8 C O N T E X T 1 1 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 0 foundations of the office development that originally was to obliterate it. The current presentation remains 20 years after its discovery – as Earl describes it – ‘little short of a national disgrace’. The aphorism ‘he who never made a mistake, never made a discovery’ is attributed to the self-help philosopher Samuel Smiles.Your columnist, when still editor of Context, tried – somewhat fruitlessly – to encourage occasional articles about unsuccessful schemes as a possible help (or warning) to others. Unsurprisingly, practitioners were reluctant to bare their souls. Cornerstone, the magazine of the SPAB (Vol 31, No 1, Spring 2010), has risen to the challenge with the first in a series entitled ‘Mea Culpa’. This looks at past failures and what can be learned from them. Jim Boutwood, a former chairman of SPAB, bravely describes the dramatic repair failure to the 14th century Guildhall in Thaxted, Essex that appeared shortly after the repairs were completed at an early stage in his career. Although the illustrated article needs to be read in full, the first mistake related to bolting and gluing parts of the timber frames rather than undertaking a (now more common) scissor repair joint. The second mistake was not to have thought what this might look like, and the third to have used green oak for such a key and conspicuous repair, as this shrank alarmingly. Boutwood describes other common problems, such as how not to deal with the many shakes and rotten cavities in exposed external timbers. He writes that at that stage in his career he had not learned one of the major SPAB dicta: that old buildings are no place to try out new materials. At the time the only written advice was (in Powys’s Repair of Ancient Buildings) to fill shakes with hemp and bituminous black mastic. Boutwood describes a new filler by Ciba-Geigy which subsequently proved to be disastrous, giving the timber frame a ‘leprous’ appearance of rusty stains as the limewash washed off the filler and this darkened with age. For non-SPAB members the article is worth tracking down. It will be interesting to see what further confessions appear in future. In the same issue is an article about the removal of architectural metalwork during the second world war to build Spitfires, Lancasters and tanks. It did not help the war effort, but the fate of all those iron railings remains a mystery. One suggestion is that the metal was quietly exported to the US to help repay war loans; another that it was dumped inWelsh mines or at sea. The rumours have been fuelled by a conspicuous lack of official documentation – somewhat surprising for such a high-profile attempt to boost the nation’s morale. Cornerstone hopes to come up with some answers. Bob Kindred MBE CRITTALL WINDOWS: NEVER OUT OF FASHION STEEL WINDOW SPECIALISTS FOR OVER 150 YEARS • Like-for-like replacement of steel windows on traditional buildings • Custom sizing • Unsurpassed maintenance life cycle • Galvanised and Duralife powder coated finish - no on-site painting • Advice from our technical design team • Each project personally managed to meet deadlines Crittall Windows Ltd, Francis House, Freebournes Road, Witham, Essex CM8 3UN. Tel: 01376 530800 Fax: 01376 530801 Email: [email protected] www. crittall-windows.com 4259 Crittall Ad.indd 1 23/3/09 17:10:53
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