Towards Regeneration of Heritage Buildings: A Building Condition Assessment of Decay and Durability of the Colonial Mercantile Warehouses on the Waterfront of Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Raymond Iheanyichukwu Mbata & Gabriel Warebi Brisibe
Abstract
Raymond Iheanyichukwu Mbata & Gabriel Warebi Brisibe
Abstract
Heritage buildings of the colonial period in Nigeria are increasingly threatened by decay, demolition and unplanned redevelopments. Decisions between demolition and conservation are made on the basis of visible appearance, without assessments of the conditions of the buildings. Heritage scholarship on colonial mercantile architecture in West African port cities has likewise operated within a documentary tradition that identifies, dates and describes surviving structures without independently verifying their structural conditions. As a result, buildings that appear derelict risk demolition, while their potential for regeneration remains unexamined. The colonial mercantile warehouses on the waterfront of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, exemplify this problem. This research assesses the building conditions of five surviving colonial mercantile warehouses at the Abonnema Wharf node on the waterfront of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. It employs case studies as a method. Data were gathered through four techniques: (a) a documentary survey reconstructing the historical evolution of the corridor from archival cartographic records, (2) a community perception survey administered across three waterfront communities. (3) a Building Condition Assessment Matrix applied to five warehouses. (4) a photographic survey documenting the state of decay of each building. The findings reveal that all the five warehouses exhibit significant surface decay of the envelopes, consistent with the perceptions of 74.2% of the respondents. However, no building scored below 58 out of 100 on the Adaptive Reuse Potential Score; two buildings scored 78 and 77 respectively, within the good category, and the corridor mean was 71 out of 100. The research concludes that the decay of these warehouses is confined largely to their envelopes, while the durability of their colonial-era structural skeletons persists after six decades of institutional neglect. The building condition record established here provides the documentary basis for a heritage-led, rather than demolition-led, regeneration of these buildings.
Keywords:
Building Condition Assessment, Colonial Heritage, Mercantile Warehouses, Decay, Durability, Adaptive Reuse, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.