News / Bristol Beacon

‘Mothballing Bristol Beacon refurbishment is not an option’

By Ellie Pipe  Wednesday Mar 3, 2021

Bristol’s flagship concert hall may have changed its name, but it is still attracting its share of controversy.

News that the cost of refurbishing the Bristol Beacon has more than doubled to £106.9m has met with criticism from many in the city, with opposition politicians blaming the current Labour administration for mismanaging the project.

Marvin Rees has insisted there is no option other than to press ahead with the major refurbishment of the historic venue and said it would cost more to mothball the work than proceed.

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The £44.5m shortfall needed to renovate the 150-year-old building, which is owned by Bristol City Council and run by Bristol Music Trust, is expected to fall on taxpayers in the city.

The mayor said even if he had known about the hefty cost beforehand, he would still have pressed ahead with the project, blaming the state of the venue on 60 years of inaction by previous administrations.

“There is a fundamental question around the building itself; do we want it regenerated and opened back up or do we not want to do that. I don’t think not opening is an option,” said the mayor during a press briefing on Wednesday.

He continued: “It wouldn’t have been good for Bristol to have a major concert venue in the middle of the city and just leave it to fall into disrepair.

“Once you go down the route of renovating Bristol Beacon then we are on the journey. These kinds of investigations into the state of the building should have been undertaken a long time ago.

“Ten years ago, a big gold extension was built on the edge of Colston Hall and no work was done on the main building. We should have looked at the whole project right there and then.”

A wealth of unexpected discoveries, including Elizabethan wells and a Victorian heating system, have added to the complexities and spiralling costs of the construction project.

A paper due to be considered by cabinet on March 9 says that there have been “significant slippages” as the project “had encountered significant issues, delays and suffered from large size difficulties and cost overrun since last project approval, which had been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic”.

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Read more: Bristol Beacon redevelopment costs more than double to £107m

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The venue now won’t be opening until October 2023 at the earliest – more than three years later than the original completion date of September 2020.

Sandy Hore-Ruthven, the Green Bristol mayoral candidate, argues the situation shows the incumbent Labour mayor cannot manage the city’s finances.

“He has hidden the details behind a wall of secrecy and asked us to simply trust his judgement,” said Hore-Ruthven.

“This is money that could have been spent on frontline services, building new homes and helping us to recover from the pandemic. Right now, we cannot afford to lose money – Bristol is being let down. The key is transparency and swift action to stop costs from getting out of control.”

Anthony Negus, a Lib Dem councillor for Cotham and scrutiny chair, believes an “inflexible top-down process” of leadership in the city is to blame for a lack of transparency around the rising costs.

He said ‘a strip-out contract’ back to the shell of the 1951 auditorium building would have enabled a detailed structural analysis and engineers’ report to minimise unknowns and better inform the lowest tender for the main contract.

Negus, a former architect, added: “Like any proud Bristolian I want our city to have a nationally-acclaimed concert hall where our people can attend a wide range of musical and other performances. But I also want to be sure we are getting value for money so that we have resources to maintain services like social care and to restore cuts like those to public toilets and affordable housing.”

Alastair Watson, the Conservative Bristol mayoral candidate was also quick to blame the incumbent mayor, claiming Rees’ administration is a threat to the city’s finances.

“To get this far in a project costing millions without a proper structural survey is totally unbelievable,” said Watson.

“We need to bring some proper business sense back to the administration of the city.”

Rees said that with the building still in operation until work began, it was not possible to carry out the invasive work necessary to uncover the hidden complications of the redevelopment.

He stated it was “not a case of spiralling costs” because what had been discovered meant the project was “fundamentally different” from the original, adding the options of what can be with a listed building such as this are limited anyway.

“It would cost the city more to mothball it than to proceed, but then we would also lose out on the contribution to the cultural sector and the gross value added which we estimate over 10 years to be £250m,” said Rees.

“This is an essential piece of work and unfortunately it’s phenomenally complex, but the complexity of that has only been added to by the fact that the city has not faced up to it for 60 years.”

Main photo by Martin Booth

Read more: Row over spiralling cost of Bristol Beacon refurbishment

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