David Beaumont

Interview conducted and transcribed by Emily Birkett 30.10.24

I’m originally from the South, but I came to study architecture in Huddersfield in the early 1980s and have stayed in the North ever since. I came to Castle Eden in 2006 and joined Tony Burns Architects. Tony was a significant NE architect and worked in Peterlee for many years. He also did a lot for Easington District Council, as it was then and was a great patron of the practice. Tony was a modernist and considered a complete architect. He lived and breathed it, and was academically strong, and put a lot of thought into work. I learnt a lot from him, so I have always been very grateful for my time with him. He made me think, ‘Where is the art‘ in what we do.

I became involved in the Heritage Lottery-funded restoration of Apollo Pavilion in 2007, and Tony told me to come and look at Peterlee, which I had never visited before. I was expecting a grotty North East town, and I was astonished to see all these wide open spaces. I thought it was really modern. A landscaper that said…‘Yes, but you’ve got all these spaces and nowhere to hide,’ meaning, there’s nowhere to play in these vast open spaces. You’d have to hide in the trees. I was quite taken by the town. My work as a Church architect meant I became the architect to look after St Cuthbert’s in Peterlee, a church built in 1956. So, I have always had an association with the town, and I began to understand the importance of coal to the region and the wider communities it created.

I became the Project Architect for the restoration in 2008. Tony was a great supporter of the Pavilion, he saw its significance and felt it should be restored because of his modernist training and appreciation. The pavilion had fallen into disrepair and looked very unattractive. The local authority didn’t want a restoration but a way of reducing anti-social behaviour, and there were various ways in which they thought it should be treated. One was to take the steps away so people couldn’t get onto the deck on the first floor. Others were to plant the deck with soil and put prickly plants in so people couldn’t climb around it. They painted it white and didn’t look after it, and then it started to fade. Concrete repairs were needed with rusting reinforcements and were patched poorly, so the whole thing was terribly down at heel.

Tony had English Heritage involved and the 20th Century Society in the late ‘90s. There was a swell of growing opinion that this was an important piece of work. It wasn’t listed, so it didn’t have protection. A local councillor said the best thing was blowing it up. And it was a big cause in the local paper. Can you imagine what would have happened if it had been blown up? Bits of the concrete pavilion on all the local houses. And it would take forever to do. Another idea was to build a pyramid on top of it and soil it over – turn it into another abstract landscape. And then, Easington District Council began to understand the importance of what they had and had an impetus to move things forward.

The Heritage Lottery Fund grant was for £400,000 and was supported by Easington District Council, which was turning into Durham County Council at the time. Colin Robson was our client on behalf of Easington and an enormous help to us. And it was one of the first serious bits of conservation work I did. I knew very little about concrete at the time. We had an engineer who assisted us in our deliberations, and we were enthusiastic at the start. We built a massive tent with a roof around it and did the work in a very harsh winter with snow. It was a building site where exposed concrete was fixed and reinstated. Until it was cleaned, you didn’t realise there were two types of concrete faces to it: bush-hammered and fair-faced – fair-faced being flat.

We began to see that rather than this being a random box, there was academic rigour behind its shaping, the ways in which the surfaces fused into art. We later did a drawing where we picked at these surfaces to understand them better. It’s an interesting abstract image when you draw it at an elevation. We reinstated the stairs to allow people back onto the structure. There were two sets of stairs – you’d go up at one end and come down in the middle – but there were no funds for the other. We didn’t have any good historical record of it then or what it might look like. So, we repaired the structure and lake, which had been a problem for a while.

The pavilion was designed to be reflected in a large lake. In the early days, there were pictures of children playing with model boats, and recently, someone put a carp in for fishing. But it hasn’t been possible to maintain the clear water. It’s concrete-lined and shallow, so the water heats up, and the nitrates in the water cause algae to bloom, resulting in a smell. We wondered if the water was being polluted upstream. Understanding the drainage is important because the surface water overflow goes in the lake. The water comes from Shotton Hall, then through the site and out at the other end and finds its way into Castle Eden Dene. We had countless attempts to try and manage it, and frankly, the best way to do it is to turn it into an ornamental pond and have a pump to clean the water and recycle it – not to have water running through but to treat it like a pond.

