Celia Clark was a founder member of the Portsmouth Society and is now the Society's President.
Celia Clark’s contributions to conservation, education and defence heritage
Dr. Celia Clark has long contributed to building conservation: saving and finding new uses for historic buildings in her home city, Portsmouth and county, Hampshire, but also for working at regional and international levels to find sustainable new uses for ex-defence sites.
She is an academic, writer and built environment campaigner. Her father was in the army, moving from Kuala Lumpur to Egypt, Camberley, Berlin, Ripon, Aden, so her childhood was spent on army estates, but it gave her a sense of the wider world.
Identification with Portsmouth as Home Town
She didn't have a home town until she married Deane, who was born in Portsmouth. In 1970 the city council advertised for a historic buildings architect to save Portsmouth's old buildings and Deane got the job. She grew strong roots in Portsmouth, where she has lived ever since. She's even been identified with the city: her friend Keith Egleston, her predecessor as Education Officer of the Civic Trust, used to call her "Mrs. Portsmouth" - because she asked for help to save so many threatened city buildings at the meetings of the Hampshire Buildings Preservation Trust. As a member of the Civic Trust’s national Local Societies’ Advisory Committee she was nominated to the Hampshire board - the only woman when it was set up in 1976. Nearly 50 years later, she continues to be an active board member. In 2021 she set up the quarterly Solent Heritage Forum so those responsible for historic properties could share experience.
The Portsmouth Society/Civic Trust
The Portsmouth Society is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023. She was one of its founding members in 1973. The Society has helped save many familiar city landmarks from demolition: the Ship & Castle, St. Agatha’s Church, the Theatre Royal, the Palace Cinema, Rivers Street Hall in Somerstown, St. Mary's House, St. Jude's Church, Omega Street School, the recruiting office on the Hard, the dockyard Cell Block behind it and Boathouse 4 inside the dockyard. At her request the Hampshire Buildings Preservation Trust and Hampshire County Council produced conversion plans for St. Mary’s House, the Portsea Island Union Workhouse of 1846 for the public inquiry, where she led the opposition to its demolition. Purbrook School pupils told the inspector how important the building was as an exemplar of the ‘real’ Victorian values. The inspector refused demolition, citing its educational importance as a historic document. Portsmouth Housing Association converted it into flats.
As a result, from 1989 to 1991 she was Education Officer of the Civic Trust, the central body for civic societies. She worked with her colleagues in the National Trust and English Heritage to ensure that education in, about, and active involvement in the built environment was included in the first national curriculum. She encouraged and supported local societies across England in their education work at different levels and worked closely with the trust’s regeneration project officers to develop local educational initiatives in Thorne, Ilfracombe and Ramsgate. She edited Shaping Place, a newsheet for schools. She was a national assessor for the Civic Trust Awards in 2009.
To mark the millennium the Portsmouth Society held an exhibition in St. Agatha’s Church and produced a book Maritime City: Portsmouth 1945-2005 to which she contributed the chapters on conservation and education buildings.
In response to the rebuilding of Southsea seafront the Society campaigned to be given a choice of designs and supported the proposal by a group in the university to downgrade the M275 to an A road which would release much needed building land. She is a member of the Tipner Heritage Forum, set up by the city to advise on development at Tipner.
The 2023 campaign to prevent demolition of the iconic News Centre Hilsea supported by the Twentieth Century Society and experts on William Mitchell’s sculpture is a case study in the current government consultation on permitted development, under which heritage buildings are being lost.
Portsmouth Society Design Awards 1983 - 2024
In 2023 Lord Mayor Cllr. Hugh Mason praised the Society’s long running Design Awards, which highlight the best new buildings, restored and reused ones and landscaping which enhance the city every year. He and the Lady Mayoress said these awards raise local standards of design and were valued by developers, architects and those who live in, work in or enjoy them. In recognition of its long contribution to city life, in 2023 the Society was given its second Civic Award by the city council.
Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Society
From her work with dockyard craftsmen in 1982-4 as the founding secretary of the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Society she identified the four engineers who designed the Boathouse in the dockyard archives, applied to list it, and alerted SAVE Britain’s Heritage to the threat to replace it with a commercial building. The commercial backers dropped away and restored, it proved useful to the Naval Base Property Trust. Until recently it housed the appropriate International Boatbuilding Training College, which brings the tourist experience alive by seeing dockyard trades at work. She started to catalogue the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust’s archives in Storehouse 10. In the 1980s she recorded dockyard craftspeople including women who worked in the dockyard in WW1 using the city museum’s tape recorder. These tapes are now available to listen to in the Portsmouth History Centre.
Portsmouth WEA Local History Group
The Portsmouth WEA Local History Group which she helped to start in the 1970s publishes popular street and area histories based on local people's memories. This group is still going strong. To mark European Architectural Heritage Year 1975 with architect Barry Russell she produced Thomas Owen’s Southsea: Four Guided Walks based on the study by two architectural students of the early garden suburb and its houses designed by Owen. The leaflet was published by the city council in French and German and led to its declaration as an outstanding conservation area.
SAVE Britain’s Heritage Award 1977
In 1977 the Somerstown Community Association which she helped to found won the £2000 SAVE Britain’s Heritage award for restoring Rivers Street Hall, a National School of 1868, working with unemployed people led by a skilled craftsman to convert it into a theatre venue. Many famous touring companies performed there. It was converted by Portsmouth Housing Association and is now three houses. Inspired by the Greening the Towns and Cities conference in Liverpool in 1984 she, Roger James and others developed the city's first community wildlife garden behind the hall on a triangular site behind it bordering Winston Churchill Avenue.
Portsmouth Environmental Education Project
From 1984-88 she was a member of and later led the Environmental Education Project for unemployed graduates in Portsmouth which wrote, designed and published education materials about the city for schools, including Portsmouth at War, Portsmouth’s Lost Canal, The Portsea Trail, Poems from Pompey and an information pack about the ferry port.
Teaching Conservation/Wymering Manor Trust/Omega Centre Trust
She taught the history of architecture and buildings conservation to craftspeople at Portsmouth College of Art/Polytechnic/University from 1989 to 2008. Their specialist decoration skills led to their conservation work on Uppark, Windsor Castle, the Kings Theatre, Theatre Royal and other important buildings. She is a trustee of Wymering Manor, the oldest house in Portsmouth. This was gifted free by the city council in 2013 after Portsmouth Youth Hostel left because it was becoming increasingly derelict. The trustees are working towards restoring it and finding new sustainable uses for it. In May 2017 a traditional garden of yews, lavenders and roses was planted at the manor, with a grant she applied for from the Hampshire Gardens Trust. Consultants Glevum funded by a Resilience Grant, worked with the manor’s trustees on audience development, business plan, interpretation, architectural analysis, governance, catering – ready for a bid to the Lottery with matched funding to finally fully restore the manor for the local community to enjoy. The university school of architecture regularly uses the house for specialised teaching.
As a member of Portsmouth Makers she has long enjoyed making pots in the ceramics studio in the Omega Centre – in the room where she used to teach. She’s offering her long experience of the restoration and creative reuse of historic buildings as a member of the Omega Centre Trust – which is offering to take over and manage this Victorian school from the Portsmouth Elementary Education Foundation for the benefit of local people.
Books and articles
In 1995 SAVE Britain’s Heritage published her report: Beacons of Learning: Breathing new life into Urban Schools sponsored by English Heritage and Hampshire County Council. Gail Baird and Dan Bernard formed Tricorn Books in 2009 to publish her book: The Tricorn Life and Death of a Sixties Icon, since reprinted four times. Tricorn Books also published Celia and Deane Clark’s Portsmouth, A Portrait in Photographs which was given to foreign visitors by the Lord Mayor. In 2003/4 she and Deane were presenters in a series of seven short programmes on local conservation projects such as the wind tunnels at RAE Farnborough on BBC TV South: Southern Ways, tied in with the BBC2 Restoration series. She highlighted the reuse of historic naval buildings in the BBC programme Out of Africa linking redevelopment of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, a former British dockyard and HMS Vernon/Gunwharf.
