At 50, SAVE Britain’s Heritage Still Fights the Same Battles—But the Stakes Have Never Been Higher

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This week marks the 50th anniversary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, a grassroots conservation group that emerged in 1975 to challenge the casual demolition of historic buildings across the UK. As The Guardian reports, SAVE’s golden anniversary is accompanied by the launch of a new exhibition at the Tate Modern, showcasing 50 of the most significant buildings the group has fought to save—including familiar landmarks like Battersea Power Station, Bradford’s Lister Mills, and entire districts such as Liverpool’s Welsh Streets. It is both a celebration and a sobering reminder that the war on architectural heritage is far from over.

Founded in the wake of London’s architectural clearances of the 1960s and ’70s, SAVE carved out a unique position: independent, research-driven, and unafraid to confront developers, planners, or local authorities. Its legacy is one of vigilance—producing photographic surveys, feasibility studies, and direct action campaigns that have prevented countless demolitions. Yet as director Henrietta Billings reflects, SAVE’s mission today faces more “sophisticated threats”: heritage is not simply destroyed; it is co-opted, commodified, or boxed in by speculative development.

One of the clearest examples of this shift is the proposed redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station, where Network Rail and developers such as Sellar—of Shard fame—have sought to insert a commercial tower over the Grade II-listed station and the adjoining Great Eastern Hotel. The Victorian Society and SAVE have argued that such schemes cloak destruction in the language of “modernisation”—a term that, far from being neutral, has become a euphemism for real estate opportunism. The result is a hollowing-out of civic space and architectural coherence, replaced by oversized towers and transient retail.

SAVE’s latest endangered buildings list —on display at the Tate—shows how widespread and systemic these pressures have become. From derelict industrial warehouses to modest civic structures, many at-risk sites are not crumbling from neglect, but threatened by a development model that sees land primarily as a financial instrument. These buildings are not just material artefacts; they are the spatial memory of working-class communities, industrial history, and architectural experimentation. Their loss is not simply aesthetic, but social and democratic.

As campaigns against the Liverpool Street scheme and similar projects reveal, modernisation today often means building for no one. Developers cite “future demand,” but London is already saturated with empty office space. What gets approved tends to serve global capital rather than the needs of residents or the integrity of place. A 15-storey tower above a functioning Victorian terminus—justified by vague promises of retail synergy—is not urban progress. It is civic vandalism wearing a marketing badge.

The story of SAVE reminds us that preservation is not backward-looking. It is an active, imaginative defence of the commons. The group has long shown that heritage buildings can be repurposed without being overwhelmed, and that public infrastructure can be upgraded without being privatised. As SAVE’s co-founder Marcus Binney once said, “There is no such thing as a building too far gone to save—only developers too lazy to try.”

At 50, SAVE’s work is more urgent than ever—not because buildings are older, but because the forces aligned against them have become more powerful, less accountable, and more skilled at disguising their intentions. The challenge now is not only to halt bulldozers, but to expose the ideology that sees land as ledger, scale as commodity, and community as obstacle.

If we are to have a London—or a Britain—worth inheriting, we must reject the false binaries of old versus new, heritage versus function. The future depends not on more towers, but on more imagination—and the will to defend what we already know to be valuable.