ROGER BOWDLER

Designating Diversity

In an age of plurality of values, statutory designators need to open their eyes and minds ever wider to the multiplicity of claims to special interest. It is a story of a shared past.

Anti-Slavery Arch, Paganhill, Stroud, Gloucestershire. Erected in 1834 on the estate of Henry Wyatt, it commemorates the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, which came into force that year, making the ownership of slaves throughout the British colonies illegal. Listed Grade II.

Right at the top of recent agendas has been the issue of diversity. How have the tried and trusted tools of statutory protection been able to keep up? Can they respond to 21st century issues, or do they face doing themselves a serious injury as they try to perform politically correct gyrations?

Designation has its own history. Listing, ushered in by the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, is 60, while scheduling has attained the grand old age of 125, as it dates back to the Ancient Monuments Act 1882. And as the Heritage Protection White Paper metamorphoses into legislation, another epoch awaits.

Designation is all about celebrating the special, and identifying it for particular attention through the planning system. For buildings, our mission is the identification of buildings and structures of special architectural and historic interest; for archaeology our target has been sites of national importance. These are subjective tests, although a growing body of guidance exists to open up our approaches to outside scrutiny.¹Attitudes change; knowledge and understanding move on; priorities, political and private alike, can shift too.

English Heritage is fully committed to pursuing the diversity agenda.² Our first head of social inclusion, Rachel Hasted, was appointed in 2006. She has recently edited a special Conservation Bulletin devoted to diversity and has produced the Sites of Memory map.³One does not have to be a Marxist to recognise that one’s approach is potentially determined by background, education and outlook. Consulting experts with other backgrounds enables fresh perspectives to be gained.

Ashton House, Manchester. Opened in 1910, this was the country’s frst municipal hostel for working women. Accommodating about 220, it was designed by the Manchester city architect HR Price and is listed Grade II.

1 Designation Selection Guides for 20 categories of buildings are available on the English Heritage website at www.english-heritage. org.uk/server/show/ ConWebDoc.10514. Work on other varieties of asset is under way.

2 See our recent Conservation Bulletin 55 (Summer 2007) on ‘Heritage: broadening access’.

3 The Sites of Memory map, which highlights sites across the country related to abolition and the slave trade, is available on the English Heritage website.

Assessing our past approach to the identification of special interest enables us to see where biases have existed in the past. An open mind and a nose for a story become crucial attributes for the designator.

In short, we have been identifying buildings with legion claims to special interest for some time, but the new agenda gives us the prompt to look harder and more widely. Historic interest has long been with us as a claim to listing, but we have perhaps been more ready to identify the architecturally special. Millicent Fawcett Hall in Westminster was listed in 1989 for its link with the suffragette movement. A plain building, but a stirring one, it was among the earlier listing responses

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Driscoll House, Southwark,

London. Opened in 1913 as

Ada Lewis House, named

after the philanthropist

who posthumously funded

the project, this hostel

accommodated about 250

working women. It was the

frst of its scale in London

and is listed Grade II.

Jewish Built Heritage, it has brought numerous sites to our attention, and led to the designation or upgrading of many outstanding sites. The recent upgrading to Grade I of the New West End Synagogue even made

the Israeli newspapers.⁵

The listing of the battered but intriguing kosher butcher’s shop-front at 29 Pembroke Place, Liverpool, raises many issues. Set within a late-Georgian terrace house in poor condition, this shopfront proudly proclaimed its Jewishness through Hebrew lettering. Ports are often cosmopolitan in character, and Liverpool is as diverse as any. The Jewish community has left this area, leaving this shop as a reminder of the continuing story of immigration and identity. National research (by Sharman Kadish, and by Kathryn Morrison’s study of the architecture of shopping⁶) enabled a case to be made.

Communicating significance better is an ever-present challenge. The fuller designation documentation we now produce enables a fuller account of the claims to special interest to be set out, and encourages a stronger link between research and assessment. Given the imaginative and engaging approaches of modern museums (Bristol and Liverpool spring to mind), it is timely to consider how our approaches as heritage protectors should develop too.

English Heritage’s Religion and Place study has looked at the buildings of a diversity of faiths in Liverpool, Leeds and London’s Tower Hamlets.⁷ V e r y small numbers of mosques are listed. Two very early examples are one installed by William Quilliam, an English convert to Islam, in a late-Georgian terrace in Liverpool in 1887 and the first purpose-built mosque in Woking, the 1889 Shah Jehan Mosque in, aptly, Oriental Road, Woking. They have both recently had their list entries enhanced or have been upgraded to reflect their significance. Many recent faith buildings of renown – the Buddhist temple in Battersea Park, or the Hindu temple in Neasden – are still too young to be listed, as they are less than 30 years old and happily not under threat.

