Mich Stevenson OBE has spent his whole life championing Nottingham. The city has him to thank for the survival of some of its most iconic buildings.
Imagine Nottingham without the Lace Market. Imagine the Lace Market without the Galleries of Justice, or the grand Adams Building on Stoney Street.
It’s a vision of a city incalculably poorer, and less magnetic, to younger generations seeking modern urban living spaces; to the night owls who party in these streets until the small hours; to the people who cherish Nottingham’s rich history, and identity, of which the Lace Market is such a vital element.
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The fear that Nottingham might lose all that was what drove Mich Stevenson in the 1990s to preserve the area and its remarkable architecture from the wrecking ball. For his efforts to do so over the past 30 years, this Nottingham benefactor should be better known.
Yet Mich is self-effacing. Despite the fact that in 1998 he was awarded an OBE; once addressed the European Parliament on the importance of urban preservation; led the redevelopment of the Motorpoint Arena, and was one of the founders and major driving forces behind the establishment of the Creative Quarter.
Now 81, his long career has taken many turns. As an apprentice engineer for aircraft manufacturer A.V. Roe, and then Raleigh, he got his first taste of business. His passion for property began after he invested commissions earned from a lucrative sales job straight into real estate.
The path that led him to his restoration work opened up in the early 1990s when Mich and others began having serious concerns about the state that some of Nottingham’s most iconic architecture was in. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the industry that gave the area its identity and name long-since peaked and faded, the Lace Market was a wilderness of abandoned factories either empty or occupied by squatters and drug users.
“It was a no-go area after 6 o’clock,” he says. “The windows were being smashed up regularly, fires were being set in some of the buildings. It was all derelict. They found bodies in some of the buildings.
“I got annoyed that the Lace Market was just being let go. All around every building had three or four boards outside, to let, for sale, long-term lease. I realised that there was no way in the world that anything was going to happen.”
Not even the landlords that owned the increasingly dilapidated buildings knew what to do about the problem. That was where Mich stepped in. “I believed something could be done with those buildings. I felt that it was such a lovely area, it was one of the biggest areas in this country of listed buildings in one place, and I believed we could find new uses for the old buildings.”
Still deep in grief over the sudden death of his brother, Mich found himself drifting away from the places and routines he and Don had established together. He needed a new focus.
“There was nobody there,” he says. “There was no reason to go into the office and plan anything. I think that had an influence on me more than I realised. “I decided to spend my time trying to sort the Lace Market out. I just wanted to prove that you could find new uses for those old buildings. I thought ‘We need something to get this going’.
“So I set up the Lace Market Heritage Trust.” The goal: to channel his years of experience as a property owner into preserving Nottingham’s most important buildings - particularly those in the Lace Market.
Working on the basis that risk-averse private capital would eventually return to the area if only it could be given an initial nudge in the right direction, through the trust Mich set about securing funding and grants to protect the old buildings and get them ready for the open market. He liaised between various key organisations including Nottingham City Council, sought sources of funding, chiefly the National Lottery and the European Union, and talked to local property developers and investors, all the time championing the opportunities the city had to offer.
At the time people in Nottingham property circles told him he was a “fool” for trying to restore buildings that seemed beyond repair. Better, the doubters said, to just knock them down and start again.
“Nobody saw what I saw. I really did love the place. I’d already made a statement by buying into it. We’d repaired our buildings. To watch the rest of it, and see nothing happen to it, was very sad. Why weren’t other people interested in doing it?”
The first big coup, and one of the trust’s most important gifts to the city, was the rescue of the abandoned Shire Hall building, former county prison, on High Pavement. Today it is the Galleries of Justice.
Long-since abandoned and with major structural repair works needed, the building, he says, was destined for demolition when in 1994 he and the trust intervened. After 18 months of tireless effort by the new team - involving the establishment of the Galleries of Justice Museum, of which Mich was the founding chair - the future of the building was secure.
For that work alone Mich was awarded his OBE in 1998. But he has many more accomplishments to name since - not least a successful bid to save another of Nottingham’s grandest landmarks, the Adams Building on Stoney Street, from rack and ruin.
The company that he and Don had founded in 1981, Spenbeck, was and still is based in the Lace Market. Today it is run by his daughters, Victoria and Becky. What the brothers began in the 1980s has evolved into a modern agency providing office and studio space for creative businesses in the very buildings, the former crumbling shells, that Mich has helped to maintain and revive.
And the family is still working to preserve the Lace Market buildings - most notably a major renovation of the iconic Spenbeck-owned Birkin Building, now a hub for creative businesses. Evidently Mich is fired by a deep belief in preserving and protecting unique, inspiring pieces of history from being lost in time.
It is what has driven him through decades of service to Nottingham’s urban heritage, and down some more quirky paths. Next time you visit Newark Air Museum, give a nod of thanks for some of the rare old airplanes on display there - Mich, who is the museum’s president, personally bought and donated many of them, and so rescued them from being scrapped.
But above all his passion is Nottingham itself. A city he believes could be much more than it is, and has “lost its way” in recent years compared even to its East Midlands neighbours. “I love this city,” he says. “I think Nottingham is a great city. But it’s lost its way a bit. Only by talking it up and making it a place where people want to be again are we going to capture that back.”
To that end he still champions the European Enterprise Promotion Award-winning Creative Quarter project which he helped found. And he has more ideas to improve the city, including a proposal for a modern revival of the former ‘shambles’ on Drury Lane, demolished in the late 1960s to make way for the Broadmarsh shopping centre.
Maybe it is because of his typically Nottinghamian tendency towards personal understatement that Mich isn’t as well-known as he is. “It’s not rocket science what I’ve done,” he says. “I like to do things quietly and walk away.”
Perhaps he does. But if you can picture Nottingham without the Lace Market, you can see just how much we would all have lost. For all the work he and those visionaries did back then, it is more than fitting that we recognise them, and give thanks, today.