We took advice from environmental engineers, and they suggested planting a reed bed at the top end of it to create a filter – a gravel bed with some gabions and lilies at the far end so it wasn’t at the front of the Pavilion. It looked to be working okay, but unfortunately, it’s not been maintained. We visited again in the last year or two to see if we could make better changes. The engineers came back and said there wasn’t; it just needed to be maintained. Watercress has now come into it and found its way around the Pavilion. A higher maintenance regime is all we can suggest at the moment.

The Pavilion repairs were a success, and Historic England considered it worthy of listing. It’s Grade II*, and received a RIBA award for the work. They sent it to Tony on the eve of his death, so there’s a sort of sad arc to that.

One of the good things to come out of the Heritage Lottery Fund restoration is the importance of community. There was encouragement to engage with local schools. We went into the schools to teach them about it. There were art projects to create your own Pavilion. There was a Scottish artist who came down and did his own interpretation. There were bands, light shows and theatre work. There was quite a buzz about the Pavilion for 2 or 3 years after.

Our inherited was antisocial behaviour and vandalism. It’s not been too bad recently, but the world has changed culturally since the 1970s. It hasn’t been trashed like we thought it might have been after the restoration. There has been some graffiti on it, which has generally been removed quickly by the local authority. We renewed the lighting to improve its appearance and security. It has been attacked, and we hope that future repairs will find a more resistant fitting.

Our engineer proposed that we give the concrete a fairing coating to reduce oxygen transmission into it. The intention is to slow oxygen migration into the fabric. Atmospheric oxygen causes the metal reinforcement embedded in the concrete to rust if it’s too close to the surface, splitting the concrete.

I hadn’t realised it at the time, but the proposed fairing coat was opaque, not translucent, so it was going to be painted white (like old times!). Colin Robson said, “No, we can’t do that,” and he was quite right. A valuable lesson was learned: Tell the engineer what you want. Don’t rely on the engineer to tell you.

We worked with a company to develop a protection treatment that gave us a watercolour effect over the structure. So, the fair-faced surfaces were painted in a translucent grey, and the aggregate ones were in clear material. These had water-shedding qualities, and by removing the water, we’re also reducing incidents of oxygen on the surface. Those coatings have to be recoated, but they haven’t been. That’s been a problem for the look of the building because concrete is hard to keep fresh, and you must keep up the maintenance regime. We produced a management and maintenance plan and identified that. Obviously, with the local authorities, you have to watch every penny and priority is low.

Colin Robson is still fighting its corner in Durham and is seeking to return to the Pavilion to improve the lighting, get the lake tidier, and see if we can recoat it again – a freshen up. But I’m pleased to be associated with it. I didn’t like the look of it when I first saw it. I thought… “What is this?” But I’ve got to understand it now.

One of the things about the understanding of it is its loss of context. When you look at the older images of it when it was first built, all the houses have flat roofs. Some got roofs in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Perhaps you can argue that it’s such a strong enough image that it can stand on its own, and you get used to it, and the surrounding houses are not so bad. The project’s fundamental reason for creating a landscape feature is still there. Think of the 18th-century parkland with a classical pavilion beside the lake designed to ornament the ‘big house.’ That is still here. The big houses are in the Sunny Blunts area and wider Peterlee.

There is one house left without a roof just to the side of the Pavilion. We were lucky enough to survey the building, and there were thoughts of turning it into a museum or a Directors’ place where you could have Apollo Pavilion studies and take schoolchildren. That would be a great idea. The local community group was keen to get that moving because the house still had many original features.

The houses lost their flat roofs because they were building homes at a time when a certain amount of money associated with it didn’t allow for the cost of a building and the artistic elements they were applying. And that they had to build these houses economically. At that time, there wasn’t much thought given to insulation. It may suit modernist thinking, but a flat roof with failed waterproofing materials can lead to leaking and rotting. So, that left the local authorities with a big problem, and the solution was to pitch roofs on them. You can see the scars of that on some of the gables of the houses where you see the change of work. And the addition of new work that doesn’t match the old.

