First Day Theme
Each day of the three-day congress was given a theme. The first day, Tuesday’s, was ‘master-plans and strategic frameworks’, the second day’s was ‘heritage in danger’ and the third day’s ‘heritage in practice’, which was led by COTAC.

Conservation used to be about preserving the fabric of particular buildings. But the industry has grown and so has the concept. Now, conservation is about preserving the ‘significance’ of not just a building but the whole site.

Tom Hassell
In fact, Tom Hassell, from the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), who was chairman of the first session of the congress, said English Heritage had just commissioned the first strategic policy plan on conservation for England as a whole.

Most conservation projects are focussed on one specific site, but the particular significance of that site is not as evident as it may at first appear. Enter the conservation plan.

Conservation plans have rapidly become familiar management tools to the conservation business. In the UK they were developed, in conjunction with English Heritage, as a result of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s requirement for a way to evaluate the large number of application it receives for help with funding projects.

Peter Burman
The concept is by no means unique to the UK and Peter Burman from the University of York, a committee member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) and a consultant to the Dean and Chapter of St Alban’s Cathedral, said he had been impressed on a visit to Sydney to find that the conservation plan for the Sydney Opera House could be bought in a bookshop.

He did not want conservation to be carried out by a few professionals behind closed doors, and applauded the openness of publishing the plans and involving a wider audience.

He also thought it was useful to publish plans so that those involved in conservation could use them for reference. Later, Tom Hassell said ICOMOS was already in discussions with English Heritage about the production of guides to creating conservation plans.

Peter Burman spoke about his own experiences at the Abbey and Cathedral of St Alban, as it is correctly called, where what was becoming reliably known about the cathedral and its surrounds was growing almost daily.

The 11th century tower was one of the great Romanesque structures of Europe, he said. He would be proposing a conservation project for it but which he was not going to divulge at the congress.

There was, however, perhaps more than a clue to what the work would involve when he said many structures of this kind and age would have been rendered and even painted.

As buildings are often altered over the years, the question of what to retain and what to restore can be vexed. At St Alban’s, many alterations were made to the cathedral by Baron Grimthorpe after he was granted a faculty in 1880 to do just about anything he liked to the building as long he paid for it.

The Baron, an enthusiastic amateur architect, ran amok, in spite of objections from great conservators like William Morris. ‘He became almost unstoppable’, said Burman.

One of his additions to the building was a rose window to the north transept, which a clerk of works had once described as a remarkable piece of Victorian engineering. ‘Unfortunately,’ said Burman, ‘it doesn’t have its original glazing, otherwise I would be considering its preservation .

’On the other hand, an education centre, ‘a classic 1970’s development’, would be retained. Thousands of schoolchildren used it each year when they came to the cathedral and that was part of the significance of the place.

‘It’s my contention’, said Burman, ‘that buildings of just this date, the 1970s, are most at risk because it’s easy to dismiss them.

’Conservation may have started off with the high ideals of preserving the architectural achievements of previous generations for the benefit of current and future generations, but it very quickly became embroiled in the tourism industry.

Conservation and tourism today are closely connected and the built heritage is widely used to compete for tourists.

Reproduced in part from an article in Natural Stone Specialist Magazine, July 2000, by Eric Bignell.