Condition
The building has been vandalised and deteriorated as a result of the theft of lead from the roof. In the early 1980s, the Lilford Trust applied for planning permission to turn the house and grounds into a country club and golf course without success. A large mural painted on the wall of the drawing room was destroyed when the west wing roof collapsed in the 1980s.
In 1952 Bank Hall was granted Grade II* listed building status. In 2002 it was in the 22% of buildings in the UK at immediate risk of further rapid deterioration or loss of fabric. and is on the Buildings at Risk Register described as in very bad condition and priority B for restoration and conservation. In 2010, the house was in a ruinous state. The west wing roof and north-east corner of the clock tower collapsed in the early 1980s, losing a clock face and three quarters of the statues from the battlements. In 2001 listed building consent was granted for structural work to the tower, Three of the decorative corner pinnacles remain but the west elevation has a crack held together by scaffolding installed in 2002 during emergency repairs funded by the action group and English Heritage. At that time, the remains of the clock mechanism were removed and the fallen statues and clock face parts put into storage. In 2006 an attic water tank crashed through the floors in the oldest part of the building causing damage to the roof, a front gable and the rooms below. On 26 July 2007 BBC Breakfast News featured the building, as one of sixteen buildings in the UK which require emergency work. A cantilevered oak staircase remains in the tower where, in 2008, part of the staircase from the south elevation collapsed, but caused no damage to the balustrade.
In 2008 most of the slates were removed to prevent more gables collapsing from pressure on the walls. Three magnolia trees are growing out of the foundations of the east wing and cover the exterior, which has lost two gables. The east wing contains a ground floor room with no windows, a concrete ceiling and a steel door which remains unopened since the estate offices closed in 1972. In September 2010, a collapse in the west wing caused further damage to the 1832 stairwell. The rooms above the parlour were destroyed as the roof and wall collapsed and the drawing room's rear wall partially collapsed. English Heritage assessed the damage as urgent and structural work was needed to prevent further collapse. In November 2011 contractors for the HTNW dismantled the north wing porch as the gable was at risk of collapse. Decorative masonry was removed for an exhibition to be held in Nelson in 2012 by the HTNW.
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Famous quotes containing the word condition:
“Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The condition that gives birth to a rule is not the same as the condition to which the rule gives birth.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)