An international perspective

There were contributions from overseas speakers and references to overseas projects by British speakers at various conference sessions of Heritage Forum, but there was one session devoted to gaining a global viewpoint with speakers from as far away as Russia, South Africa and Australia.

Conservation of Moscow
The Russian case, about the conservation of Moscow, was presented by Vladimir Sokolovskiy and Anna Kasatkina, both from the Moscow Central Department of Monuments. What they have done in Moscow, which has a population of l0 million, seems to be well ahead of what authorities have done in the UK. They have made extensive use of computers to build databases and create reiterative econometric processes to evaluate their stock of heritage sites – of which, of course, Moscow has a vast wealth – and the conservation of them.

The database includes 2,924 cultural sites, 2,167 architectural sites, 300 monuments and 1,007 tombstones, with details about who owns them, information about the structures and what repairs are needed. The buildings have been divided into those that can produce an economic return and those that cannot, although that in itself does not dictate the level of priority the building receives for conservation purposes. For that they have created a formula into which are entered values for the tangible and intangible properties of the site.

As conservation work progresses the model is used to keep a constant track of developments, including what work is being carried out, how much it is costing and whether or not it is keeping to schedule. And it is interactive, so that decisions being made are reviewed during the process of restoration. Any unexpected finds in the course of the work that require a change to the works or schedules are easily incorporated.

Every year in Moscow they have a Heritage Day on 18 April. And they hold a competition among conservation contractors to identify the projects that reach particularly high standards. There has been a steady increase in the number of entries to the competition over the years and this year 48 projects received recognition from among 110 entries.

World Heritage Sites
Bernd von Droste, who has been with UNESCO for 25years, spoke about World Heritage Sites, of which there are 630, 70 of them in the UK. Globally, he said, the greatest threat to world heritage was still war. The wars were different, tending to be internal affairs, but nevertheless the opposing sides still wanted to destroy the symbols of their enemies.

He mentioned Stonehenge, one of the UK’s World Heritage Sites, which had been called a national disgrace because of the roads around it. Proposals had been made to re-route them or put them underground. The public enquiry into the project was, said von Droste, exemplary democracy but the length of time it was taking to get the roads off the site was ‘astonishing’.

Peter Romney
Peter Romney gave a fascinating account of Port Arthuron on the Australian island off Tasmania, once a British penal colony. And Janette Deacon spoke about the changing approach to heritage in South Africa as black people tend not to consider the buildings of white people as significant parts of their heritage, except as symbols of oppression and eventual liberation – like Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated.

Tamara Rogic
Concluding, Tamara Rogic, a Croatian, spoke about the investigations she is carrying out into industrial building evaluation for her doctorate at the University of Plymouth. Her particular interest is space – the spaces around and inside buildings, their development and use over time and the relevance of that to the conservation of historical sites.

‘One particular architectural element which changes a lot is space,’ she said. ‘In the UK, people haven’t looked into architectural space. What I’m trying to do here is to pose the question of what space is.’ To illustrate, she presented a case study of a factory in Rjaka, the oldest industrial centre of Croatia.

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