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Going Going Gone: Nick Broomfield's Disappearing Britain

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

25/05/2016

BBC Four - Going Going Gone: Nick Broomfield's Disappearing Britain

Profiles of two iconic buildings threatened with demolition in Liverpool and Cardiff.

Documentary. Two iconic British buildings - the Wellington Rooms in Liverpool and the Coal Exchange in Cardiff - are threatened with demolition and Nick Broomfield is on the case.

Two iconic British buildings are threatened with demolition and the intrepid Nick Broomfield is on the case. In a pair of documentaries, Broomfield profiles the Wellington Rooms in Liverpool and the Coal Exchange in Cardiff.

The Wellington Rooms, built in 1815 by Edmund Aikin, was originally the social hub for the super-rich, slave traders, businessmen and the elite. The prime minister William Gladstone's family, themselves wealthy slave owners, invested heavily in this magnificent building with the most intricate detailing and proportions. A Wedgwood ceiling and sprung dance floor, with classical columns, create a building of love and light. 

Despite the depression in Liverpool's fortunes, it's a building that has brought enormous happiness to many different people over a couple of centuries. Countless people seem to have fallen in love and met their future partners in the assembly room. Now in a rundown state of faded glory, the question is - what to do with the Wellington Rooms?

The Coal Exchange in Cardiff, built in 1883 by Edward Seward, is a magnificent celebration of the industry of coal and its immense wealth. A glass-ceilinged exchange room with galleries on three floors and a unique lowered floor are a remarkable monument to this time. 

Now in serious neglect, the whole building, the size of a city block, faces demolition. It signifies the serious lack of resourcefulness on the part of Cardiff Council to celebrate and regenerate not only this building but the whole area. The once great Butetown Docks and the magnificent buildings surrounding the Coal Exchange have also been allowed to crumble and disintegrate. Rather than redevelop the docks in a way that they have been so wonderfully done in Liverpool, the docks in Cardiff have been filled in. Magnificent warehouses have been torn down, and the whole history of coal and the uniqueness of this area have been almost obliterated.

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