Or Why Nobody Photographs Admiral Park
In simple words
Tourists photograph Guernsey’s old harbour and historic streets thousands of times daily, but nobody photographs Admiral Park or Frossard House (Custard Castle). This reveals an uncomfortable truth: visitors come for our granite streets and centuries-old buildings, not the modern developments our bureaucrats keep creating. Yes, Admiral Park generates financial revenue, but cities like Edinburgh prove you can have profitable banks in beautiful old buildings. Instead, we drained St Peter Port’s life to build sterile offices, leaving the historic centre full of empty buildings, particularly above the shops.
The problem runs deeper than bad planning. Throughout history, the more socialist a government, the more it destroys heritage: from Stalin demolishing churches to British post-war planners destroying more buildings than German bombs did. Old buildings prove society functioned without central planning, which threatens bureaucrats who need to justify their control. In Guernsey, this manifests two ways: bureaucrats actively replace granite with concrete and erect barriers everywhere in the name of “safety,” creating generations unable to handle uneven surfaces; meanwhile, they impose expensive regulations on historic buildings but provide zero financial help (Jersey offers £50,000 grants, France pays 40%), ensuring these buildings decay. The bureaucrats who gave us Frossard House are slowly redesigning our island, one “improvement” at a time.
Wander St Peter Port on a summer’s day and count those taking photographs. The results are invariably the same: thousands of images of the harbour, High Street, Pollet, Mill Street, Castle Cornet, and precisely none of Admiral Park or Frossard House.
This photographic apartheid reveals an uncomfortable truth for the bureaucrats who occupy Frossard House, that monument to architectural failure widely condemned as one of Britain’s worst public buildings. From their concrete eyrie, these creatures control the historic streets that generate our tourism revenue, seeing not irreplaceable heritage but ‘health and safety’ and ‘development opportunities’. The irony appears lost on them; they work in a building that serves as a permanent reminder of bureaucratic architectural incompetence, yet persist in believing they know better than centuries of accumulated wisdom.
For example, Admiral Park represents everything our planning authorities consider progress: ample parking, level surfaces, full regulatory compliance, and an atmosphere so devoid of character that even seagulls seem quiet. No tourist asks directions there unless seeking a laundromat. No couple chooses it for engagement photographs. Yet this model drew businesses and workers from the historic town centre to sterile out-of-town developments, gutting St Peter Port of its commercial life; hence our town centre’s epidemic of empty offices and vacant flats above ever-changing shops. The authorities created Admiral Park, watched it drain vitality from our historic streets, then started chipping away at the historic fabric of the rest of the island in its image.
Admiral Park was designed for ‘financial growth’, and yes, it generates substantial revenue through financial services. But at what cost? We drained St Peter Port’s commercial life to create a business park that nobody photographs, nobody visits after 6pm (except for B&Q), and nobody will ever love. Edinburgh’s financial district thrives within its historic New Town. Zurich’s banks occupy beautiful old buildings. Even London manages both. We could have had the revenue AND the heritage. Instead, we got the money but lost much of the soul, and we have to stop that spreading.
Visitors don’t spend their money reaching Guernsey for retail environments identical to Basingstoke. They come for narrow streets, granite steps worn smooth by centuries, irregular cobbles speaking of maritime commerce. They come for what bureaucrats term ‘inefficient land use’; meaning streets built for people not cars, organic development, and authentic character.
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings understood something fundamental that escapes our modern improvers: original fabric matters. The weathering of Guernsey granite tells stories that no replacement material can replicate. Each repair, each adaptation, each century of salt wind and winter storms adds to a narrative that began before the Norman Conquest. When we replace these materials with modern substitutes, we do not create improved versions of historic buildings; we create theme park simulacra that fool nobody and inspire nothing.
Traditional materials perform better in maritime climates than replacements. Granite lasts forever, sheds water, weathers beautifully. Modern materials require constant maintenance, fail within decades, contribute nothing to economically beneficial character. The greenest building remains the one already built.
The States demolished the fine Georgian Beau Sejour House in 1976, home to the distinguished Dobrée family, Huguenot refugees who became island magistrates and militia commanders, and a building that would unquestionably be listed today in an act of intentional cultural vandalism, choosing to destroy rather than site their leisure centre elsewhere on the extensive grounds.
Nowadays the destruction rarely arrives as dramatic demolition. Instead, it creeps forward through a thousand small vandalisms dressed as improvements. Historic granite paving gets replaced with concrete slabs: cheaper initially, costlier over decades, impossible to reverse. Each ‘minor’ change costs taxpayers thrice: first for the destruction, then for the inferior replacement’s constant maintenance and then for the ongoing cost of being ugly. Bureaucratic vandalism may satisfy the improver’s urge for visible action, but unlike graffiti, it cannot simply be cleaned off. Once granite setts disappear beneath tarmac, once historic ironwork yields to stainless steel, once dressed stone details get simplified for ‘safety’, the damage proves permanent. The bureaucrats treat our heritage like children with hammers treat antiques; they enjoy the immediate satisfaction of destruction without comprehending the irreplaceable value of what they destroy. They love the ‘lego look’.