She is the author of many articles and several books about architecture and conservation in dockyards and ex-military sites. Finding creative new uses for old buildings is celebrated in her books. In 2000 the University of the West of England published her Vintage Ports or Deserted Dockyards: differing futures for naval heritage across Europe (Working Paper No. 57 pp.115 Research Consultancy for University of the West of England, Bristol ISBN I 86043 281 6). Her recent book with Martin Marks OBE: Barracks, Forts and Ramparts: Regeneration Challenges for Portsmouth Harbour’s Defence Heritage (Tricorn Books 2020) documents experience on how the forts, ordnance and victualing yards, naval hospital and city walls have found new uses in the last fifty years. According to Wayne Cocroft of Historic England this book and Chatham Historic Dockyard World Power to Resurgence (Liverpool University Press 2021) “Both are very valuable first-hand records of the journeys both historic dockyards have and are taking.”
She donated her extensive collection of books and articles about architecture and planning to Portsmouth Central Library for local people to enjoy. Her defence heritage books are also there, ready to be catalogued and shelved next to the national Naval Collection.
Regeneration Research
Her Master’s degree dissertation at Oxford Brookes university in 1996 examined post-defence experience at four historic dockyards: Chatham, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Venice Arsenale. Her PhD thesis in 2002 explored the extent to which ex-defence communities gained or lost in the disposal of HMS Vernon/Gunwharf, Plymouth Stonehouse and Mount Wise and the Royal Gunpowder Works at Waltham Abbey Essex. She is a founder member of the Naval Dockyards Society and has contributed many papers to their annual conferences, published in their Transactions. She suggested Portsmouth as a partner in an EU AsiaUrbs Walled Cities team of conservationists and planners who worked with colleagues in Obidos Portugal to assist the local authority in Xingcheng, Liaoning Province in China to develop heritage tourism and improve local living conditions, drawing on the experience of Portsmouth and Obidos. In 2006 she led the bid to inscribe Portsmouth Harbour onto the World Heritage list as the world’s first cultural seascape, with the support of five local authorities. The bid was launched in Boathouse 6 by Admiral Band, but cancelled by the leader of Portsmouth City Council who feared that inscription would deter inward investment.
Changing the UK rules for disposal of historic defence sites
She also works at regional and national level. In 1996 at Kellogg Collage Oxford and in 2002 in the County Council chamber in Winchester she initiated seminars with the RTPI for the MOD, English Heritage, local authorities and communities about the under-reported process but complex task of finding new uses for defence heritage sites and buildings. As board member of the Hampshire Buildings Preservation Trust in 2017 she organised another regional seminar: Sustainable Regeneration of Former Defence Sites, again with participants from Historic England, Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust, the university, developers, planners, architects and local historians took place at Bursledon Brickworks Hampshire, sponsored by Buildings Preservation Trust and the Royal Town Planning Institute South East. Suella Braverman MP spoke at the final session. The seminar’s recommendations that the current Treasury-led system of sale of redundant defence sites to the highest bidder at maximum planning value should be modified in favour of a more locally beneficial system were sent to the Ministry of Defence and their property agency, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, subsequently backed by Portsmouth’s two MPs, but as yet the evidence from other countries more positive systems of defence disposals have not been considered in the UK MOD.
With Professor Samer Bagaeen she edited the first book to examine Sustainable Regeneration of Former Military Sites (Routledge 2016). It has case studies from China, Taiwan, Holland, the UK and the US. As another way of providing opportunities for cross-cultural exchange on the important but under-reported process of finding new uses for historic ex-military, naval and air force sites, in 2012 she initiated a series of international conferences: Defence Heritage History and Future, which were organised by the Wessex Institute of Technology (WIT). WIT published the papers of the contributors from many parts of the world. The first conference was in Portsmouth, the second in Venice Arsenale, and the third in Alicante. Her cross-cultural work examining how different countries dispose of their surplus defence estate is ongoing. She contributed a paper about this to an international conference hosted in Venice in 2021, to the Naval Dockyard Society’s conference in the National Museum of the Royal Navy in June 2022 and to the EU Regional Towns and Cities Conference in October 2023. She is a member of the University of Portsmouth School of Architecture group: Defence Heritage which is applying for research funds to set up an international network to develop this work.
Her fifty plus years in Portsmouth have been well spent!
Celia Clark
October 2023
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