Exeter's Royal
Clarence Hotel
– Luxury apartments or a Literary Heritage Centre?
This is a revision of a submission made to the Royal Clarence Public Consultation which closes 22 December 2021.
The recent proposal to convert
the Royal Clarence Hotel
into luxury apartments, available for purchase as well as to rent, with a bar
and restaurant on the ground floor is completely inappropriate. St Martin's Island is part of the primary shopping area and the
introduction of private accommodation would constitute a considerable change of
use in a listed building within a conservation area. The proposals show a lack
of vision.
Here in the heart of Exeter is an iconic building of great
significance to the people of Exeter located in the cultural hub of Exeter
around Saint Peter's Churchyard, where Exeter's first library was rebuilt in
the Cathedral cloisters in the early 15th century, Exeter's first
recorded bookseller was established on Saint Martin's Island at the start of
the 16th century, Exeter's first printers produced newspapers in and
around the Exchange Coffee House in the early 18th century and the
Devon and Exeter Institution, Exeter's first heritage hub, was founded in the
town house of the Courtenay family at the start of the 19th century.
Exeter was
designated UNESCO City of Literature in the early 21st century to
celebrate this rich literary heritage.
What Exeter lacks is a central literary hub, a memory
institution open to all, to bring this written legacy before the City's
residents, visitors, students and researchers. A decade ago the region's
largest local studies collection, the Westcountry Studies Library, was removed
by Devon County Council from the centre of Exeter, and the premises sold off
and converted to the Library Lofts, luxury apartments such as are once again
proposed, while the Library itself was re-housed in Great Moor House on the
Sowton Industrial Estate, with no funding to maintain it and no specialist
staff to interpret this unique collection or to seek out new material to
continue to record the City and County as they are today for future
generations.
In November the Exeter Literary
Festival included a moving and inspirational presentation, Syria's secret library by BBC correspondent
Mike Thomson, an account of the struggle to maintain a library of several
thousand books in a cellar beneath a suburb of Damascus as the bombs rained down. Those who
rescued the books from destruction said that they were preserving the city's
memory and culture. At present the only literature on Exeter and its region freely available to the
public in the midst of the City is a small changing selection of lending books
on half a dozen shelves in the Central Library. Many smaller communities in Devon can do far better than that. We have in the heart
of Exeter a building as ruinous as any in Syria,
not through bombing but through fire. The façade, which it is intended to
retain, shows that there were four storeys on a large plot, plus, presumably,
basement areas. There is room to accommodate behind that façade Exeter's secret library,
the collections that Exeter City Library built up for more than a century, and
much more besides.
The ground floor could house a
tourist information centre and bookshop for local interest publications, and
serve as the point of departure for the redcoat guides. The reading room and
main book stack of Exeter's
local studies collection with a Record Office service point could also be on
this floor.
The first floor could have an exhibition room, displaying a
changing selection of treasures from this and other collections in the county,
and a lecture theatre or function room, recalling the assembly room in the
hotel, and seminar rooms, together with the Exchange Coffee House, a memory of
the nearby locale where one of the first Exeter printing presses was set up in
the early 18th century.
The third and fourth floors could provide space for
staff and technical services, such as digitisation and bibliographical work,
offices for historical, genealogical, literary and other local organisations
and, if space and access permit, serviced accommodation for visiting
researchers, authors, and speakers. Care should be taken to incorporate as many
surviving historical features as possible. The Centre would also work closely
with its neighbours ariund St Peter's Churcyard, the Devon and Exeter Institution and Exeter Cathedral
Library and Archives, to promote education and research into Exeter and its region.
Such a library would not take all non-archival items at present in the Devon Heritage Centre. Hard copy newspapers, Ordnance
Survey large-scale maps and other backup materials would remain with the Record
Office, although digital access and microforms would be available. It would be
a multimedia resource centre for the 21st century, located in the heart of the
city.
Easy to dream, and now is not
exactly a good time for grand ideas, but perhaps something could be achieved
with the City, University and County (the present library authority for
Exeter) working together with the business, cultural, heritage and voluntary
sectors, possibly through a charitable trust that could attract grants and
lottery funding. Austerity measures landed us in the present situation in 2011;
perhaps, a decade on, covid recovery measures can enable Exeter's community memory to rise
phoenix-like from the ashes of austerity and covid, but faster than it did
after 1942. After all, such opportunities occur rarely, even in the best of
times.
Ian Maxted, 9 December 2021
The writer was Devon's local
studies librarian, based in Exeter, from 1977 to
2005 and has undertaken extensive research into the literary history of Exeter which can be
viewed on the bookhistory.blogspot.com
and devon-bibliography.blogspot.com
websites. He is the author of The
story of the book in Exeter and Devon, published in 2021.
It must be emphasised that there
is no criticism of the South West Heritage Trust, based in Taunton,
Somerset, which administers Exeter's local studies collection in the
Devon Heritage Centre. They have been given an impossible task and have
achieved much with minimal resources, but there has inevitably been an emphasis
on archives. Traditionally libraries have been managed by librarians, who have
a wider scope to their activities than archivists, looking to the present as
well as the past, and including the natural environment, arts and literature as
well as local administrative, legal and ecclesiastical records. Beside
historical writings, the Westcountry Studies Library holds rich collections of
works by Devon writers, including: Sir Walter
Raleigh, John Ford, Robert Herrick, Thomas D'Urfey, John Gay, Peter Pindar,
Charles Kingsley, Sabine Baring-Gould, R. D. Blackmore, Eden Phillpotts, John
Galsworthy, Henry Williamson, Agatha Christie, Sir Michael Morpurgo and many
more. Exeter is
not a true city of literature or city of culture without easy access to this
treasure house of writings.
