C O N T E X T 1 1 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 0 7 agreement that more research is needed to address this, and to challenge the all too common assumption that 20th century buildings are an environmental disaster, contributing to global warming and costing a fortune to run’. Croft refers to the provocative suggestion made recently by John Allan of Avanti Architects that there are two types of conservationist: ‘curators’ and ‘alchemists’. Allan considers curators to be obstructive types who just seek to protect a building as it is; he is on the side of the alchemists – those who see historic buildings as a resource to be imaginatively exploited. Croft sees a more positive side to being a curator: the desire thoroughly to understand a building and explain it to others. But she accepts that often buildings do need major changes and radical new uses. It might be argued that the modern steel-framed house is a highly legible building type. The recent refusal by English Heritage to list a very good example in Belsize Park Gardens, London by Robin Spence and RobinWebster has prompted a very informative article by Neil Jackson about this small but very significant group of buildings. They were very much the product of the 1960s and 1970s. Jackson provides a gazetteer of 33 examples, spanning the wider period 1956 to 1998. He explains both their evolution and the principal protagonists. He points out that although the origin of steel-framed houses was the case study houses of post-war Los Angeles, and work by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. They became a very British, not to say, English phenomenon – icons of an era, and to hell with the vagaries of the British climate. The battle by the Twentieth Century Society over the Belsize Park case is also explained in the casework section. The society’s casework reports are some of the most detailed and closely argued among the national amenity society publications, and give valuable insight to listing submissions even when the individual cases may be unfamiliar. Such rigour no doubt reflects a need to counter evident reluctance to fully protect more of the modern. In the delightfully titled ‘Spittoons in Arcadia’ in the same issue, Simon Fowler provides a potted social history of inter-war public houses. During this era over one third of the 75,000 then existing licensed premises were improved and another 5,900 were built or rebuilt. Fowler notes that although Britain never adopted prohibition, the temperance lobby came near to strangling the pub before and after the first world war through a raft of restrictions. The most notable of these were on opening hours and gambling, but many other activities were also discouraged. Fowler amusingly refers to a sign in a Sussex pub stating there should be ‘no loud laughter’. The March 2010 issue of Natural Stone Specialist raises the controversial conjectural intervention of a new Carrara marble fountain for the Elizabethan Gardens at Kenilworth Castle. Tim Cawley, the mason responsible for the work, addresses the question of whether the fountain is a work of restoration or imagination. The gardens, for which English Heritage is responsible, were recently recreated to the original layout of c1575, based on archaeological excavations of 2004 and 2006 and documentary research. Unfortunately, while the fountain is described in a contemporary letter and shown in a tiny and impressionistic manner in an 18th century copy of a 17th century mural, this is not much to go on for a full-blown recreation. The new fountain is a remarkable work of craftsmanship. But given the current English Heritage emphasis on conservation principles, is the surviving evidence sufficient to justify the work in historical terms, or is this driven by a desire for enhanced visitor numbers? Crawley writes that ‘this work might not be in the current spirit of conservation’. But he considers it legitimate ‘restoration’ because he defines that word as ‘the reinstatement of something that once existed back to its former place and condition’. He feels that the new fountain at Kenilworth could be described as a restoration. This seems a pretty contentious interpretation and not just a matter of semantics, so it would be interesting to know if this aspect of the project has been more widely publicly debated. It is somewhat unusual for this column to review a review. An exception must be made for John Earl’s review of the recent Museum of London monograph included in the Theatres Trust’s Theatres Magazine (Issue 23, Spring 2010) on the unearthing of the Rose Playhouse at Bankside in London. The review describes a Conservative government’s attitude to heritage at the time. John Earl was director of the trust when this momentous discovery was made in 1989. He rightly berates the pusillanimous attitude of the then secretary of state Nicholas Ridley for ‘offering money with one hand to the developer of the site to compensate for the delay [to redevelopment], but refusing to use his power, as he most certainly should have done, to bring protective processes into play by scheduling the remains at once as an ancient monument’. Earl further notes that English Heritage sadly ‘proved less than completely immune from the political pressure in the prevailing pro-developer climate’. Have times changed? While Margaret Thatcher stated that ‘everything must be done to preserve [the] remains’, Earl notes that “in the event her secretary of state did not even make use of the powers he had’. The preserved remains lie inconveniently and incongruously within the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=