C O N T E X T 1 1 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0 41 Vox pop David McDonald is conservation and design team leader with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Hall, which is lined with Leighton’s collection of Persian tiles. The gaps were filled by reproductions by no less a figure than William de Morgan. If this whets your appetite, do read the article about it in the 2010 IHBCYearbook. Your favourite place? Another hard choice to make, but if I restrict myself to the UK, it’s Cromarty in Easter Ross. A delightful 18th-century fishing port, it lies at the tip of the Black Isle, a long, long way from London. The skies are huge and you can see dolphins in the bay. Looking across the Channel, Montmartre in Paris would be another. Not Place du Tetre, which heaves with tourists, but the area at the foot of the hill around Rue des Abbesses. If there is such a thing as Village Paris, this is it – small local shops, bars, restaurants (of course) and still some sort of sense of a local community. It certainly does it for me. Your favourite book? At the risk of sounding rather pretentious, it’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust. I’m not sure that it is my absolute favourite, but I felt a real sense of achievement reading it from cover to cover. It is a fascinating account of the leisured classes in fin de siècle Paris and, according to the blurb on my Penguin edition, ‘a perfect rendering of life in art’. It would certainly be my book choice on Desert Island Discs. Talking of which, my favourite track would be Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen, an elegiac song of young love, escape and breaking free from your home town. What do you do in your spare time? Yoga, of course, as well as regular gym sessions, roaming around London’s art galleries, travel and, when I’m up north, watching Ross County FC. What organisations are you a member of? The IHBC, RTPI, National Trust, Victorian Society, Friends of the Royal Academy and the Tate. Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on? I’m not being very original here, but the iniquitous VAT regime in relation to repairs is still worth fighting against. The arguments become more compelling when you add sustainability and embodied energy issues. Who has been your greatest inspiration? Many people over the years, but it is currently Sharon, my yoga teacher. Her inspirational classes, with their mixture of breathing, postures and meditations on life, keep body and soul together through sometimes stressful weeks at work. What has been your best idea? Probably deciding to enrol on the building conservation course at the Architectural Association and getting my former employer to pay for it. My career in conservation took off from that point on. Other than that I have learned over the years to listen to the ideas of others very carefully and then help put them into action. What would you like to have been if you had not become a conservationist? A wandering poet. How do you reply when at a party someone asks what you do? I usually say that I work in local government dealing with listed buildings and conservation areas. When I mention Kensington and Chelsea, it usually elicits the response, ‘how interesting!’ What is the biggest frustration in your job? The endless on-line form filling which seems to accompany everything I do, the dumping of all HR’s responsibilities on to managers and the endless tyranny of emails. What would you like to be doing in five years time? More than likely I will have retired from local government, but I will certainly still be involved with conservation in some shape or form. What is your favourite building? That’s a difficult one! If I confine myself to Kensington and Chelsea, it has to be Leighton House. It is the quintessential Victorian house for an art lover. It was Lord Leighton’s home, studio, showroom for his paintings and gallery for his collected works of art. Behind its rather austere red brick facade in Holland Park is a wonderful interior, including the magnificent Arab
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