Chapter 22
Black Swan Terrace
I first became involved with the Black Swan project in the middle of 2000. I had become aware that it was an important timber-framed building with considerable history and merit as an outstanding example of its period, there being somewhere around eighty percent of the original timbers in their original locations and in important locations there were all the timbers in place.
I had severed my connections with my former company and had little to do. I took on the task of managing the project. A local man and a friend had started the project five years earlier when wandering home one summer evening. He was aware of the nature of the building from his time in City Planning and he and his friend decided they should save the building for posterity.
The building is a row of tiny weavers cottages with a very unusual internal jettied construction and survived probably because it has been home for five hundred years to a succession of tenants and owners with marginal incomes. No-one in its whole history could afford a major rebuild which would destroy the original frame. This did occur in around 1850 to the end frame which largely disappeared but fortunately after it had been recorded by both photography and in a sketch by Troughton.
The man and his friends formed a company and sought funding from the National Lottery and with the help of the Architectural Heritage Fund. English Heritage also supported the project financially and technically. The European Regional Development Fund provided money through the Government of the West Midlands and Coventry City council voted a substantial amount of money to the project.
When I became involved in the middle of the year 2000 all of the funding was in place and quotations had been received for phase one of the restoration which cleared the site, erected a protective scaffold and prepared the derelict buildings for future repairs and renewals.
The man had retired as a director of the Spon End Building preservation Trust so that he could tender for the work. His company won the contract in open competition and it was part of my duty as the newly appointed secretary to ensure all dealings were at arms length. I had run my own business for thirty years and had often had to deal at arms length so was well aware of the difficulties.
In the event the arrangements strained our personal relationship but did not appear to have done permanent damage. All of the money was in place but in his absence there was no one to manage the project. I took this task under my wing and rapidly brought it to order.
The accounts were not in good order as some of the cheque books had been lost and there were no formal accounts. I secured copies of the account from the bank and, with the help of the architect and quantity surveyor, was able to trace every item of expenditure and all but one of the income. I prepared proper accounts and then tackled the various funding offers.
The offer from the City of Coventry was easiest to manage. Firstly I had two excellent contacts who were keen to see the project succeed and did all they could to help and to persuade others to help. We arranged that they would pay bills on presentation of invoices and they generally did this within seven days. As the Trust had typically 28 days to pay its bills this meant that we could arrange a positive cash flow during much of the project. It was only towards the end of the project, when the City funding had been used that we began to find stringency the order of the day.
The funding from English Heritage was a little more difficult to draw down as they were restrained by their own charitable rules to pay only for repairs and not improvements. This meant that the Quantity Surveyors had to provide a breakdown of each invoice into these categories. This became so complicated in most cases that I left all the negotiations to the professional parties and acted only as a bagman to ensure the money changed hands with due speed.
In the event our Quantity Surveyors were rather superb and they struck a good accord with the English Heritage surveyors and most items were agreed quite quickly. Never the less we were often grateful for the City money up front.
The ERDF money was a quite different matter. Beset by rules and red tape, it was a vital part of our income but very difficult to draw down. The proof of expenditure was simply invoices but the categorisation and eligibility rules for the expenditures were almost unintelligible. Euro Speak at its worst. This was where I was rather pleased that we had had the good fortune to have brought CDA into the nearby Doe Bank Building. They had some of the most knowledgeable people in Coventry on ERDF funding bids and they employed one person half time to work alongside me and effectively do the draw-downs for me.
He taught me a lot and I was actually able to do the last draw- down myself but I would never have been able to do this without the baby-sitting provided by CDA. An extra hurdle was that the ERDF required a Completion Certificate before making a final payment. This could have been a serious problem as completion on civil contracts does not strictly occur for twelve months after construction is complete. We did, however reach a compromise with ERDF on this and they accepted a final valuation certificate.
The worst aspect of the ERDF funding was that it had an absolute deadline of 31st December 2001 with no possibility of extension whatever. We had already negotiated several extensions due to delays but the final date had been decreed in Brussels for all funding schemes and was inviolate. We had exactly one year to complete both phase one and phase two of the contract. I know a lot of people thought we would never do it but I never had serious doubts of our ability to complete on time.