Of course, in the North East, our climate can be harsh. So it’s hard to love concrete here when the sun doesn’t shine. Going to the Pavilion on a lovely sunny day is alright. But when it’s an overcast day, it can be off-putting. I now realise Pasmore missed a trick with the concrete surface. Whilst he did have fair-faced and exposed aggregate surfaces- they weren’t bold enough to create variety. The modernist architects of the ‘60s and ‘70s perhaps realised slabs of concrete were too uniform and made patterns on the surface- some quite deep to make more variety of the surface.

But the development of Sunny Blunts is a time of real communities, neighbourliness, and pride in your house and garden. Going back to that big open landscape side, a lack of defensible space can be intimidating if someone plays the other side of the fence and kicks the football on the gable. And the structure itself is intimidating in the landscape it’s in and with everyone around it. And if it attracts anti-social behaviour, it’s even more anxious making. It touches on the fact that a significant sculptural element would be appreciated and looked after if this were in a big park in an urban location. But in Peterlee, it sometimes feels like it’s been foisted upon people.

When we were doing the restoration work, people occasionally asked…‘Are you knocking it down?’ Others would say they’re pleased to see someone start to look after it. One evening, we had an allnight security guard there because we were worried people would start messing about with it. We were on tenterhooks, a bit anxious that people would start breaking in while work was happening, but I don’t recall much interaction because we built a fenced fortress around it. We had to do that to protect it. The contractors did the day-to-day work, and I’d only go to the site to inspect, so it was infrequent. After we finished the work, there was a groundswell of people saying…‘That’s great, it’s so much better, thanks for doing that.’

We couldn’t make any big changes to Apollo because the conservation principle is not to harm the building. So, we are not employed to take bits away. We repair. It was important to put the stairs back to provide the most important use of the Pavilion, up onto the deck to experience the volume from inside it. It’s what Victor Pasmore intended. Because when you are within it, you think…‘That’s nice, that’s low, what does that surface look like? Oh, you can see my house from there,’ and while interacting with it, you’re raised to a higher plane, experiencing air, light, freedom, movement and height above water, green landscape, harmonious buildings, and hopefully cheering you up, uplifting your spirits and making you think a bit more. And I suppose that’s the purpose of art, to make you think a bit.

[Docs, Images]

● [DB] Pasmore Humanising (Building Design Magazine).jpg

● [DB] DWG.P11 – PROPOSED PERSPECTIVE VIEWS NTS @ A3 (Coloured elevations- for fun- when we were showing locations for recoating).pdf

● [DB] Pasmore Apollo Pavilion Lecture, Glasgow School of Art (Glasgow School of Art flyer).pdf

● [DB] Penguin Grafitti 2012.JPG

● [DB] AJ – The Critics – 30.07.09 (Architect Journal article).pdf

● [DB] DWG.P12 – PROPOSED PERSPECTIVE VIEWS NTS @ A3 (Coloured elevations- for fun- when we were showing locations for recoating).pdf

● [DB] Apollo Pavilion Report (My Report on the restoration).pdf

● [DB] Peterlee Pevsner.pdf

● [DB] Peterlee Newtown Historical.pdf

● [DB] Sunderland Echo Toby Paterson (Toby Paterson, artist article).pdf

● [DB] An Experiment in Total Environment_2014 (Gathercole, an artist based on Pasmore ‘Experiment…).pdf

● [DB] Pasmore on-site during Construction (Construction image and one of Vic on site).JPG

● [DB] During Construction (Construction image and one of Vic on site).JPG

● [DB] Micheels residence, Westport CT by PRudolph 1972 (How to turn it into a house- JPG Connecticut 1972).jpg

● [??] Peterlee Development Corporation status report

[References]

(*) Link to Quote: https://peterlee.gov.uk/about-peterlee-town/culture-and-heritage/victor-pasmoreand-
apollo-pavilion/