In 1998, English Heritage listed Park Hill at Grade II* — the highest category for a post-war structure at that time. The building had been substantially empty for years. Its lifts did not work. Its walkways, the "streets in the sky" that Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith had designed to carry the social life of the demolished terraces into the air, were used primarily by people who had nowhere else to go.
The listing was contested. Sheffield City Council, which owned the building, had been planning demolition. The architects who had designed it were largely absent from the debate. One of them, Jack Lynn, had died in 1991. Ivor Smith, still living, expressed reservations about conservation that preserved the structure but altered its social purpose.
The Urban Splash Intervention
Regeneration came in the form of Urban Splash, the Manchester-based developer known for its work converting industrial buildings. Their approach to Park Hill was architecturally radical. They retained the concrete frame — a listed structure, it could not be demolished — but replaced the façade panels with coloured aluminium cladding in a palette designed by Studio Egret West. The result is a building that is unmistakably Park Hill and yet visually unrecognisable from its listed photographs.
The Phase 1 flats, released from 2013, sold. The market had changed; the same city that had abandoned the building's original tenants was now willing to pay significant sums to live in a "heritage" structure in a central location with good transport links.
The Question of Use
What the Park Hill story demonstrates is that heritage listing does not necessarily preserve the social function of a building, only its physical form. The deck-access walkways remain; the residents who used them in 1960 have long since dispersed, their successors unable to afford the rents that the regenerated building commands.
Whether this constitutes successful conservation depends on what you believe conservation is for.