Heritage Now No 8 Spring 2024

If heritage is about appreciating, understanding and interpreting the past, it may also be about learning from triumphs and disasters. The latest issue of Heritage Now (No 8, Spring 2024), the magazine of Historic Buildings and Places, helps kick off the centenary of the society by reviewing the direction of travel of building conservation. As the society is looking forward as much as backward, in the current issue director Liz Power gives an insight into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, but the 100-year landmark deserves some narrated retrospection.

Giles Quarme, the society’s chairman, reviews a century of caring for buildings and places, including several notable early AMS successes such as the prevention of the erection of a huge power station in the immediate vicinity of Durham Cathedral. This intervention was even more meritorious because the society’s witness presented evidence at only three days’ notice, in midwinter in wartime conditions when travel was severely restricted. The arguments the society put forward in the era before effective heritage legislation attracted considerable public support.

The society had a proud record of attending public inquiries and objecting to unsuitable proposals. In 1974, representations were made at no fewer than 36 public inquiries, a particular need at that time when conservation was still on the back foot.

Paul Holden looks back at the work of the first 50 years of the society up to 1974, when it had no statutory role. The founder of the society was a Mancunian, John Swarbrick, an architect and dedicated activist. His campaign to save the Elizabethan manor house Hough End Hall from the impact of a new main road led him to form the AMS. This was at a time when the country had only just begun to accept responsibility for its heritage, and when one of its early supporters, Thomas Tout, claimed that without immediate action ancient monuments would become ‘extinct’.

Another positive contribution to heritage protection was forged in 1952 when the society became a founder trustee of the Historic Churches Preservation Trust. One of the trust’s initial purposes was to raise £4 million over a decade to put neglected churches into good repair.

It might be easy to think that all the heritage battles have been won, notwithstanding the present diminished resources available for heritage protection. But it is instructive to look back at the battles that were fought before the current legislation came into operation, and to see how much of the heritage of Britain might have retained had more positive attitudes prevailed and more effective protection been introduced decades earlier. Now that the AMS Transactions are all online, it is worth looking at LM Angus-Butterworth’s review of the early history of the AMS in Volume 20 (1973) and RW Brunskill’s review of the first 70 years in Volume 39 (1995).

Also of interest in the current issue is a reassessment of resort architecture by Kathryn Ferry, a founder member of the Seaside Heritage Network. This new body has been established to connect people around the coast, sharing best practice and celebrating everything that makes the British seaside great. She notes that, despite the lockdown trend for staycations, it is telling that national news stories still tend to focus on the negatives, such as sewage spills and inexcusable levels of social deprivation. Ferry wants the network to help balance the narrative, because historic resorts need interest from new visitors. She concludes positively that perceptions about the British seaside are changing, with a recognition of the rich heritage of pleasure resorts, and that this can be a force for change in places that have been overlooked. More information can be accessed at ‘The neglected heritage of the seaside holiday’ in Coastal Studies and Society by Duncan Light and Anya Chapman.

This article originally appeared in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 180, published in June 2024.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

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