C O N T E X T 1 2 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1 9 often surrounds modern towers and usually have accommodation below (a neglected but important subject which gets a valuable airing); the sustainable re-glazing of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1959 Guggenheim Museum in NewYork; and the conservation of the 1969 kinetic light sculptures by the German light sculptor Otto Piene in the Hawaii State Capitol. This last item poses and answers the question: ‘Should preservation of mechanical components follow a museum standard, which generally favours the retention of original wiring, lighting, electronics and their associated ephemeral values, or is this value dispensable when dealing with architecture?’ Also worth noting in brief: the August issue (Vol 164, Issue EH3) of The Institution of Civil Engineers Proceedings on Engineering History and Heritage is a themed issue devoted to the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Scottish civil engineer John Rennie. It is not a biography but looks at six aspects of his work: his adaptation of steam power in mechanical engineering; his work on the Rochdale Canal; his work on the Waterloo Bridge and Southwark Iron Bridge; his drainage scheme for the Lincolnshire Fens; and his work with resident engineers. Finally, a short briefing note by AndrewTegg sets out the approach by BritishWaterways to the aftermath of vehicle strikes to historic canal bridges, with the Lancaster canal as a particular example (see also his article on the subject in Context 110, July 2009). The damage is costing the organisation an estimated £2.5 million each year to repair. Partnerships are being promoted with communities and regulatory authorities to minimise the damage. Bob Kindred MBE Adam Fergusson writing in The Persephone Biannually (Autumn/Winter 2011–12) about his 1973 book The Sack of Bath never made the original list at all. Acres and acres of eighteenth century streets had only recently been flattened to create those ‘comprehensive development areas’ with which the planning department had persuaded the city fathers that they must tackle the future… Already, two decades of tastelessness ranging from the uninspired to the grotesque starkly punctuated Britain’s most remarkable townscape. The then biggest names in architecture were involved: Sir Frederick Gibberd had designed the unspeakable Technical College. Owen Luder was behind the Southgate shopping centre, now mercifully replaced. Sir Hugh Casson, another luminary of the Royal Fine Art commission, was retained by Bath Corporation to guide its taste. I went to Bath then as a journalist. I returned as a crusader, horrified by what had already happened, by the planning blight that had caused neglect in so much that was saveable, by the demolition still proposed – and by the outrageously unsympathetic attitude of the city architect who had recently written an article on ‘the dangers of conservation’. Unlike any other major city of historic importance, Bath was built virtually in a single century. Uniquely, all Georgian Bath grew old together, as a unity. It never spawned a ‘West End’. Consequently, the little artisan houses and streets and lanes were as essential to the urban scene as the big set-pieces like the Royal Crescent and the Circus. The lesser dwellings are what Shelley might have called ‘unpremeditated art’ – with their sudden corners, tiny arches, wrought ironwork; the idiosyncrasies of raised pavements, tumbling steps, cobble-stones, narrow doorways, and twisting alleys. To destroy these informal streets, as Bath Corporation with its lust for comprehensive development was bent on doing in the early 1970s, was – these similes are not new – like denuding a forest of its wild undergrowth, robbing old masters of their frames… And who lived in the artisan houses and little inns and mewses and these diminutive streets which the corporation’s planning department was sweeping away? Well, they were precisely the people who made it possible to run the Assembly Rooms and the Pump Rooms, who serviced the city known to Jane Austen; the city visited by Johnson and Boswell and Nelson, and Sheridan and Sydney Smith and Dickens. And, unlike the constant stream of well-to-do visitors from all over Britain, down an ever more crowded Barth Road, these people dwelt in Bath all year long. In many way they were the real Georgian Bathonians: the sedanchair carriers, the launderers, the ostlers, the postmen, the grooms, the footmen, the buhl-cutters, the croupiers, the shopkeepers; the paviers, the chimney-sweeps and stonemasons; the families – of the landladies, and of the man- and maid-servants, and of the porters and the watchmen. Of course, if it is practicable (and it largely was and is), we must conserve this Bath as well… Hundreds of Bath’s Grade III [the nonstatutory grade, abolished in 1970] buildings had already been lost by 1972, in addition to the 2,000 Georgian houses which, mainly because they were so profuse, had ice | proceedings www.engineeringhistoryandheritage.com ISSN1757-9430 ICEPublishing ICEProceedings EngineeringHistoryandHeritage Volume164 IssueEH3 August2011 Engineering History and Heritage John Rennie Volume164 IssueEH3 August2011
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