This year’s bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade provided an opportunity for us to explore the role of history on the list around a particular theme. The DCMS was disappointed to note that the current list entry for Holy Trinity Church in Clapham did not mention the important role that the building played in supporting the abolition movement. It was hard to resist doing a project, building on the positive momentum and research of many others this year, to offer amendments to about 40 listed buildings – domestic, religious, industrial, public and commemorative. These new descriptions will have fuller history sections that explain the buildings’ links to the transatlantic slave trade, to plantation profits and to abolition. This will help to engage owners and managers with the sometimes sensitive significance of their site, and provide a more up-to-date register of this important period of history for historians and the interested public.

4 Veronica Fiorato, ‘Greenham Common: the conservation and management of a Cold War archetype’ in J Schofield and W Cocroft, eds, A Fearsome Heritage: diverse legacies of the cold war (2007), pp129–154

5 Ha’aretz, 9 August 2007

6 Kathryn Morrison, English Shops and Shopping: an architectural history (2003)

7 A Religion and Place exhibition in partnership with the Building Exploratory will launch in February 2008 at the Ideas Store in Tower Hamlets, and there is information on the Building Exploratory website. There are forthcoming publications in the English Heritage Informed Conservation series for Liverpool and Leeds.

to women’s history. The scheduling of a section of fencing near the cruise missile shelter complex at Greenham Common airbase in West Berkshire in 2003 shows how archaeological designation can respond to recent events too.⁴

New research leads to new understanding. A recent Architectural Association building conservation thesis by Emily Gee on women’s hostels in London has identified a distinct building type, devoted to providing affordable and respectable housing for single clerical workers. They cast much light on the emergence of independent women in modern city life. Listing needs to keep up with fresh insights as our appreciation of history’s complexities develops. All too often, planning requirements are too urgent for in-depth research to be undertaken. One such hostel, Driscoll House on London’s New Kent Road in Southwark, was recognised for what it was and listed as an exceptional survival of a women’s hostel. Web developments have hugely increased the options for discovery, but we still have further to go in linking targeted research to planning priorities. History matters, after all.

Women’s history is one area of established engagement. Another is that of Jewish history. Sharman Kadish’s Jewish Heritage in England (2006) has been one of the successes of recent English Heritage publishing. Based on the work begun by the Survey of

P Galkoff family butcher’s

shop, Pembroke Place,

Liverpool. Listed Grade II,

principally for the survival

of a nationally unique

Jewish butcher’s shopfront of

around 1930.

CONTEXT 102 : NOVEMBER 2007

British soil does not hold such obvious reminders of slavery as do the southeast United States or the west coast of Africa, and it is easy to overlook the impact that the transatlantic slave trade had on our own landscape. Take, for example, the anti-slavery arch outside Stroud. Its current one-line list entry does little to answer the intriguing questions that this miniature triumphal arch of 1834 presents. This project is allowing us to highlight the special historic interest of buildings associated with both the harsh reality of slavery and the heroic efforts of abolitionists.

How class-bound is designation? Doesn’t history favour the writers and builders – those who leave their record behind? Is conservation doomed to be biased? What about the missing voices of the multitude? Two important strands of later 20th century conservation – vernacular architecture, and industrial archaeology – have been highly influential in offsetting a ‘polite’ reading of the past.

Regional and local specialist trades are explicitly accorded respect when being assessed for designation, as seen in the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter project, the Sheffield metal trades work, or in studies of London’s furniture district in Shoreditch. All these research projects have had a designation follow-up. As post-industrial redevelopment continues and the brownfield site becomes ever more targeted, urgent assigning of protection becomes the order of the day. The recent listing of the winder and fan houses at Snowdown Colliery, Kent, will serve as a reminder of the punishingly hot world of the Kent miner at the coalface.

In domestic terms, the designated realm is undeniably skewed towards the upper end of the spectrum. Studies like Peter Guillery’s The Small House in the Eighteenth Century (2004) shed much light on the variety and form of modest tenements and dwellings, but the fragility of the building stock, combined with decades of slum clearance and deterioration, makes survivals scarce. Early public housing has long been designated, and we need to keep the story up to date. Continuing discussions concerning re-used first-world-war army huts in Somerset and pre-fabs in South London remind us how diverse the building stock is, and what a range of stories it tells.

Ethnicity, gender, religion, class: to these areas of designation responsiveness one could add popular culture and youth. Space precludes discussion. Nor can plaques be dealt with – an area of particular relevance, with decades of experience of diversity to draw from.

Far from jumping on a bandwagon, then, designation does what it always has done. It flags up diverse claims to special interest and introduces a level of protection through the planning system. But there are no grounds for self-satisfaction, as so much work remains to be done. Besides, in an age of plurality of values, statutory designators need to open their eyes and minds ever wider to the multiplicity of

New West End Synagogue, City of Westminster. Described as ‘the architectural high watermark of Anglo-Jewry’, this is the second synagogue in the country to be listed at Grade I. It was designed by George Audsley and opened in 1879.

Headstone of Scipio Africanus, Henbury, Bristol. Listed 1720, this is a rare and unusually decorative headstone to a young man who was born a slave and brought to England as a ‘negro servant’. It is listed Grade II.

claims to special interest. Resuming more strategic approaches to designation is essential too. The DCMS is determined to make conservation more involving for all communities.

