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£18m refurbishment announced for five tower blocks
Campaigners are celebrating after Bristol City Council announced an extensive refurbishment of its housing in St Jude’s.
Delayed for over a decade, the project has an estimated cost of £18m.
The investment will see the upgrading of five blocks – John Cozens House, Haviland House, Charleton House, Langton House and Tyndall House – which among them have a total of 180 flats.
is needed now More than ever
John Cozens House is one of the five blocks due to be upgraded – photo: Karen Johnson
Before the refurbishment begins in December, extensive structural surveys will be conducted requiring residents of 14 flats to move out for a maximum of three months.
These residents will be provided with serviced accommodation through the council or they can choose to stay with friends or family and receive some financial support.
Repairs will include new roofs, floors, doors, windows, lighting, external wall insulation, enclosed staircases, electrical works, smoke detectors, bike racks and bin stores.
St Jude’s is set to experience huge changes over the next decade as part of the ‘Frome Gateway’- photo: Martin Booth
City Hall housing chiefs say there are no structural concerns despite the fact the tower blocks have a similar design to Barton House, where the local authority declared a major incident in November amid fears that the building could collapse if there was a fire in a single flat.
At Barton House, about 400 tenants and leaseholders were evacuated, mostly into hotels, but further surveys showed the Barton Hill high-rise was fundamentally safe and they were allowed to return home four months later.
The refurbishment programme in St Jude’s will be done in phases and take three to five years to complete.
It signals victory for residents who launched a campaign backed by community union ACORN over the dreadful state of their council flats.
In September, a group of women stormed council offices in Temple Street demanding a meeting with the authority’s head of repairs – and then plastered the premises with ‘Wanted’ posters when no one would talk to them.
They were told the housing department would sort out the issues, including damp and mould which tenants said had caused their children to develop asthma and other health conditions and had forced them to spend a fortune on mould-proof paint.
But nothing happened, so ACORN members planned to march on the council again in May, which was called off after the authority’s new housing chairman Cllr Barry Parsons (Green, Easton) intervened and met them earlier this month, promising an update within a fortnight.
Now after years of delays, the council has confirmed the sorely needed improvements to the blocks is about to get underway.
A small playground in front of Haviland House off Great Ann Street in St Jude’s – photo: Martin Booth
St Jude’s resident and ACORN member Yasmin said: “I can’t describe what a monumental win these new developments will be for our community.
“After many years fading into the background, our homes neglected and forgotten, with the much appreciated help and dedication from ACORN we banded together as residents and fought for our voices to be heard.
“At the end of the day, these flats are home to many complex and intricate individual lives, where we raise our children and lay to rest at night.
“We are not just statistics on a sheet of paper or boxes to be ticked.
“It’s brilliant to feel such hope for myself and my fellow residents of St Jude’s for the first time in my seven years living here.”
Another neighbour and ACORN member Mohamed said: “The council ignored us for years, but after we marched on the council building together they started to listen.
“Last month we took action again, pushing council leaders for when they would start working to make our homes safe, and now we see concrete plans – it’s brilliant.”
A basketball court in Riverside Park in St Jude’s – photo: Ellie Pipe
The refurbishment was announced on the same day that council staff hand-delivered leaflets to all residents in the blocks, explaining in detail what would happen. The leaflets are also available for everyone to access online, in English, Arabic, Somali and Portuguese.
In a press briefing, a council spokesperson said officers and contractors would work with the community on the final designs and that building work itself was expected to start around the end of the year after the results of the surveys were known, but that initial findings had shown no concerns.
They said: “These blocks have been overdue a refurbishment for a very long time. They have been unfortunately subject to water ingress and have a lot of wear and tear.
“It’s a campaign the residents have taken to City Hall. We are now in a place where we can start that refurbishment.
“There has been an ambition to do this for over a decade. We apologise that it has taken so long.
“A lot of this work will be focused on improving the energy efficiency of the blocks.”
The spokesperson said the project was fully funded in the council’s housing budget, agreed by councillors in February, but that the authority would seek other grants, such as from the West of England Combined Authority, for energy efficiency improvements, and the government.
They said: “The point of the refurbishment is not about building safety, it’s about the quality of the accommodation.”
The spokesperson said the delays had been a combination of finances, the pandemic, requirements to improve fire safety and cladding in blocks following the Grenfell disaster and, most recently, resources having to be redirected to issues at Barton House.
Main photo: Karen Johnson
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