Much attention has been focused in recent issues of Context (35, 36 and 38) on the anti-stone cleaning lobby, most especially its Scottish branch. This lobby has a two-pronged aspect: a technical one, with particular reference to the cleaning of sandstone; and a philosophical one, which is boundless in its potential application.

I have seen this debate develop over a number of years, and become increasingly concerned at the confusion and extremism of this lobby and the threat which I believe it presents to all of us who are concerned with the long-term future of our built heritage.

A serious imbalance has developed in the presentation of the case against cleaning: emotive terms are used to misrepresent its purpose and result; conservation charters are misquoted; and damage is insinuated without proper regard to objective interpretation of the evidence. This imbalance is promoted by a lobby which is happy to be seen as extremist, and which admits of no exception to the belief that stone cleaning damages sandstone or that — in any event

— it is wrong in principle. Rational debate and commonsense have been overtaken by a missionary zeal which is attracting ridicule to conservationists generally.

Stone cleaning has a long and distinguished history, which in modern times may be dated to 1959 when André Malraux (himself a highly cultivated man and coincidentally France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs) revived a Paris Cleaning Order dating back to 1852. This prescribed that “house frontages will at all times be kept in a good state of cleanliness. They will be washed, repainted or whitewashed at least once in every ten years”. This drew the connection between

MYOPIA

washing and cleanliness; it recognised cleaning as periodic (if over-stating its frequency); it presented cleaning as an ongoing civic responsibility.

This revival of the Paris Cleaning Order initiated the first of the large-scale cleaning and restoration programmes of historic monuments in European cities, anticipating the later programmes of historic area conservation. Cleaning was recognised as having both a townscape function and an architectural one, aiding the proper appreciation of form, the intricacies of detail, the enriching effect of the passage of light and shade.

I am quite satisfied that cleaning has contributed more than any other single

technical operation to a resurgence of confidence in our established environments, and had a major contributory effect in turning people’s eyes away from the attitudes and policies of blight and destruction in the immediate post-war era. Stone cleaning cannot be dismissed as a symbol of a tourism- orientated heritage industry. Make no mistake, without cleaning as a contributor to restoration and rehabilitation, far larger tracts of our historic towns and cities would no longer exist. Wherein lies the justification, whether it be political or psychological, for investing in the future of historic buildings or urban areas which bear all the visible hallmarks of being in terminal decline?

The purpose of cleaning, we are told by the anti-cleaning lobby, is to make an old building look new, with the deliberate intent of deceiving upon its historic age. The result of stone cleaning is likened to a Michael Jackson type surgical facelift.

As an architect whose practice has successfully cleaned a number of buildings over a period of years, I have never had the slightest doubt that the purpose of cleaning accords with my dictionary’s definition of the word, namely to “make free from dirt or filth”. That is all it means, and in any cleaning exercise one of the most critical decisions to take is when to halt the cleaning process, and thereby prevent the damage which can result from the over-application of the method. I call this the partial or 80% approach: the clean that dislodges surface dirt but happily leaves ingrained deposits that cannot be removed without also taking off, or chemically damaging, the surface of the stone.

As such, the concept of cleaning has no

Dennis Rodwell responds to

those who believe that Scottish buildings

should never be cleaned

ANTI-STONE CLEANING

Lawnmarket, Royal Mile, Edinburgh. Three tenements cleaned without the use of either abrasives or hydrofluoric acid methods.

CONTEXT 40

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