it’s hospitality: what experience is the visitor, occupier, or user getting? Whether that’s an office building, coliving, or an apartment scheme, it’s across everything. I think it’s interesting that as we’ve become more connected with IT and phones and digital, there’s a danger that we’ve become less connected to people. So, anything with increased human connection is valued.

We worked at Circle Square with SciTech Bruntwood, and they were all about the community. They had a number of disparate businesses in there, all around tech, but they wanted them to meet each other, often accidentally. So we purposely built in spaces where they would accidentally bump into each other ,and be able to talk and interact and find solutions to other people’s problems. To spark things that are outside their individual specialism – it’s those unintentional meetings, I think, that often lead to quite exciting things.

Buttress will be hosting its panel discussion on ‘what makes the heritage of the future’ at Clockwise from 3pm on 20 May.