2007 Yearbook

INSTITUTE OF HISTORIC BUILDING CONSERVATION YEARBOOK 2007 17 I N R E V I E W provision. We also hope to evolve this resource to address the acute needs of our local authority members. Our chair’s foreword identifies some of the big sector-wide challenges and changes which form the background to these developments. The move towards a more integrated understanding of the historic environment is increasingly evident across much of the UK. Perhaps the most notable example is the integration of the archaeological resource with the built heritage under a common system of planning control. In England (and, as opted for, in Wales) the lead is being taken through new legislation developed from the Heritage Protection Review and Reform (HPR) in the form of a much-trailed Heritage White Paper. IHBC has had both official and informal input here, but our final position must await the paper’s publication. Certainly we can expect that archaeology will become a planning issue within conservation. This should lead to greater recognition of the needs of the sector across government departments, and hopefully this will result in capacity building in the principal bodies responsible for addressing the needs of the historic environment. The challenge for our local government members will be to integrate archaeology into the many considerations they must balance in promoting conservation, including architecture, planning and the social and environmental considerations which lie at the heart of conservation. Whether or not we see a flurry of restoration proposals for ‘stone age architecture’, in the short term we hold out few hopes for help or resources for our members working in local authorities. In Scotland, as a smaller world, archaeologists and conservation professionals have inevitably worked more closely together, particularly in local authorities. Centrally, Historic Scotland has been able to integrate the different professional disciplines into single teams. This is a more tentative approach than England’s, but is probably a more considered first step than was possible under the funding crisis faced by English Heritage, bearing in mind the climate prevailing in its sponsoring department. In Scotland’s strategy, proper training and education are the keys to success; for England’s the importance of training is fully recognised, to the full credit of English Heritage, but the more radical changes create a myriad of other urgent issues. In both cases however, the IHBC expects to play a central role as it remains the key professional institute for those conserving our historic environment within the planning and place-making agendas. Professional processes are also evolving in Scotland’s private sector. The Edinburgh architectural practice of Simpson and Brown for example has developed what might be called an ‘HPR compliant’ team as, led by conservation architects, it offers integrated services ranging from archaeology, architectural history and conservation to radical new architecture and design. This healthy integration reflects the full spectrum of the competences identified under the IHBC’s membership application process, and we look forward to a flourish of new applications from staff in this and other progressive practices in the coming year. In Wales, Cadw maintains the traditional character of a central government service, an arrangement no doubt longed for by many fellow professionals in the other regions. However, and ever so sadly for this writer, absolutely no one envies the working environment of our Northern Ireland branch which lacks the support of a dedicated national heritage agency. Here they try to fight their way through the morass of planning priorities in a bureaucracy that registers conservation as little more than an itch that has to be scratched, and even then only occasionally. This is the world I knew when working in the south of Ireland, and it is a permanent reminder to me that, however much central and local government conservation interests might suffer disappointment with each other, the potential of that partnership is something to be valued, and worked at. Similarly, as IHBC tries to mediate between central and local government interests, so too we recognise tensions across the many disciplines that are represented in our multi-disciplinary membership. Tensions we see when engaging with, for want of a better term, mainstream archaeology, are no different from those we see when working with mainstream architecture Tombland, Norwich (Photo: Seán O’Reilly)