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Well, Nigel, may-be you could explain what the mess is inside the building. How are we supposed to know? No-one goes in there. I can only assume by what I see from the outside, that the building is stable and made of bricks.
Any building that has been disused for a long period will have mess inside. My dad bought a house in Dover in 1972 and completely remodernised it inside. He put in new stair-cases and put wall-boards on the walls. Had new windows and doors put in, and a new bathroom. He put new ceiling and floor tiles in all the rooms. He did most the work himself, and contracted workers only for the essential restructuring. And he had a fresh coat of paint spraid on the outside walls. Two men came and did the paint job, and it took them two or three hours!
I somehow doubt that any mess in the Britannia building cannot be cleared away. I have experience of how buildings can look inside and how they can be cleared of mess, having worked as painter and decorator and carried out plenty of remodernising work inside disused buildings! I also know it from how my dad got the house remodernised in Dover which we moved to.
Having personal work experience, I know what I'm talking about here. Exactly what needs doing inside the Britannia can only be judged if one looks inside. What I find hard to understand is how a building can be deemed ready for demolishing because it is messy inside.
May-be you could explain to us all what structural problems concern the Britannia, if any. Has water leekd inside and ruined the foundations? Are there dangerous cracks in the walls? Is the place sinking into the ground?
If it just needs a general cleaning up job inside, and painting (all buildings periodically need repainting inside and outside), then this is no argument to knock the building down! Mess is usually cleared out and loaded onto a lorry.
Roofs also need to be periodically changed. Heavy roof beems of wood can last hundreds of years, the smaller wooden beems may-be 50 to a hundred yerars, and the thinner pieces of wood on which the tiles rest should be changed every few decades, if they are rotting, or even every 50 years, but at some point they will need changing.
The Britannia building is not particularly old in comparisson, but I dread to think what DDC councillors would do if asked to modernise old buildings in Canterbury. Come on with bulldozers or what?