The range of designated assets is huge, and there is diversity aplenty to be found. The enhanced designation basis of the heritage protection reform

enables a better story to be told. It is a story of a shared past in which variety, otherness, and interest have leading parts to play.

Roger Bowdler is head of designation in the heritage protection department at English Heritage.

CONTEXT 102 : NOVEMBER 2007



Driscoll House, Southwark, London. Opened in 1913 as Ada Lewis House, named after the philanthropist who posthumously funded the project, this hostel accommodated about 250 working women. It was the frst of its scale in London and is listed Grade II.		Jewish Built Heritage, it has brought numerous sites to our attention, and led to the designation or upgrading of many outstanding sites. The recent upgrading to Grade I of the New West End Synagogue even made the Israeli newspapers.⁵ The listing of the battered but intriguing kosher butcher’s shop-front at 29 Pembroke Place, Liverpool, raises many issues. Set within a late-Georgian terrace house in poor condition, this shopfront proudly proclaimed its Jewishness through Hebrew lettering. Ports are often cosmopolitan in character, and Liverpool is as diverse as any. The Jewish community has left this area, leaving this shop as a reminder of the continuing story of immigration and identity. National research (by Sharman Kadish, and by Kathryn Morrison’s study of the architecture of shopping⁶) enabled a case to be made. Communicating significance better is an ever-present challenge. The fuller designation documentation we now produce enables a fuller account of the claims to special interest to be set out, and encourages a stronger link between research and assessment. Given the imaginative and engaging approaches of modern museums (Bristol and Liverpool spring to mind), it is timely to consider how our approaches as heritage protectors should develop too. English Heritage’s Religion and Place study has looked at the buildings of a diversity of faiths in Liverpool, Leeds and London’s Tower Hamlets.⁷ V e r y small numbers of mosques are listed. Two very early examples are one installed by William Quilliam, an English convert to Islam, in a late-Georgian terrace in Liverpool in 1887 and the first purpose-built mosque in Woking, the 1889 Shah Jehan Mosque in, aptly, Oriental Road, Woking. They have both recently had their list entries enhanced or have been upgraded to reflect their significance. Many recent faith buildings of renown – the Buddhist temple in Battersea Park, or the Hindu temple in Neasden – are still too young to be listed, as they are less than 30 years old and happily not under threat. This year’s bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade provided an opportunity for us to explore the role of history on the list around a particular theme. The DCMS was disappointed to note that the current list entry for Holy Trinity Church in Clapham did not mention the important role that the building played in supporting the abolition movement. It was hard to resist doing a project, building on the positive momentum and research of many others this year, to offer amendments to about 40 listed buildings – domestic, religious, industrial, public and commemorative. These new descriptions will have fuller history sections that explain the buildings’ links to the transatlantic slave trade, to plantation profits and to abolition. This will help to engage owners and managers with the sometimes sensitive significance of their site, and provide a more up-to-date register of this important period of history for historians and the interested public.
4 Veronica Fiorato, ‘Greenham Common: the conservation and management of a Cold War archetype’ in J Schofield and W Cocroft, eds, A Fearsome Heritage: diverse legacies of the cold war (2007), pp129–154 5 Ha’aretz, 9 August 2007 6 Kathryn Morrison, English Shops and Shopping: an architectural history (2003) 7 A Religion and Place exhibition in partnership with the Building Exploratory will launch in February 2008 at the Ideas Store in Tower Hamlets, and there is information on the Building Exploratory website. There are forthcoming publications in the English Heritage Informed Conservation series for Liverpool and Leeds.	to women’s history. The scheduling of a section of fencing near the cruise missile shelter complex at Greenham Common airbase in West Berkshire in 2003 shows how archaeological designation can respond to recent events too.⁴ New research leads to new understanding. A recent Architectural Association building conservation thesis by Emily Gee on women’s hostels in London has identified a distinct building type, devoted to providing affordable and respectable housing for single clerical workers. They cast much light on the emergence of independent women in modern city life. Listing needs to keep up with fresh insights as our appreciation of history’s complexities develops. All too often, planning requirements are too urgent for in-depth research to be undertaken. One such hostel, Driscoll House on London’s New Kent Road in Southwark, was recognised for what it was and listed as an exceptional survival of a women’s hostel. Web developments have hugely increased the options for discovery, but we still have further to go in linking targeted research to planning priorities. History matters, after all. Women’s history is one area of established engagement. Another is that of Jewish history. Sharman Kadish’s Jewish Heritage in England (2006) has been one of the successes of recent English Heritage publishing. Based on the work begun by the Survey of
P Galkoff family butcher’s shop, Pembroke Place, Liverpool. Listed Grade II, principally for the survival of a nationally unique Jewish butcher’s shopfront of around 1930.

26	CONTEXT 102 : NOVEMBER 2007