Having established good contacts with each of the funding bodies and explained our plans to them with a face-to-face visit and numerous phone calls, I prepared a budget and cash flow to ensure the project was feasible. There would clearly be no problem until close to the end of the project and as money changes hands after building work, there would actually be no problem at all while construction was in progress. Everything depended upon the speed with which I could persuade the funders to part with their cash.
I had been in business for thirty years myself and was well aware of how difficult small businesses find survival when debtors do not pay and I had no intention of subjecting our contractors to this denigration. In the event we did have a problem making the very last payment to the contractor but that was paid eventually.
The next problem was that the contract had to be placed very quickly and there was no time to renew the bids or re-negotiate the funding. The result was that we placed contracts on the basis of estimates that were at least twelve months out of date and should, strictly have been subjected to inflationary adjustments. This was simply impossible due to the very tight deadline imposed by ERDF.
We went ahead on the existing basis and the phase one contract started on 1st January 2001 and Practical Completion was signed off on 31st May. The contract was completed within budget. Some of the dereliction was much worse than had been thought but it was all cleared successfully and the site cleared and the scaffolding erected in good time for the phase two contract.
The bids for the phase two contract varied greatly and a company in a nearby town came in at almost exactly the value previously estimated by the quantity surveyor. The other three bids were substantially greater. While the Trust might have been prepared to accept other than the lowest bid, the English Heritage rules forebade them to fund any but the lowest bid so our mind was made up for us. The architect and trust members visited the potential contractor and were impressed enough to be confident that we could achieve our objectives with him as main contractor.
The phase two contract started on 1st August 2001 and the first certificate was issued on the 20th of that month. This meant that we had five months to complete the contract. I had already calculated that we actually had only just over four months as the last week of December had to be written off on the basis that the ERDF rules demanded that the money actually be in the contractors account before it counted. As the banks were closed for several days over the end of year and the contractors were on holiday and the valuation, certification, invoice and payment system took at least seven working days we had to set the 7th December as the last effective working day. On that day the quantity surveyor must be able to make the final valuation.
This was an appropriate day as it was my birthday and in the event we achieved it almost exactly. There were a few remedial tasks to be completed after that but the surveyor easily had enough value on site to satisfy the elements of the contract covered by the ERDF rules.
Another practical complication for me was the Audit. We had tentatively decided for several reasons that the books should be closed at the end of December. In the event it became apparent that the End of January 2002 would be a much more practical date and the records show that the print-outs for audit were produced mainly on the 15th January 2002. This was possible on most accounts as all possible transactions had been completed by this date. The Accounts were presented to the trust by the auditor on the 11th April 2002. I believe in running a tight ship and can proudly assert that the auditor had neither requests for extra information nor significant corrections. The first audit was completed in less that four months of the completion of the project and all parties were satisfied.
An interesting aside is the matter of VAT. Although I have run my own company for many years I have almost no experience of VAT. I specialised in tax and NIC contributions, which I consider the biggest confidence trick of all time, but I could never bring myself to face up to VAT. My partner always handled that within the business. Various members of the trust insisted that we could reclaim VAT so I asked the members of the team and then a few friends and gathered all the information I could, together with reading a leaflet that purported to tell you all about VAT on construction projects.
Then I took the bull by the horns and phoned the appropriate office. A friendly Scotsman talked to me twice for about half an hour each time. We followed each pathway through the rules ticking off each point as we went such as charitable status, purpose, nature of project. Each time we came to a dead end. We concluded that it was impossible for us to find a way through this maze that would allow us to reclaim the VAT charged to us by the contractors. I sincerely believe that no company, person or organisation in the UK other than, possibly, English Heritage or the National Trust could find a worthwhile way to reclaim VAT on a construction project. The fifty odd pages of this booklet, one of many, were simply gobbledygook. I have never yet dealt with the vatman and I sincerely hope I never have to. VAT, like NIC, is a crime against civilisation.
While I had many years experience of running my own company and performing every required task from repairing the roof to rodding the drains, and everything in between, I had no knowledge of the construction industry. I knew some techniques of managing a workforce and my experience rebuilding my own home over 25 years had taught me a lot about building materials and techniques but the construction industry is run by sets of rules and regulations imposed and supervised by quango type organisations ranging from the Association of British Architects to the enforcement agencies within the local council. Every single possible task is prescribed and must be followed. Failure to do this at any point would almost certainly result in failure to obtain permissions, failure to complete and would ultimately lead to very expensive lawsuits. I allowed the architects and quantity surveyors to lead me through this minefield and I never failed to take their advice.
