Hereford Emergency Housing: 28 Flats at John Venn Building

Demolition work has started inside the former John Venn Building on the corner of Gaol Street and Bath Street in Hereford, the first stage of a £3.8 million conversion that will turn it into 28 self-contained one-bedroom flats for people facing homelessness. Herefordshire Council expects the scheme to finish by summer 2027, with the first residents moving in from autumn 2027. (Herefordshire Council, 13 August 2026)

The council is working with the contractor Speller Metcalfe, whose divisional director Mark Eaton confirmed that “soft strip demolition works” are now underway. The council bought the building, previously called the John Haider Building, specifically to address a shortage of emergency accommodation, and the scheme follows approval of its outline business case by Full Council in July 2024.

The numbers behind the shortage

Councillor Graham Biggs, cabinet member for economy and growth, said there is “a critical shortage of suitable emergency accommodation in Herefordshire, with increasing numbers of people coming to the Council needing somewhere safe and secure to stay”. The government’s own quarterly figures back that up, and they are more specific than the phrase suggests.

At 31 March 2026, 196 households in Herefordshire were living in temporary accommodation arranged by the council. That is up from 166 a year earlier and 151 at the same point in 2024, a rise of about 30 per cent in two years. Sixty-six of those households included children, and 143 children were living in temporary accommodation in the county on that date. (MHCLG statutory homelessness live tables, table TA1)

Herefordshire’s rate, 2.2 households in temporary accommodation per 1,000 households, is up from 1.7 in 2024 and 1.9 in 2025, and is still well below the England average of 5.5 and the West Midlands average of 3.3. It is higher than every neighbouring rural authority, though: Shropshire was 1.7, Forest of Dean 0.9, Wychavon 0.8, Malvern Hills 0.6 and Wyre Forest 0.6, all from the same table.

The type of accommodation is where the cost sits. Of the 196 households, 75 were in nightly paid, privately managed self-contained accommodation, the arrangement councils generally pay most for; 56 were in private sector accommodation, 38 in hostels, 12 in council or housing association stock and 15 in bed and breakfast hotels. Of those 15, five were households with children who had been resident for more than six weeks. The Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2003 prohibits the use of B&B accommodation for families except in an emergency, and then for no longer than six weeks, which is why the statistics count that group separately.

Against that background the council’s financial case is straightforward: it expects the finished building to save “more than £600,000 a year” once operational, money it says can go to other services. Councillor Biggs called the site visit “really encouraging” and said the project would bring “an ageing and prominent building back into productive use” at a gateway into the city centre.

Why it is called the John Venn Building

The name is not new to Hereford. The council renamed the John Haider building in September 2025 after John Venn, a 19th century clergyman who was vicar of St Peter’s and St Owen’s from 1833 to 1870 and who, with his sister Emelia, founded the Hereford City Mission and the Hereford Society for Aiding the Industrious. The City Mission still operates, reborn in 2013 as Vennture. (Herefordshire Council, 25 September 2025)

What it means for you

If you are homeless or at risk of losing your home, do not wait for this building. The council’s homelessness pages cover how to get help, what counts as legally homeless, temporary accommodation and your right to a review of a housing decision. Asking early matters, because prevention duties are easier to act on before a tenancy ends than after.

If you live near Gaol Street or Bath Street, expect construction traffic on that corner into 2027. Our Hereford roadworks and travel page tracks closures across the city, and Hereford planning news follows the decisions behind schemes like this one.

If you are watching the housing market here, the temporary accommodation figures sit alongside what people pay to buy: our Hereford house prices page tracks the Land Registry numbers for the county and the towns around it.