The health and safety brigade weaponises public welfare to justify this incremental erasure. The Pollet and Mill Street, traversed successfully by generations including those less mobile than today’s population, face similar threats. Historic slipways must be barricaded lest someone approach the sea; yet what else should one expect on an island?
This systematic infantilisation creates its own dangers. Removing every irregular surface produces citizens incapable of navigating beyond perfectly level car parks. French visitors from St Malo, whose historic streets remain unimproved, watch bemused as we erect barriers around normal urban furniture. We’re creating generations unable to judge basic physical risks.
The competent citizen becomes a radical concept. Adults navigating uneven surfaces, children learning risk judgement, islanders understanding tides: revolutionary ideas. The Dutch pioneered shared spaces where pedestrians, cyclists and drivers negotiate with each other rather than rely on signals and barriers. Yet this requires accepting that people possess agency, incompatible with progressive visions of helpless victims requiring overriding bureaucratic protection. The competent citizen is incompatible with the nanny state.
A deeper ideological current drives this destruction. The progressive mindset dominating modern bureaucracy harbours inherent suspicion of history itself. To progressives, the past represents not wisdom but injustice, not tested solutions but outdated prejudices. History becomes something to overcome rather than preserve. This Year Zero mentality finds perfect expression in Frossard House and Admiral Park.
But there’s something more specific at work. Historic buildings stand as evidence of success achieved without central planning, without credentialed experts, without the bureaucratic apparatus that modern progressivism insists is essential. Every functioning medieval market square refutes the notion that society requires technocratic management. Every beautiful Georgian terrace built by speculative developers mocks the idea that only the government can provide adequate housing. Every Victorian commercial building demonstrates that capitalism, for all its faults, created beauty whilst socialism produced only Frossard Houses.
This is why socialist regimes invariably destroy heritage; not as collateral damage but as deliberate policy. From Stalin’s demolition of churches to Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Ceaușescu’s razing of Bucharest’s historic quarter, the pattern repeats. The past must be erased because it proves people once thrived without the apparatus of control that justifies the bureaucrat’s existence. Guernsey’s merchants’ houses whisper dangerous truths: that free individuals trading freely created more beauty than any planning committee or department ever could; that spontaneous order or organic growth produces better results than imposed design; that the invisible hand of the past built better than the iron fist of the present.
The pattern holds: the more socialist the regime, the more systematic the erasure of inconvenient history. From Stalin’s churches to Mao’s temples to British planners’ medieval streets, the left’s mentality requires destroying evidence that society once functioned without central planning.
The bureaucratic appetite for destruction has historical precedent, intensifying with leftward ideology. When German bombs fell on British cities, progressive planners saw opportunity not tragedy. In Coventry, where the Luftwaffe destroyed 4,000 homes, post-war planners demolished over half of entire neighbourhoods that survived, ‘completing the process started by the Luftwaffe’ as their plans boasted. Communist East Germany went further, deliberately destroying the structurally sound Berlin Palace as a ‘token of imperialism’. One official admitted: ‘We had the choice..the palace or the cathedral… We can deal with the art historians!’
Prague, by contrast, survived the war largely intact, denying its communist rulers the convenient excuse of ‘reconstruction’. Without rubble to clear, they couldn’t easily justify demolition. Instead, they let buildings decay through malign neglect; workers would erect scaffolding then disappear to moonlighting jobs, leaving facades covered for decades. Yet even this passive destruction had limits. Prague Castle continued housing presidents, and the Old Town remained a functioning quarter. The communists discovered what our Guernsey bureaucrats should note: intact heritage constrains even totalitarian ambition.
Warsaw’s communists could reshape 85% ruins according to ideology, hiding grim modern apartments behind reconstructed facades. Prague’s communists, facing intact medieval streets beloved by citizens, dared not start what bombs hadn’t finished. The lesson is clear: ideological destruction requires cover. The Luftwaffe provided it in Coventry and Warsaw; ‘safety concerns’ provide it in Guernsey. Without such pretexts, even Stalin’s heirs hesitated to swing the wrecking ball. Our bureaucrats proceed more subtly, replacing granite with concrete one part at a time, adding overbright LED streetlighting wherever possible, excessive ‘street furniture’, attempting to cover over the water lanes, moving only as fast as public indifference allows. The erosion is gradual, reversible if we act, catastrophic if we don’t.
The internationalist worldview sees local traditions as parochial obstacles. Why maintain Guernsey’s distinct character when standardised regulations could make it identical everywhere? Heritage represents hierarchy; tradition implies inequality; beauty becomes politically suspect as elitist. Better equally ugly buildings and streets accessible to all than beautiful ones potentially excluding someone.