I had rapidly established a rapport with the site foreman and his boss as they were the ones who were going to get the task completed on time. My operating method was simple. I went on site nearly every day but rarely asked how progress was. Instead I asked what today’s problems were and what I could do to help solve them. Sometimes we selected alternative materials or methods to ensure that a particular problem would be quickly solved. I would phone the architect and ask for a change or concession and we would discuss it and get an immediate answer. I never tried to bully or threaten or even to cajole. I learned many years ago in my own business that the best way to motivate men is to get them to sign up to your objectives. Any form of force is counter productive, causes bad blood and ill feeling and de-motivates. Anyone who expects men to bust their guts under those circumstances deserves what they get.
I made and maintained good relationships throughout and do not remember one single problem that threatened our schedule. I never once gave an order but made hundreds of requests. I never once criticised anybody but complimented and thanked people as often as they deserved. At lunchtime I often sat with the tradesmen in the midst of their work and joined in their banter and moans. I never tried to become one of the boys but I let them know I appreciated that they were the ones who would make this project possible or destroy it.
Although I never gave a direct order, I never have done in my life, neither did I ever fail to accept responsibility or take a decision. I would talk over all relevant matters with the people concerned, get them signed up to my decision and then implement it. I never back-tracked or tried to blame anyone else for the few things that went wrong. On a couple of occasions when things had got out of step I had to conduct a mini on-the -spot enquiry and then go round and smooth a few ruffled feathers. But this was rare because I took the time and effort to plan each day and ensure that hiccups did not occur.
The only real hiccups were due to things I had put to the back of my mind. One was the electricity supply. We had made full provision for the electrical installations but had been rather let down by the electrical supply companies. In the days of nationalised electricity one phoned the local office and an engineer came out to look at the problem and then gave you an estimate for the job. Trying to find a supplier who will take responsibility for installation of a new supply is now a nightmare.
The site had nine live electricity supplies to it, despite having been derelict and unused for 25 years and one of them was suitable for use in one section of the building. A second one needed completely replacing, the distribution board dating from the days of the Coventry Electricity Co. I eventually found the right people to talk to and that cost us over £3,000 that had not been budgeted.
As the project neared completion it attracted a lot of local interest, especially from some of the more suspect members of the local community and it became apparent that substantial security measures would be needed. The building was to house quite a large number of computers that were highly prized objects of envy. Certain members of the local community expressed opposition to fortifying the building but the Trust decided to do that and in retrospect I believe we got the balance right. There has not been a serious attack on the building in over two years. The extra security measures cost around £3000 which took us over budget.
Otherwise the project was brought in on time and on budget to a quotation over two years old. The quantity surveyor assured me that that was a highly significant achievement. The factors that allowed this achievement were my constant attention to the needs of the contractors and reconciling quickly the desires of the architects with the practical realities on the ground. The chair of the Trust gave me almost total freedom to run the project in my style and I believe I did not betray his trust. The contractors were willing to make changes and offer advice on the way to achieve our objectives and went out of their way to secure difficult supplies and crafts.
I had personally subcontracted to provide an emergency electrical supply to the building as the contract had to start in January and we needed much more than daylight to complete on time. I was the first working person to enter the building on around the 5th January 2002. The dry rot hung eight inches deep from the low ceilings and the mandatory hard hat was more use to protect against a shower of gunk than to protect against dangerous objects.
Water dripped through numerous holes in the roof and the floors were several inches deep in accumulated junk. Working in some of the dark passages was possible only around midday when enough light pierced the gloom to allow a couple of hours work. I negotiated with the owners of the building next door and fitted them a waterproof outside electrical socket and they allowed us to use their power. I fitted a meter inside our building and we recorded the usage and paid them for units according to the rate they were being charged. Thus we established a little bit of civilisation on site. We also found the water supply still worked and, fortunately, that the gas had been disconnected. So we began.
