 Ac thanks for inviting me to this talk today. At I miss the morning session because I had a Sc noodles on my work, but I did catch the last bit of the panel discussion. I discussed the fact and I have the fairy idea of what we discussed continuing on that, and I will be talking about the identification and several of the signification is actually necessary Aunt. Significant obviously means different things to different people depending on you know what state they have on a property on a site. It, in planning world, it is an extremely essential term a policy term introduced in national planning policy framework against to which all planning applications are judged, including applications for faith buildings, adaptation of faith buildings. Hyst Travel UK haf yw gweithio cefnol am codiwg cyd-gwladol o'i cefnol, am brifwys y glas rydyn ni gweithio saes yn ei gweithio'u cerdd, gwybod heb cynnidiau, yn credu hwn sy'n credu ei gweithio, yn gweithio, amser, yn cerdd, gyda ei chynghwm, gyd-gyrchu'i cyffredig llwy, geitwch ar pupil y gyd-gyrchu, i'r ddylchio gyda'r ddeall hyffordd eich cyfrolyniad o'r personaleau a'r ddyliadau ar gyfer ar wgellgor cartiolau ar ocun. Mae eich cyfle o'r ddal yn ddiweddog, sydd wedi cydweithio ffyrdd i wladwg gyflymu'n cerddurol. i'r diwethaf, i gyfweld i gilyddiaeth hyn yn factoryn iaith y gallu gardenau gyda siaradahol. A syniadau gardenau yn ei wneud hynny, dwi'n ffuntiwch, cyfwismu cyfwisio cyfwisio hynny a hynny yw cyfwisio cyfwisio cyfwisio. a gweithgwch gyda'n cael meddwl y gallwn i'w aelodol.olol ac gallwch chi'n amser bod yn dwy'n gwneud i'r mwyaf o'r 3 gwaith Roedd ffyrdd y gwirionedd ar y crfyniad o'r sgol yw'r gwirionedd newydd mwyaf i gwybod o unrhyw storiogau gwirionedd. Mae yma mae'r ll rent yn gweithio i gwybod i gweithio i ddechrau a'r last one is creating a new faith building. The gentleman over there in the earlier part before we went for lunch from the south was talking about buildings which are cinema buildings that have been adapted into churches, minority faith churches. This is one such example, it's called Tottenham Palace. It was opened in 1908 as a theatre building, it was a music variety place. It had three levels, stall, circle and balcony. You can see from some of the photographs how large the spaces are internally. When it was built, it was supposed to house 3,000 people. However, because by the time it came in, cinema had already started to take over, it got quickly converted into a cinema building. In 1968 it was then taken over by a bingo hall and remained in use as a bingo hall from 1968 to the 1990s. In the 1990s, a Pentecostal Church took over the building, bought the freehold and renamed it as Palace Cathedral. The building's history basically moves from Tottenham Palace to Palace Cathedral with its new owner as the Pentecostal Church. The building is great to listed and unfortunately due to its poor condition and maintenance issues, it is included in the Historic England's At Risk Register. There is a big lack of funds which we realised and with Historic England because it's an at risk thing, we decided to engage with discussions with the current management. Unfortunately, although the management people of the congregation, they love the building, they really appreciate the building, they appreciate how big the building is because often, although not every service, but sometimes they do get special speakers coming out from other parts of the world and they do appreciate the vast amount of space they have. But there is very poor understanding and intellectual understanding of the significance of the spaces and the features. For example, there used to be an organ there, a word it's an organ I think it was called. It was only the second in the country, nobody knows where it went because it was probably just taken out because it was no longer required. And there is an even poorer understanding about the methods of repair work. For example, not using hard cement, for example hard cement mortar, is just such a basic thing for any historic building practitioner. For them, it was such a surprise when I told them, no, you have to use lime plaster. They are struggling with it and there is also inefficient use of the spaces. There are other theatre buildings that have been converted into churches who are being used very efficiently, but this particular building is not being used efficiently, which means that they are not earning enough money. And so our idea with Historic England was to approach them and give them ideas about how we could help them, how we could give them expertise about historic buildings, how we can advise them on getting additional funding. But then there was an ideology conflict. They didn't want to share the space with anybody who would sell, for example alcohol. They didn't want to have an event there which would lead to a situation where they would sell alcohol. They didn't want to approach heritage lottery fund because it's gambling money. And so, you know, at the end of the day, we've been in discussions with them for three years and we feel like we're going round in circles. And because the spaces are not being used properly, they're not getting enough income, which is like a vicious circle because it's contributing at the end of the day for the poor maintenance of the building. My next example is adapting an existing building. You can see from the drawing, the top drawing, the first two on the top. This building, it's actually in a conservation area, it's not listed or anything. It used to be a church and the building got bombed and then was rebuilt in the 50s and was used as a Jewish synagogue. And most recently has been taken over by a, how do I explain, by... It's a very Orthodox Hindu sectarian, it's called a Murugan Temple. It's a Southern Indian sect, very Orthodox. And they have congregation, not just in its immediate north London area, but also people living outside of London from Sri Lankan origin, et cetera, who come to this temple. So this is an extremely important building for them, but not necessarily for the wider community because the wider community is not of that faith. They wanted to adapt the building because they wanted to make it as a mark of their community, even though most of the congregation lived outside of the neighborhood. They wanted to adapt the facade of the building and you can see how... You can see that they wanted to... If