Technocratic faith that credentialed experts know better than accumulated tradition also drives destruction. The planning officer with urban studies degrees believes they understand streets better than the generations who used them. This is simple ignorance of Chesterton’s fence: the principle that one should understand why something exists before destroying it.
And there is yet another side to this, one where Guernsey’s heritage is even more disadvantaged: it is an island that stands virtually alone imposing draconian heritage listings but without the balance of any support. The UK offers extensive grants. France provides 40% restoration funding. Jersey gives £50,000 annually for heritage projects. Guernsey possesses statutory provision for heritage grants under the 2005 Planning Law: powers ‘never put into effect’. Legal machinery exists; political will doesn’t. Privatise the cost and socialise the benefit.
Yes, protective layers exist on paper – the Société Guernesiaise comments, general planning conditions pile up, heritage assessments multiply. Those who’ve served on the DPA committee know the complexity, at least for the controversial applications they actually see. The routine ones waved through at officer level likely tell a different story. Yet somehow granite still becomes concrete, historic details still get ‘simplified’, and Mill Street still decays. The problem isn’t the absence of rules but their selective application. We excel at grand gestures of preservation in the wrong places – the listing of Castel Hospital sparked controversy precisely because it blocked sensible development. And we excel at forcing the private owner through hoops, whilst often side-stepping our obligations over public-owned property: the incremental erosion of genuinely historic streetscapes proceeds unchallenged. We preserve what doesn’t need preserving whilst failing to maintain what does.
Walk through St Peter Port witnessing policy consequences. Mill Street exemplifies devastating neglect. Housing for hundreds sits vacant. We’ve created heritage blight: properties ensnared in regulations preventing development whilst providing no preservation support, ensuring decay rather than restoration. And we have a housing crisis.
If working in Frossard House creates aesthetic Stockholm syndrome, where prolonged exposure to architectural failure numbs the sense of beauty, then the post-pandemic shift to remote working should have sparked a heritage renaissance. Yet bureaucrats, freed from their concrete prison, continue inflicting the same aesthetic poverty from their home offices. Perhaps the damage proves permanent; perhaps Frossard House’s brutalism infected their souls so thoroughly that no amount of domestic comfort can restore their appreciation for beauty.
Even career incentives align against heritage. Preservation appears passive whilst demolition creates visible legacies. Planning officers maintaining the status quo leave no mark; those enabling transformation point to concrete achievements, literally. Frossard House stands as warning not inspiration, yet the response isn’t humility but determination to impose the same vision elsewhere.
Solutions exist. Heritage zones could establish different standards. The Heritage Committee needs strengthening relative to the Development and Planning Authority and Traffic and Highway Services and the rules need to be applied well. Those with listed buildings need proactive help to preserve our heritage. Activate dormant grant powers or abandon the system. Remove TRP from listed buildings. Require planning officials to complete heritage training, including Frossard House contemplation as aversion therapy.
The States stated on ITV this week they have no obligation to consult Parish Constables or the public on heritage decisions. They’ve forgotten who pays them. Their role is serving the public interest, not imposing technocratic visions. This defensiveness ‘defending the indefensible’ passes itself off as expertise. Bureaucrats who produced one of Britain’s worst public buildings have no authority to ignore Parish Constables or residents who want our heritage protected. Refusing to consult reveals fear of scrutiny, nothing more.
I have often repeated the mantra: ‘Government exists to provide the minimum necessary services that the lone individual cannot provide for themselves. Nothing more’.
But heritage preservation may be that rare exception where government action is justified; not because bureaucrats know best, but because collective memory cannot be maintained individually. One owner preserving their building means little if the streetscape vanishes. Heritage is the physical manifestation of societal memory; without it, each generation is condemned to a short cycle of costly rediscovery, mistaking ignorance for innovation. The invisible hand builds beautifully, but it cannot necessarily preserve collectively. (Adam Smith’s market forces might preserve Bath’s Royal Crescent because it’s profitable to maintain, but won’t necessarily preserve Mill Street’s working-class heritage.) This makes the government’s current approach of imposing burdens without support, destroying what it claims to protect doubly damaging. It fails both the minimal state principle AND the broader obligation to preserve collective memory.
The battle for Guernsey’s heritage isn’t merely architectural but philosophical, centred on whether we value inherited wisdom over theoretical improvements from the experts who gave us things like Frossard House. Complexity shouldn’t excuse outcomes. The test remains simple: where do people spend time, point cameras, linger over coffee? The answer isn’t Admiral Park or sites like the Castel Hospital, but the historic streets we’re gradually eroding. Each small act of bureaucratic vandalism, each granite stone replaced with concrete, each historic detail simplified away, represents another irreversible step towards mediocrity. The bureaucrats have already given us one of Britain’s worst public buildings; we cannot afford the same vision applied island-wide, one ‘improvement’ at a time.