Spolia

99% Invisible

In the South Liverpool neighborhood of Granby, a community land trust and design collective called Assemble transformed abandoned, gutted ho

Key takeaways

The government's removal of all valuable materials from Granby homes was meant to prevent squatting but erased cultural and emotional value.
Spolia is not just practical reuse; it carries symbolic meaning by honoring the past through material continuity.

Main topics

Spolia in architecture
Community-led urban renewal

Notable quotes

Every single house on the street says, no items of value in this house.

Conclusion

Granby's transformation from a hollowed-out neighborhood to a thriving community demonstrates that

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In South Liverpool, there's a neighbourhood called Granby. It used to be one of the most vibrant and diverse neighbourhoods in the UK. It had a busy main street lined with shops and cafes. But by 2012, when an architect named Lewis Jones first visited, most of the houses were unoccupied. Speaker 2 (0:24) So, you know, a couple of hundred houses, but only about 10 or 12 people still living there. The rest of the house is all empty. Speaker 5 (0:33) Granby had suffered through decades of unemployment, aggressive policing, and failed redevelopment schemes. And over time, the neighborhood had hollowed out. Speaker 3 (0:43) That's 99PI senior editor Delaney Hall. Speaker 5 (0:46) The local government had forced residents to sell their homes and then boarded them up. But before the authorities sealed each house, they gutted it. Speaker 2 (0:55) They'd strip everything out. They'd strip out the copper, the lead, everything that was seen to have an economic value. but also everything that would enable someone to live there, the toilets, the kind of infrastructure. And that was to prevent people from squatting in those houses after they'd been emptied out. Speaker 5 (1:13) And after stripping the houses and boarding up the windows, the government would place a sign on the front, reading, All Speaker 2 (1:21) items of value have been removed from this property. And, you know, it's quite a provocation when every single house on the street says on it, no items of value in this house. Speaker 5 (1:33) Of course, the government meant materials like copper and lead. But there are other kinds of value embedded in a home. There's the skill it took to build it, and the years of life that happened inside of it, and the community that grew up around it. And what happened next in Granby? would prove the signs wrong. Speaker 3 (1:54) A small group of residents basically refused to leave the neighborhood. Little by little, they began clearing trash from the empty lots, planting community gardens, and painting the boarded-up houses in bright colors. Speaker 5 (2:07) Eventually, this band of holdouts formed a community land trust, or a CLT. Their goal was to take ownership of the empty houses and bring people back to the neighborhood. They raised money through a patchwork of small grants, and then they realized it might be useful to have some folks on board who knew how to design and build stuff. Which is how Lewis got involved. Speaker 2 (2:31) They wanted to renovate those houses. They wanted to provide those as affordable housing. They wanted to invite people who previously had lived in that neighborhood but had to be moved away from it. They wanted to invite those people back in. Speaker 5 (2:43) Lewis is a part of a design collective called Assemble. And with Assemble's support, the CLT advocated to the local government to stop demolishing the remaining homes. Then they worked together to renovate a handful of the old houses. Speaker 3 (2:58) As they pulled out materials that were too damaged to save, they started experimenting with the debris. Eventually, they set up a little backyard workshop with a local artist. And together, they figured out how to make something that they called Granby Rock. Speaker 2 (3:13) And it was basically a kind of rubble terrazzo that we'd take all of the broken bricks and bits of slate and other kind of debris coming out of the renovation process and we'd recast them as components for these new decorative fireplaces and mantelpieces that we then put back into each house. Speaker 5 (3:33) Every chunk of Granby rock was unique, swirled with colour from the old bricks and flecked with pieces of broken slate. Then it was poured into molds and polished smooth. Granby Rock fireplaces and countertops went into each of the renovated houses. It Speaker 2 (3:49) just felt important as part of kind of the process of reclaiming the narrative of these houses, of this neighborhood, that actually valuing everything that was there was important. Speaker 3 (4:02) Over the next few years, dozens of properties in Granby were renovated and then offered as affordable housing. And slowly, people started moving in. Speaker 5 (4:11) New families prepared dinner on the countertops made from salvaged brick. They sat near fireplaces that were cast from the rubble of the house next door. They were living in a very real way, with materials from the neighborhood's complicated past. Speaker 3 (4:29) In the world of design, there's Speaker 5 (4:31) a Speaker 3 (4:31) term that's used for the practice of taking elements from older buildings and reusing them in new ones. It's called spolia. And what Assemble did in Granby was a version of that. The designers looked at the materials from the old houses and they saw an opportunity to make something new. Speaker 5 (4:48) Reuse has always been an element of how humans build. We are endless recyclers, pulling nails out of old burned timbers and cleaning and restacking used bricks and hauling stone from one building to the next. Speaker 3 (5:04) But with Spolia, this reuse isn't just a matter of practicality. It also carries meaning. The old material has a history, and using it in a new building is a way of acknowledging that what came before still matters. And that might be why spolia shows up in some of the world's most famous architecture. Places like the Hagia Sophia, Notre Dame, and the Great Mosque of Cordoba all use repurposed stonework. Speaker 5 (5:30) But to really understand spolia, you have to go back to the place where the practice first became widespread. It happened when a civilization was in the middle of an existential crisis. And it started pulling apart the old world in order to build a new one. That civilization was the Roman Empire. Speaker 3 (5:52) That's funny. I was just thinking about the Roman Empire. Speaker 5 (5:56) At its peak, the Roman Empire controlled the entire Mediterranean world. It spanned Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. The empire lasted for roughly five centuries. And nearly 2,000 years later, we are still arguing about its legacy. Speaker 4 (6:13) So my name is Dr. Emma Southern. I am a Roman historian. I am an ex-academic, and now I write books about how horrible the Romans were. Speaker 5 (6:24) Emma loves to hate the Romans. She has been obsessed ever since she first learned about them as a teenager. The Speaker 4 (6:32) thing that I love the most about them more than any other empire really is the complete disconnect between their image of themselves as being the most rational, the most perfect, the peak of civilization, the best that humanity can be.