We made a few quite minor changes to the specification. Saving tiled floors proved impossible as the cost and time to have raised them without damaging them would have been prohibitive. Most of them were quite obviously built by cowboy builders in the first place. We have replaced them with similar floors built to a much better specification and without causing any collateral damage that might prejudice future investigations or use of the building.
An interesting episode was the hoarding attached to the scaffolding and protecting the site mainly in Spon Street. The hoarding was constructed with 1.2m by 2.4m sheets of 12mm Ply and was pretty unsightly. The Trust had had the foresight to gain a grant from the city to pay Artspace to paint the hoarding. They went into nearby Spon Gate school and had the children paint scenes from Coventry’s history. The majority of them involved Lady Godiva on a horse. The painted scenes were to be projected from across the street and then sketched directly onto the plywood. In the event the technique could not be made to work and one of the artists laboriously sketched each print onto the hoarding at about ten times the scale of the originals.
The sketches were then painted by the children and by volunteers from the nearby care centre. This process generated much local interest and the scenes remained an effective decoration for several years.
There were several significant timber frame features that we treated with great care and attention and when the requirement of these features were explained to the contractors they took the utmost care to preserve them and protect the precious heritage of this very sensitive building.
A difficult topic was disabled access. The building is essentially five hundred years old with all its attendant design features and warts and wheelchair access to all rooms was simply impossible without seriously destroying the features that the restoration was intended to preserve. The Trust decided to make the main wheelchair access at the rear of the stable block. A new footpath was provided to link to the existing footpath at the rear of number 123 and this would eventually be extended to the rear of all the houses. Access to the stable block was thereby ensured together with access to toilets. Access to the ground floor of the main building was achieved directly into three of the four ground floor rooms. This was considered sufficient to ensure that no disabled person would be unable to access the public facilities in Black Swan. Experience has proved this to be the case.
A few of the interesting features uncovered, discussed, acted upon and preserved were the lath and plaster wall upstairs in number 123. This showed evidence of smoke deposits that indicate that the whole building was a smoke room even after the upper jettied room had been added. The fire was in the middle of the floor and the smoke was vented through an adjustable hole in the roof. This feature has not been totally satisfactorily explained as smoke deposits occur in rooms that were obviously designed to be protected from smoke. This may simply reflect the inadequacy of the then current design and materials but was unexpected and not in accordance with smoke patterns observed in other parts of the terrace. The contractor built a glass fronted cupboard to protect and display this lath and plaster feature.The chimney in number 123 had to be repaired and it was found that the brick chimney was constructed with mud and straw rather than mortar. It was mooted that whoever had made the wattle and daub walls had also built the chimney and used local materials rather than importing expensive mortar. Some people have expressed to me the fear that a straw-built chimney would burn down. This is quite a false idea as the straw inside the chimney would soon burn off and that protected by mud would never burn unless the mud disintegrated. The evidence before us showed that this chimney had lasted for several hundred years.
In the back room of number 123 we uncovered a sandstone well. I went on site one day and saw a workman carrying a large sledgehammer indoors. I was immediately alarmed and followed him. He showed me a wall he had uncovered under the flagged floor in the back room that he wanted to demolish. I called the architect to look and we decided the wall was of late construction and of little importance. I asked the workman to continue with great care. When I returned an hour later he presented me with a medieval sandstone well complete with Victorian additions. The well was dry to around fifteen feet deep and was backfilled with loose rubble to around five feet deep. A sandstone gully ran along the course of the original rear wall and diverted rainwater into the well. A Victorian blue-brick drain at a slightly higher level carried water into the well from the rear of number 122.
We used sandstone found on site to rebuild two courses of stones back to ground level and then installed a protective armoured glass plate. The contractors did all this work without extra charge above normal contingency allowance. The well, now in the back room, must once have been outside the rear wall. This is a little strange as the Troughton drawing clearly shows an outshot, what we would now call an extension, to the rear of number 124. We also have an early photograph of number 124 as a Public House and the outshot is quite clear. This appears to be at odds with the evidence of a gully to the rear of number 124 so there is an unresolved conflict here.
The chimney in the Victorian addition to the rear of number 123 was in a terrible state and had separated from the single brick two-story wall that it had once supported. The gap between the two extended to 100 mm in one place. Demolition was out of the question as the chimney was an important feature in the life of the buildings. We jacked up the top of the chimney, weighing around four tons on top of a scaffold. Then we removed the chimney from the ceiling level on the upper floor down to within about two feet of the ground where the structure became stable.
