46 C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 to give you Scotland in miniature. There’s something almost romantic about catching a boat (albeit a Caledonian McBride ferry) to reach your destination. Holidaying aside, the island itself is beautifully innocent in attitude, clean and fresh, picturesque beyond belief and, of course, steeped in history. And it has its own brewery and distillery. It’s a proper, living place, with a tight-knit but outwardlooking community.What more could a displaced townie want? Your favourite book? My favourite genre is travel writing: Pete McCarthy’s musings on Ireland and beyond, and Attention All Shipping by Charlie Connelly, that kind of thing. Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice is a wonderfully witty, incisive insider’s view of northern England. If I have to choose one, then it would be the book that started me on this trail: Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island. I first read this as part of my recuperation following an emergency operation to remove my appendix: I, quite literally, split my side laughing. What do you do in your spare time? I’m aWest Bromwich Albion season ticket holder. I like gardening, and go hill walking and cycling when I can. I’m an avid Radio 4 listener, in the car, at home and in the office (when everyone else has gone). What organisations are you a member of? RTPI; RTPI West Midlands Regional Advisory Committee; Urban Design Group;West Midlands Historic Building Trust; and Midlands Architecture and the Designed Environment (MADE) Design ReviewWest Midlands (panel member). Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on? As a council officer, I felt the local dimension was largely missing from the HeritageWhite Paper, which was regrettable. As a practitioner, I admire and support the work of the English Historic Towns Forum (now the HTF) and I’m a great fan of the work undertaken by organisations such as Common Ground. I don’t think we should underestimate the intrinsic value of ordinary historic features present in our everyday lives. Vox pop Dan Roberts is part-time conservation and urban design manager at Lichfield District Council and a part-time senior lecturer in the school of property, construction and planning at Birmingham City University. Who has been your greatest inspiration? My parents. They were both geographers and my mum, in particular, specialised in human geography, which is where I think I developed my interest in how we humans use and manipulate the earth’s environments and resources. Also Francis Tibbalds, who I heard at the launch of the Birmingham Urban Design Study when I was a rookie planner at Walsall MBC in the late 1980s. What has been your best idea? Enrolling on the Design in the Built Environment post-grad diploma course at the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education (as was). It was the only truly part-time urban design course I could find at the time. The council would not fund me as the then director of the department (a highway engineer) declared that he could not see the relevance of urban design training to my planning work. It meant that I was a good 10 years ahead of the game, before urban design became trendy and part of the government’s agenda. It introduced me to all kinds of interesting theories and ideas, and the value of understanding the past. What would you like to have been if you had not become a conservationist? I’d like to be an artist. My dream would be to win the lottery (but I’d have to buy a ticket) or inherit lots of money (but I’d need to discover a rich relative), so I could retire and buy a little retreat, somewhere rural, where I could draw and paint to my heart’s content. How do you reply when at a party someone asks what you do? I don’t get to go out much! I rarely admit to being a town planner, much to my wife’s relief. I’ve found that if I say I work with old buildings, in building conservation, almost without exception people think this is an interesting line to be in. If I wanted to be particularly mysterious or obscure, I would describe myself as an urbanist. It sounds so continental. What is the biggest frustration in your job? I find the need constantly to justify what we are doing, as professionals, to be somewhat frustrating.While I see the need for the monitoring of public services, I’m old enough to remember a time before the seemingly endless need to ‘evidence’ and review our outputs through service and action plans, instead of doing the work itself. A whole new breed of council officer has been born out of this work, it seems, and the pursuit of externally established targets can often skew efforts away from local need. Higher education seems no better than local government in this respect. It would not be so bad if the guidelines for returns remained the same for at least a couple of years. What would you like to be doing in five years time? Having bought a winning ticket, I’ll be sitting outside that little cottage retreat, sipping a glass of real ale, sketching or painting a picture, or perhaps just having a snooze. I’m not driven by ambition, you’ll have gathered. I enjoy my work very much – I’ll see where it takes me, and enjoy the ride. What is your favourite building? I have a guilty pleasure: I like modernist architecture. I’ll choose the German Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe. All those clean lines and shallow, rectilinear water; perfection in reflection. My appreciation of the building may well have been enhanced by the fact that I first visited it with fellow (mature) students on a conservation course. Your favourite place? I like my historic cities – Hereford, Chester andYork are among my favourites. One side of my family emanates from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, so I’ve always had a soft spot for the relatively undiscovered land ‘twix Zevern andWye’. As for a favourite place: the Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland. According to the tourist board, it’s supposed
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