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Summary of Peter Brimblecombe's conference paper

Peter Brimblecombe

Peter Brimblecombe, a chemist from the University of East Anglia and author of The Big Smoke, on air pollution in London, introduced an interesting perspective of sustainability by saying heritage itself could reach a point where it was unsustainable. Although he accepted the limit could be moved, he said: “In the end it’s not sustainable to keep accumulating heritage. There has to be a leak rate.”

He included architects along with air pollution and weathering, among the contributing factors to that leak rate – not through inappropriate conservation or alteration work, for which they are usually blamed, but through their original designs.

He said High Gothic could have  been designed specifically to maximize a building’s vulnerability to sulphur dioxide (SO²) attack. Yet the height of fashion for Gothic buildings in London coincided with the highest ever levels of SO² emissions in the city. SO² levels had fallen considerably since then, but nitrous oxide levels now constituted a higher proportion of the air and nobody knew what damage they were causing, especially to new materials such as polymers and metals used among other applications as fixings and sealants.

Ozone levels had risen in the laboratory that amplified the effects of SO² corrosion but whether it had the same effect on buildings nobody could say for sure