C O N T E X T 1 0 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 13 IHBC Annual School 2007 IHBC Annual School 2007 IHBC Annual School 2007 allowed in public buildings. I had first visited this temple of excess – more is more – in 1986(?) at the ACO Summer School. That was the only time I have ever taken a photograph in a gents’ lavatory.The slide clearly shows a bearded ACO member using this magnificent marbled and mosaic facility. Could this summer school have also been the event where John Fidler returned to his hot Ford Escort to find it up on bricks, made local enquiries, and bought back his alloys? Memory can play tricks. Next morning I queued up with the silver-top coach parties for breakfast, appetite rejuvenated, then off through the streetscape improvements to St George’s Hall for the Day School. More architectural excess. People look so small. This must be the grandest neo-classical building in England, so is it a paradox that we were there to explore the relevance of the historic environment to everyone in our everyday lives? There we were, talking about a bottom-up approach to historic places. Were our words echoing around the architecture of power and elitism? No. Not here. St George’s Hall (pictured on p12) is a monument to a proud community at the peak of its powers, and a monument to cooperation rather than individualism. Yes, those other times had other ways and other values, and we should not judge them by our ways and our values, but the common thread from that great building to our words and thoughts that day was ‘cooperation’. As ever, the deepest insights and most startling breakthroughs came at the edges of our specialisms. Even from the chair, it was exciting to feel us being cajoled out of our professional comfort zones into the unfamiliar territory of identity and social research. The organising team had done a brilliant job in programme, content and timing, so this was a remarkably easy day to chair, in spite of the orchestral acoustics of that splendid interior swallowing up some registers of the human voice almost without trace.The day flew by. All too soon we were back in the Adelphi, in one of its many rooms eerily reminiscent of the Titanic, for the Annual General Meeting of the institute. (Anoraksia sufferers will of course know that the Titanic was registered in Liverpool, as the White Star Line was based there in a Norman Shaw building, and that there is a memorial to the ship’s engineers and stokers next to the Pier Head.) What a good tempered event the AGM was! Affectionate even. Where were the red-faced hecklers demanding immediate war or amalgamation with other bodies? The institute is not what it was, and for those of us who remember some very bad-tempered AGMs a few years ago, that is no bad thing. All the same, it would perhaps have been more exciting to have had a few contested elections, even in the welloiled machine that we have become. It will be interesting to see how the changes at the top affect the course that the institute will now steer. In essence, we still have a very well balanced and representative leadership, but with rather more direct experience of regeneration and urban design than in the past few years. Will our closer links there, which reflect the reality of most local authority conservation structures and working practices in particular, accommodate the links to curatorial archaeology that English Heritage and the HeritageWhite Paper seek to develop? Watch this space, or preferably join in. The Magical History Tour continued to the next venue, the crypt of Lutyens’ abandoned design for the Roman Catholic Cathedral, where we celebrated our 10th Anniversary Dinner. There’s something intrinsically melancholy about an abandoned project, and especially one that would have produced such a creatively different and vast building, like nowhere else. But that night those great bare brick vaults most certainly did not cast a gloom over the participants. They echoed to the sound of a Beatles tribute band, lovingly reviving (or regenerating? restoring? replicating? reproducing? renewing? renovating? – ah, those R words) – that aspect of Liverpool’s heritage with the greatest global resonance.We danced, re-enacting a past that many of us had never experienced, and that those who had could not remember. Another day, another hotel breakfast, another fall from herbivorous grace, and up that hill again, this time to the Liverpool Medical Institute for the morning’s programme.We discovered that a 19th-century lecture theatre, designed around the life-and-death imperative for an audience of future doctors to see the detail of a dissected human body, is ideally suited to the small print of 20th-century PowerPoint presentations. Our dissections that day were salutary too. Regeneration practitioners kept our feet firmly on the ground, only for Dennis Rodwell to whisk us off into a philosophical maelstrom of startling intensity and direction. We all know that one of the most useful and delightful aspects of the annual school is the opportunity it gives for networking, to lapse for once into managementspeak. In a conversation over lunch, our esteemed Hon Sec Dr Richard Morrice could not hide his desire for a real headquarters for the institute, like the building we were in – all those portraits, the smell of old leather in the library, the oak boards with lists of names, and so on. My line on this was that our virtual office is a great strength, and we should be proud that our institute is not tied down by real sticks and stones. The conversation leaped forward to a virtual headquarters for the institute. Using powerful software as in virtual reality games, we could build and furnish our HQ in a lamented lost building such as the Coal Exchange, the London Adelphi or the old Euston, or perhaps even an unexecuted architectural masterpiece. Virtual portraits of the IHBC founders would gaze down sternly from their virtual gilt frames, the virtual library would be replete with unimaginably valuable first editions, a succession of virtual special exhibitions would bring fame to our virtual gallery, and the council would sit in continuous virtual session. Good stuff, annual schools. John Yates, former chair of the IHBC
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