The bricks removed were reused where possible and a supply of similar bricks was rapidly secured by the contractor. The chimney was rebuilt in exactly the original format and even the same oak beam replaced as a chimney lintel. The beam had a substantial new portion inserted with a lap joint and the one concession we made was to reinforce the oak beam with a hidden steel RSJ to take the rather massive load of this three story chimney. The cowboy builders had been at it again. The separated wall had been reinforced with steel stays many years ago and these were retained. The top part of the chimney was dropped back on and pointed with lime mortar and it should last another 100 years. It is a much better example of workmanship than the original.
The last interesting feature was the roof of the stable block at the rear of number 123. We stripped this completely to felt and re-roof it to modern standards, using the original tiles where possible. When we had stripped it we stood and looked at it for several hours. All the roof timbers had fallen sideways by around ten inches and yet the end walls were perfectly vertical. Then we found that the rafters were separated from the north wall and were embedded in, and protruded through, the south wall. It was clear that the whole roof had moved and the end walls had been rebuilt to accommodate the movement.
The question was what could possibly have caused this to happen. There was no excessive subsidence or any hint that the walls below the roof had moved. It was some time before I realised what had happened. The roof had moved in one violent upheaval and the walls had been rebuilt around the new roofline. The building next door is now a recently built nursery, but it had been built on land that had been a bombsite, in which Coventry abounded, for many years. A whole terrace of houses had disappeared from that site in November 1940 or April 1941.
My extensive experience of bombsites, gained as a child after the war, told me that houses were usually destroyed one by one and an explosion that had taken out eight houses in a row must have been a landmine. The whole row of houses next door had been destroyed in one second and our building had moved sideways ten inches to avoid the blast. The flexibility of the wooded structure absorbed the energy and saved it from destruction. The end walls probably disappeared and were no doubt rebuilt as War Damage repairs.
The building has carried with it its character, changes, warts, scars and stories from 1452 through to 1940 and onwards. Now we have given it a new set of scars to carry with it into the future. It carries one hidden story. Around 1960 number 124 became a shop known as Moira’s Wet Fish and the shop was fitted with a sloping floor to facilitate washing down the fish slabs. It survived into the 1970’s as a grocer’s shop but the name remained.
In more recent years the salacious connotations of the name attracted Coventry’s growing student population and during construction several young people came to me in the street and asked me to retain the name. I fully concurred but other members of the Trust and team were not so sure. In the event I had the contractor place a heavy gauge plywood signboard over the shop sign. Moira’s Wet Fish is still in place and will no doubt be rediscovered by some future generation of conservationists. It is to be hoped they have a sense of humour and understand both the social significance of the name as originally conceived and the fun reasons for preserving it.
There were a good many doubters who were confounded by our success in restoring this fine and rare old building. There were a few critics who will never be satisfied, whatever you do. But most people recognised the fine achievement and we received mainly compliments. Perhaps the best was from the senior Conservation Officer for the City who thanked me for doing the job as the task would otherwise have fallen to him. That was the best compliment I could have had.
On the day before the opening I cleared the street in front of the building that had been inside the hoarded scaffold for a year and was four inches deep in accumulated building rubbish. It was pretty wet and I shovelled it into a large soggy pile in front of the building. Then I wondered what to do about it. The gate in the hoarding was a long way away and I could not have taken it to the rear of the building. Then I remembered the local city Area Service Officer. I made one plaintive phone call and within two hours the pile of mud had disappeared and an hour later a man appeared with a truck and watered down the pavement and the road and even washed the splashes off the front of my new building. I gave thanks to Coventry City Council that day.
We held the opening day in March 2002 that was paid for largely by Area Co-ordination and was well attended by many members of the local community and of the Trust, the Team, the funders and the City and it proved an excellent social occasion. I had arranged for eight flower arrangements for people who had contributed most to the project and I received a bottle of whisky from a trust member
I had asked several members of the community to come and help with cleaning in preparation for the open day and Kay and Nikki had responded. By opening day we had the building looking pristine. Kay had even found some red tile polish and the three of us spent a whole day on our hand and knees polishing the red tile floor.
And so the second phase of the project was completed.