Chester is a city packed with heritage.
From Roman remains to St Werburgh’s ,the 15th-century cathedral, you can’t take a step without being in the path of ancient feet. But perhaps the most famous and extraordinary aspect of Chester’s history are the 13th-century Rows, famous for being the only example of medieval buildings of this type to have existed, never mind survive today.
In the 21st century, securing a future for the Rows is fraught with difficulty; not only were they designed for smaller people, undertaking different tasks and living above the shop but they are very expensive to maintain and offer what appear to be almost insurmountable challenges to landlords and tenants.
‘We really feel, right now, that Chester is in a ‘thrive or die moment – either it’s going to reinvent itself fantastically, or it’s going to slide into something irrelevant and all the beautiful buildings are going to stay vacant, and slowly decay. We want to be part of making sure the former happens,’ says architect Tony Swindells, who, along with his partners at design firm Openhome and his fellow founders of ChesterGAS, have big plans for Chester’s Rows.
‘She bought me a Moschino jacket. She paid £250, 35 years ago. It was the start of my fascination with design, and fashion, and cool stuff; the beginning of my journey here.’
Tony went onto study for an architecture degree at Bath, and after graduating joined a firm in Liverpool.
‘I stayed in Liverpool and ultimately became the major shareholder in the business. I sold my share in 2021, to a management buyout. We built a strong business, with 40 architectural staff and 10 interior designers. We did loads of lovely, big, award-winning stuff. But big projects and big business takes its toll, and I decided it was time to make a change.’
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‘I had to decide what was genuinely important in my life. We decided to sell the business to the junior partners, find somewhere beautiful to live and just do beautiful projects for ourselves. And we chose Chester.
‘Monika and I set up a small design practice and the idea was to just do select hand-picked quality projects, work maybe two or three days a week and build a small portfolio for ourselves. Here we are three years later, and we’ve invested every single penny we have in Chester. We have bought properties we are redeveloping, we have set up ChesterGAS, we have set up Openhome, our architectural design agency in partnership with Stephen and Nicol Morris and have founded The Chester Design Foundation CIC. While we just came here for a quieter life to live and work, we fell in love with the city’s potential and the people here.’
‘We want to see this city reinvested and redeveloped and to convince the council it’s the jewel in the crown and great things can be done,’ Tony says. ‘The initial founders were me, Tim Kenney, Mike Hogg and Izzy Grey. When I arrived here, I dived straight into networking and building relationships and learned very quickly that Chester was really siloed. Nobody seemed to sharing information or working collaboratively, which we have set about correcting, and one of our most important projects is absolutely the re-energising of the Rows.’
The more the team spoke with landlords, business owners and the council, the more they realised there is vast amount of vacant heritage property in Chester at risk of long-term, irreversible decay, and there was a need for someone to create a pathway for these spaces to bring them back to use and occupation.
‘A lot of the historic conversions had been done in the 1970s and ‘80s, really badly, and with scant regard for heritage,’ Tony says. Monika and I bought two properties on Castle Street and renovated them. They both sold the day they went on the market – proving that people want to live in the city, and that you can take heritage-affected, complicated old buildings and make them relevant today.’
‘There is still a lot of vacant space in and above the Rows,’ Tony explains. ‘Vacant space isn’t anybody’s fault. Landlords are getting a bad rap, but in this case it’s more complicated. The shape of retail and of commercial offices has changed. No retailers carry massive stock anymore, so they don’t need the upper floors to store it in. Nor are they needed for office space. Covid damaged Chester as a place to do business. Once everybody started working from home they all realised this was preferrable to spending their days in a badly heated, draughty, centuries-old property. Landlords struggle to fill these vacant spaces, despite three years of advertising.
‘For example, I went into a Grade 1 listed building on the Rows, sitting vacant, with leaking roof, rotten timbers, a failed electrical test, and the landlord refusing to do anything with it. These buildings are hugely expensive to maintain once they’re empty. The irony is, if we roll forward 20 years and do nothing about it, that heritage we care so much about and sell Chester on is going to have fallen down.
‘The council are concerned about this, so asked me to give a talk at the Town Hall to the planning committee and staff, to present a new perspective and approach. They then asked if GAS could help prepare a document showing people what the potential of the Rows is – a document they could take to potential investors, to encourage new investment by showing they were was open to new thinking and action.’
Today, Tony and Monika, with Openhome, are putting their money where their mouths are and proving that to revive the centre of Chester, and especially the Rows, their way of thinking is an immediate solution. This is taking the form of bespoke regeneration of five heritage properties, two of which they are undertaking as joint ventures with local investors, including 22 Bridge Street, where they are working with Chester Racecourse.
‘We are going to ‘back convert’ this property,’ Tony says. ‘The Chester Design Foundation store occupies the ground floor and we are going to create two three-bedroom properties, with a central courtyard, with the remaining floors. A second Rows property on Watergate Street has been reconfigured into a three-storey retail unit, with restored Rows access and residential spaces to the rear.
‘We also own a Rows property on Lower Bridge Street, where we are currently at work creating space for a retail unit at street level and converting everything above to two homes, with a totally unique Row-level shared terrace overlooking the street.’
Every property Tony, Monika, and Openhome develop, whether personally or as part of a joint venture, will demonstrate to the wider community, to the local authority and to potential investors in Chester that there is huge potential within the walls of this tiny, but perfectly formed city, leading to a renaissance in the fortunes of what surely must be, as Tony argues, the jewel in Cheshire’s crown.
‘Everything we are achieving here is because we’re part of a huge collaborative effort,’ Tony closes. ‘Cities like Chester have to come together, to work collaboratively and share energy and creativity, and we are seeing the results of this collaboration. The appetite was always there, now we have the machinery to make things happen.’
When once Chester’s walls were built to keep the Welshman out, it seems that now Chester’s future will be directly, positively, and lastingly influenced by the arrival of one Welshman who, at age 16, fell in love with the concept of design in a shop in the Rows, a medieval architectural oddity he is now proving can be reimagined and protected, hopefully for another 800 years and more.
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