anybody has been to Madurai, the Menachee Temple in South of India, the kind of wanted this very decorative plaster there just outside the building converted, make it look like as if it was a makeshift temple. However, they forgot that they needed planning permission for it. And they went on to do this work and they did it in colours, golden and pink, and not just the chic golden and pink, but the golden and metallic chic golden and pink. And obviously the community were not happy about it. They came running to us, we had to send the enforcement team there, had to stop words, scaffolding had to come down for us to be able to appreciate the colours, et cetera. And then we started doing the dialogues with them. Most of them did not speak English. And so we had to get a translator to help us communicate with them. They had no idea why they needed planning permission because they were not increasing the height of the building. So why would they need permission? So we had to explain to them the process behind this. And then also work with them to make it simplified of sorts. If you see the previous, you would see that this section is more decorative. Whereas we managed to reduce the amount of plaster work, simplify the colours. Because everything is yellow stock, brick, terraced sort of buildings, we managed to convince them to use what we call as a sandalwood colour. And so they toned everything down from the metallic green and metallic pink to colours of beige basically, including yellow granite at the bottom. We made them, you know, we wanted to, because it's a shop front on the street, it's a shopping street. We wanted to make sure that the shop front remained a shop front basically. So yeah, and you know, they were very cooperative. And when we had to, obviously as part of the planning permission, we had to go out for consultation with the community, we had really mixed reactions. Some people saying, oh, we don't understand this, why is it in my neighborhood? And some people saying, oh, this is great. You know, we welcome this community, we welcome this congregation, and we like the fact that there is an iconic building in our street. But we were able to get work with them, get through with them, and the project is completed now, and it's popular. The next one is a purpose-built temple. Obviously, this is not a purpose-built temple. This is a outer London sort of sub-topian area, which all looks the same everywhere. It's a warehouse building, which was being used in a makeshift way as a temple. A northern Indian temple, sort of Punjabi origin, I think the temple had. And because the congregation kept increasing, they started out in Port of Covens, you can see there. These Port of Covens were obviously very ugly, and they have a, normally in planning terms, they have a time limit, and the time limit was coming to an end. So we spoke to the temple and we said, have you thought about actually putting a more permanent but nicer structure, which works with your congregation? And they said, oh yeah, that's great, thank you. Yeah, we'll go away and we'll think about this. And they went away and they thought about this. Extremely poor quality. I was the urban design officer at that time, at that council, and extremely poor quality in terms of architecture, no top whatsoever, just plonking additional height on what used to be the warehouse basically, which is actually construction-wise very difficult to do, because you have to have really, really deep foundations, and adding this makeshift shikara, as they call it in Hindu temple architecture, just just plonking it just to make it look like it was a temple. And it's a very tight neighbourhood. All the buildings are two stories. And so the height was a big issue for the planning officers because it was causing overshadowing, privacy issues, in addition to the fact that often they will have big lunches, which will mean a lot of people coming into the area. So the planners weren't happy with the bulk, I wasn't happy with the design, so we went back to them and we said, actually have you thought about, you do have to reduce the height. Have you thought about actually hiring an architect who could design you a Hindu temple? They went and said, oh yeah, that's even better. They came up with this. And you can imagine the reaction of fun is this is an area, I'm talking about an area which is basically a warden, terraced, terraced, terraced, nothing but terraced housing, all in the shade of red or beige. And here comes a very ethnic looking temple. So the planning officers had no clue how to react to it basically. They had not studied about temple and Vedic architecture, I was lucky enough to study that back in my architecture graduate years, but for them this was clearly out of character. And in planning policy terms, then how do you judge it then? Do you still look at it, oh is it causing privacy? Actually if privacy issues, no, actually it isn't. Is it causing overshadow? No it isn't. Is it trying to anchor what was a boring, box-standard, sub-topian era into something more visionary, something more multicultural? Yes it does. Is that a bad thing? No it isn't. But how do you, you know, in the planning policy terms, there isn't anything that defines iconic architecture which is not tall buildings designed by Norman Foster. So it was tough convincing the planning officers at that time. To be honest at that I had left immediately after I had recommended it for approval. I don't actually know where they'd got approval. There must have been parking issues. And I would leave you with these three beautiful examples. This one is a mosque in Hackney Road designed by my very good friend. I'm going to be speaking next, Shahidzali. It is one of my favourite buildings in Hackney. It's a mosque but it is so subtly done. It's contemporary, it sits with the streets so beautifully. This is a temple in Madhya Pradesh in India. And the idea behind this particular temple was that your worshipping space is small but your reflection space around it is much bigger. So you have more open space where you can sit and reflect rather than go inside and worship and queue etc. And this third one is actually in the borough that I work for right now. It's Senans in Haringey. It used to be a Catholic, Victorian Catholic school. It's now a Sufi centre. Successfully adapted, extremely successful and extremely popular in the area. Thank you.