C O N T E X T 1 1 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 0 7 Letters Affordable housing From Ann Petherick,York According to Stephen Trow’s article (‘Affordable housing in the countryside’, Context 110, July 2009) only five per cent of rural housing is affordable. Taken at face value this would mean that only five per cent is occupied. We all know what he means but it does illustrate how absurd the term ‘affordable housing’ has become. If the term means anything at all, it means housing provided for sale or rent at less than the market cost. In other words, subsidised housing. If only we could bring ourselves to use the ‘s’ word, it might help to focus attention on where the subsidy is going to come from. It may be direct financial subsidy, in the form of grant from central or local government, charitable trust, or some other source. It might be in the form of free or cheap land from local authority or the Church, or it may derive from a condition imposed on a commercial developer. What is clear is that these measures are not providing anything like enough subsidised housing. When housing associations were set up in the 1960s they were intended to provide good-quality rented housing for people on average incomes. They are no longer doing that, and nor is anyone else. Associations have been required to take over the residual housing role from local authorities, and around 80 per cent of their new lettings are now to those dependent on benefits. This results in an undesirably polarised housing market, particularly in rural areas where much privatesector housing is bought by relatively wealthy commuters or retirees. An intermediate level of rented housing is urgently needed. This would still need subsidy, although at a lower level than for social housing, but it also needs a legal structure and a not-for-profit body to provide and manage it – exactly as housing associations once did. Ann Petherick Insulation comes last From ChrisWood Your correspondent reporting on the IHBC North West conference in Liverpool (‘Facing the energy crunch’, Context 112, November 2009) quoted Caroline Cattini as explaining that ‘energy-saving measures, such as low-energy light bulbs and insulation, should come first’. I have checked with Cattini, who confirms that she stressed that insulation is the last option, after good housekeeping, changing behaviour and carrying out benign improvements. This may seem to be a small point, but as quoted it will be used to justify drastic and highly invasive work by those with a different agenda. That said, this Context was, again, a very good read. ChrisWood From A Month in the Country by JL Carr (1980). The narrator is restoring a medieval wallpainting. My picture was so well preserved that I became more and more convinced that, even before it was forty or fifty years old, it had been hidden beneath a lime wash. Why? The priest found fault with its iconography? The local magnates took umbrage at some fancied resemblance? A literate churchwarden thought it old-fashioned for a forward-looking parish? Take your choice. Every week that passes, you can bet your life that, somewhere in this land, there’s a first-class row bubbling up about what someone wants in and someone else wants out of a village church. And then, over the centuries, after each fifty years or so of taper and candle smoke, paraffin lamps, the painting had taken on another layer of cover-up. And, of course, in latter days, the good old Bankdam-Crowther had done its bit, doubtlessly, on a single mad morning’s fling, throwing up as much muck as a medieval decade. So, once I got the hang of it, the job followed a steady pattern, cleaning down the years to the painting itself. Well, perhaps I’m making it sound too easy. It wasn’t – but I got better at it as the days passed. Really it boiled down to a game of patience. My first move had been to grid the likely area of colour into chalked square feet and then, as you might say, to inch along, only straying from one square to the next to follow a hand or a face. Because, although Joe Watterson had been too canny to put it into as many words, it simply isn’t possible to return a five-hundredyear-old wallpainting to its original state. At best, I aimed at approximation, uniformity, something that looked right. And so (jumping ahead for a moment) it went on, day following day up there on the scaffolding, shuffling sideways and backwards, on my knees, up on my haunches, when I was too idle to use a step-ladder, stretching my toes. It was like a window in a filthy wall which, every day or two, opened a square foot or wider. You know how it is when a tricky job is going well because you’re doing things the way they should be done, when you’re working in rhythm and feel a reassuring confidence that everything’s unravelling naturally and all will be right in the end. That’s about it: I knew what I was doing – it’s really what being professional means. Infestation From Chris Morris, design and conservation officer, Lewes District Council On a recent site visit at Fisher Street, Lewes, where repair work is taking place to an oriel window, I found the lead shown in the photograph. Beetles have apparently eaten through it. Have any Context readers seen this before? The contractor tells me that there were a few dead beetles around the holes, possibly poisoned by the lead. Chris Morris Beetle damage to the lead of a Lewes window
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