Kevin McCloud's Restoration of the Year: inside the transformations of Britain's endangered buildings

Perhaps the Chancellor recognised the feel-good factor created by restoring an architectural landmark. With his pledge he joined the ranks of Britain’s restoration revolutionaries, a growing number of community groups, charities and councils collaborating to rebuild our heritage, brick by brick.

A new Channel 4 series called Restoration of the Year, which started on Thursday, is celebrating the most hard-fought and transformative of these projects.

Presenters Kevin McCloud and the Landmark Trust’s Dr Anna Keay showcase palaces, watermills, department stores and music halls. The buildings featured, which span nine centuries, were brought back from the brink of ruin, in some cases costing millions of pounds of public money.

It’s a new award judged by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. It looks at buildings from the pre-Georgian, Georgian, Victorian and 20th-century periods, and at the end of each programme, each era winner is announced. The overall victor will be revealed at the close of the fourth and final episode.

“This programme holds to account the process through which these buildings are saved and show us how the funds raised [mainly via taxes from the public] are being spent,” says McCloud. “But the series is important not least because culturally and socially it helps us to understand our past and therefore plot our future.”

While he praises the work of organisations such as the National Trust in returning the UK’s grand mansions and medieval castles to their former glory, it was the community-led mission to recover the Master’s House in Ledbury, Herefordshire, that won him over.

Dating from 1487, the Grade II listed property is one of the remaining fragments of the medieval St Katherine’s Hospital (founded in 1232) and was built to house the leader of a group of brethren who cared for the poor and needy.

The building, now stranded in a car park, has had many lives. It was requisitioned during the Second World War as a food bank, before becoming council offices, flats and then a doctors’ surgery.

Before this project the 530-year-old timber frame at the core of the building had been lost under layers of adaptations including a Georgian envelope, a Victorian addition and 20th-century redecoration.

A group of concerned locals (later to become the Friends of the Master’s House) approached Hereford Council in 2008 for a grant to restore the building and house a new library. But after they had secured funding, the global financial crisis struck and public sector austerity measures threatened the project.

“The council considered pulling the whole project and doing a patch-up job on the building,” explains Robert Waddington, chairman of the Friends. “At this point we turned from a mild support team to a lobbying group.”

They wrote letters, barracked town planners and railroaded council meetings. It paid off: in 2009 the council ring-fenced £2.4 million to kick-start the project. But it wasn’t until they won a further £1.7 million from the National Lottery that the work really got going.

“The project was like a gas boiler and the Friends were the pilot light,” says Waddington.

Builders Speller Metcalfe of the Midlands carefully repaired the forgotten timber frame and built a new roof using Hempcrete and clay tiles, lime plaster and natural finishes.

“From the outside it looks like a smart semi-Georgian, semi-Victorian building, but push open the door and you walk into a magical medieval hall with exposed timber beams,” says Waddington. 

They even uncovered old musings in Latin scribbled on the walls. The scrawl, which reads “he who so walketh upright shall be saved but he that is perverse in his ways shall fall at once,” has now been made into a historical feature.

The programme also covers projects at the other end of the scale. The Stewart family bought a vast mansion in County Down in 1744. They named it Mount Stewart, upgrading it in two phases, in the 1780s and the 1840s.

It has been lived in by many of the aristocratic family, including Lord Castlereagh, British Foreign Secretary during the Napoleonic times. After being gifted to the National Trust the house and grounds (all 900 acres), it was opened to the public in 1977.

But after centuries of family life and 35 years of visitors tramping down the corridors, parts of the neoclassical pile were beginning to crumble.

“Mount Stewart had fallen into a perilous condition,” says McCloud’s fellow presenter, Anna Keay. “The place was literally falling down in areas and the task of taking it apart to repair its skeleton was eye-watering and hugely impressive.” 

In 2012 the £8 million overhaul got under way, funded by the National Trust, to return the 80-room house to the glory days of the Twenties and Thirties, when Charles and Edith, the 7th Marquess and Marchioness of Londonderry, were in residence. Charles was the minister of education in the first Northern Ireland government and Edith, a famous socialite, redecorated the house and started her world-famous gardens.

Over the past four years the building has been stabilised, redecorated, rewired and replumbed, with all 150 windows removed, repaired and replaced. 

Tasks ranged from the seemingly mundane – every light bulb changed to an LED – to the more pressing, such as asbestos removal. 

Most of the Twenties colour schemes have been refreshed using fine brushes and no rollers. A specialist mixer from the contractor Joseph Hughes created a chalky brand of paint called Case & Distemper and supplied by Farrow & Ball. The walls in the central hall have been painted an elegant creamy stone colour and the wooden pillars stripped back to remove the discoloured varnish and reveal a lovely blue sheen.

“This country has the best artisan craftsmen in the world and this programme allows us to go behind the scenes and see how the professionals do it,” says Keay.

Neil Medcalf, the founder of Traditional Millwrights Limited (tradmillwrights.co.uk), was at the heart of the project to save the Grade II listed 18th-century watermill on Sacrewell heritage farm, near Peterborough.

Owned and run by a charity, the William Scott Abbott Trust, the mill dates from 1086, but it closed down in 1965 when a lack of manpower and a supply of cheaper flour from America stopped production. Medcalf took the water mill apart, restored it and got it turning; it now produces flour for artisan bread.

Keay recalls how Medcalf had pulled an enormous lever to get it going again. “It was like a creature waking from the dead as the building started to creak and move once more, rediscovering its forgotten function,” she says. 

The restoration of the building was funded by the National Lottery to the tune of £1.7 million.

Other projects featured on the programme include the Landmark Trust’s very own Belmont House in Lyme Regis, Hampton Court and Lewes Castle. 

All these venues will ring out with the sound of children this Easter, as our past and our future meet.

“These ancient sites give us permission to time-travel,” says McCloud. “Just as we did as children pretending to be somebody else from another time.”