Five Bristol tower blocks to be refurbished in 'overdue' council housing upgrade
Campaigners are celebrating after Bristol City Council announced a major £18million refurbishment of its housing in St Jude’s that has been delayed for over a decade.
The funding will be spent upgrading five blocks – John Cozens House, Haviland House, Charleton House, Langton House and Tyndall House – with a total of 180 flats, of which 163 are occupied.
Fourteen families will be asked to move out for up to three months while engineers carry out survey work, and they will be found other council accommodation or can 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.
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 the building could collapse if there was a fire in a single flat.
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, near Cabot Circus, 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.
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.”
The announcement on 13 June came as the authority delivered leaflets to everyone in the blocks explaining what would happen.
In a press briefing on Thursday afternoon, 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 delays had been a combination of finances, the pandemic, requirements to improve fire safety and cladding in blocks following the Grenfell disaster and, mostly recently, resources having to be redirected to sort the issues at Barton House.