Clive Wilson
Arriving to live in St James's Square in 1966, Clive and his wife Catherine found an area that had seen better days. At the time there were no railings around the now-restored houses, the iron having been taken to make guns for World War II. The railings had been removed from round the square communal gardens too, and replaced with a rusty chain link fence. Clive says: “Cornices were falling into the street. One house, number 9, had to be barricaded off.” Early on Clive realised what an exceptional area he had come to live in, even if it had fallen on hard times. War damage still pervaded, due to shortage of materials and lack of funds. But a distinguished late Regency/early Victorian layout, with many fine houses, needed rescuing and restoring after the slash-and-burn approach to redevelopment of the early 1960's. Moreover for Clive, a major irritation was up to 600 vehicles an hour, including lorries and buses, roaring past his door in St James’ Gardens, up through Clarendon Cross and Clarendon Road, finding their way from the recently built M4 and the M1. Something had to be done to get rid of them.
Clive consulted Gordon Michell, an architect on Queensdale Road, who was a pioneer of conservation in towns. Gordon told him the council had just been required to designate Conservation Areas, and didn't know what to do with them: no conservation ideas, aims, let alone policies. Gordon suggested that the designation of Norland as ‘an outstanding Conservation Area’ gave an opportunity to rescue and restore the area, and get rid of the traffic as part of this effort, helping the Council to understand what a Conservation Area should be about, and develop policies to rescue the area. Thus was started the Norland Conservation Society (NCS) in 1969, architect Gordon Michell as chairman, and another local friend Ian Tegner as founding treasurer. Clive ran the Norland Conservation Society for 50 years, finally handing over the reins to Libby Kinmonth in 2019.
One of the first, and most significant achievements of NCS was the closure of Clarendon Cross. Once Clarendon Cross was closed, through traffic was closed off and peace came to this enclave of London. This coincided with the opening of the West Cross Route and Western avenue extension, which meant through traffic no longer needed to find a rat-run through Norland.
After that, successive NCS Committees wrestled with the many pressures of defending a historic area against the demands of increasingly prosperous and well-heeled owners, all the time trying to develop consistent and defensible conservation policies. In this process, a significant mile-stone came with European Architectural Heritage Year, headed up by Gordon Michell, which supported getting all the Royal Crescent houses painted a uniform colour. “That was a great achievement,” says Clive.
A more recent significant achievement of the NCS was the development, and adoption by referendum, of the Norland Neighbourhood Plan, the first in London and the second in the whole country: “We were the first to get a Neighbourhood Plan endorsed by referendum,” says Clive, “we got recognition and authority countrywide."
