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Recent news stories in Context and elsewhere about auction houses and owners being prosecuted for selling off fixtures and fittings from listed buildings jogged JF’s databank. His thoughts, set out below, might help Conservation Officers cope with architectural salvage issues in their widest sense.
Twelve years ago the
Architects journal
ran a campaign on architectural salvage spurred on by the fall-out activities of European Architectural Heritage Year. As usual, conservation was “in crisis” and the salvage of historic building materials was seen as a panacea for several ills. Local authorities responded and proud Chief Plan- fling Officers wrote in to report on their works depot yards and empty warehouses stuffed full of rescued components and finishes. Hutton & Rostron, architects and information systems consultants, started a computer-based “dating” service with the
AJ
to put the salvage in touch with those using salvaged material and one of our common problems seemed to be on the wane.
Common problems? You know the sort of thing “Oh I can’t produce that detail, you can’t get the wood/tools to turn the wood any more” or “Ah the craftmanship! Too bad nobody supplies/makes these any more” and so on. Well, time moves on but the same old rubbish is still trotted out by the ignorant and the uninterested
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much to conservation officers’ fury. The lessons never seem to be learnt do they? Architectural salvage provided a smart response to pompous architects, quick profit builders and naive surveyors but its promulgation without supplementary reference to craft registers, materials manufacturers and the
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like was also a cop-out for the junior conservation officer. Material salvage is a problem of ethics and economics and of technical and social complexity. Let me give you an example.
I remember working for the Socialist Republic of Greater Londoii when the GLC Historic Buildings Division was involved in rescuing Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets. Here with
SlO
Town-
scheme grants clay pantile roofs were being repaired at vast expense, and a lengthy debate started over the sources for replacement tiles. At the time you could count the pantile manufactories on two or three fingers so the question of supply and demand was raised.
Limited supplies of new material
forced the builders to look for alternatives and a significant second hand trade developed. But such was the scope of the GLC’s work that complaints came in from our conservation officer friends in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex and Norfolk: that barns were mysteriously disappearing overnight, used as quick service “supermarkets” for illicit trade in pantiles! As a result we investigated ways of inducing plain clay tile companies to take an interest in pantile production and the rest is history. Here salvage demand for one region affected the welfare of viable historic buildings and fabric in another. I have another example.
Some years ago the City of London Corporation decided to repair the Collyweston stone slates of the roof of the medieval Guildhall. The roof had been laid in modern times after fire bombing in the London raids and was suffering superficially from frost attack and shaling. The problem was, however, that the Guildhall roof is the largest Collyweston stone slate roof in England and even partial wholesale
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replacement on a like-for-like basis would cause several conservation and socio-economic problems. Research showed that since its original building the roof had had many pitches and coverings including plain clay tiles, leadwork and Westmorland slate as well as the Collywestons. On the basis of “preserve as found” we stuck to Collywestons but supplies of new quarried stone were and are limited. Not only that, but a large order from the wealthy City would monopolise supplies and curtail conservation opportunities in the authentic vernacular region. More flak from ACO friends! We considered buying second-hand material but remembered the Spitalfields case
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disappearing barns again! As an alternative we planned a modest, small scale rolling repair programme to fix the roof slowly. This guaranteed the rare Collyweston slate fixers some regular term contracts to keep them buoyant; prevented damage of various kinds to the vernacular region’s interests and followed Wm Morris’s edict of “a stitch in time” in the process. An automatic “salvage first” response would have been inappropriate.
Where does this take us? More problems, I am afraid. As we all know, architectural salvage has taken off in a big way. What started as a conservation panacea and developed in various places as a YTS initiative has now become big business. The “life style”, diy and period house magazines are full of private salvage yard advertisements: places where pine doors are stripped, soaked and marketed by the tonne. This shows laudable capitalist initiative and consumer interest in historic detailing and authenticity. Or does
it?
Every week English Heritage chums report more and more “rehabi
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CONTEXT 24
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