Major £18m housing refurbishment announced by Bristol City Council in St Jude’s | Bristol Live

The activities are celebrating after Bristol City Council announced a major £18 million housing refurbishment at St Jude’s, which has been delayed for over a decade. Of this, between £7m and £10m will be spent on upgrading five blocks John Cozens House, Haviland House, Charleton House, Langton House and Tyndall House, with a total of 180 flats, of which 163 are occupied.

Fourteen families will be asked to move for up to three months while engineers carry out survey work and will be found other council accommodation or will be able to stay with friends or family and receive financial support. Repairs will include new roofs, floors, doors, windows, lighting, exterior wall insulation, enclosed stairs, electrical work, smoke detectors, bike racks and trash stores.

City hall housing chiefs say there are no structural concerns, despite the tower blocks having a similar design to Barton House, where the local authority declared a “major incident” in November amid fears the building could collapse if it would be a fire in one place. apartment. Around 400 tenants and occupiers were evacuated, most of them in hotels, but further investigations showed that the Barton Hill building was fundamentally safe and they were allowed to return home four months later.

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The refurbishment program at St Jude’s, near Cabot Circus on the edge of the city centre, will take place in phases and take between three and five years. It marks victory for residents who launched a campaign backed by community union ACORN over the appalling state of their council flats.

In September, a group of women stormed the council’s offices in Temple Street, demanding a meeting with the authority’s head of repairs and then plastered the premises with ‘Wanted’ posters when no one would speak to them. They were told the housing department would fix the problems, including damp and mold that tenants said caused children to develop asthma and other health conditions and forced them to spend a fortune on mold-resistant paint.

But nothing happened, so ACORN members planned to march on the council again in May, which was called off after the housing authority’s new chairman, Cllr Barry Parsons (Green, Easton), stepped in and met them at the start this month, promising an update within two weeks.

Now, after years of delays, the council has confirmed that much-needed improvements to the blocks are about to start. St Jude resident and ACORN member Yasmin said: “I cannot describe what a monumental victory these new developments will be for our community.

“After many years fading into the background, our homes neglected and forgotten, with much appreciated help and dedication from ACORN we came together as residents and fought to make our voices heard. At the end of the day, these apartments are home to many complex and intricate individual lives, where we raise our children and rest at night.

“We are not just statistics on a piece of paper or tick boxes. It is brilliant to feel such hope for myself and my fellow residents at St Jude’s for the first time in my seven years here.”

Another neighbor and ACORN member Mohamed said: “The council ignored us for years, but after we marched together on the council building, they started to listen. Last month we took action again, pushing council leaders when they will start work to build our homes. safe, and now we’re seeing concrete plans, it’s brilliant.”

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The announcement today (Thursday June 13) came as the authority delivered leaflets to everyone in the blocks explaining what would happen and also published a series of webpages here.

At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, a council spokesman said officers and contractors would work with the community on the final designs and that the building work itself should start towards the end of the year once the results surveys were known, but that the initial findings showed no concern.

They said: “These blocks have been overdue for a refurbishment for a very long time. Unfortunately, they have been subject to water penetration and have a lot of wear and tear.

“It is a campaign that the residents took to the City Hall. We are now in a place where we can begin that redevelopment.

“There has been an ambition to do this for over a decade. We apologize that it has taken so long. Much of this work will focus on improving the energy efficiency of the blocks.”

The spokesman said the project was fully funded from the council’s housing budget, agreed by councilors in February, but that the authority would also seek other grants, such as from the West of England Combined Authority (Weca), to improve efficiency energy and government. .

They said: “The purpose of the renovation is not about the safety of the building, but about the quality of the home.” The spokesman said the delays were a combination of finances, the pandemic, requirements to improve fire safety and cladding of blocks following the Grenfell disaster and, most recently, resources needing to be redirected to deal with problems at Barton House.