4 C O N T E X T 1 2 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1 St Mary’s College in Oscott, near Sutton Coldfield, has been restored as student accommodation. ISG was the contractor. are putting £180,000 into a three-year industrial cold-spot grant scheme to kick-start rescue projects in places where few are going on. The scheme will be run by the Architectural Heritage Fund, which, with English Heritage, is putting £400,000 into part-funding three people to matchmake voluntary heritage groups with industrial buildings needing rescue. English Heritage is also to part-fund an industrial heritage support officer to set up a network of support and advice for trusts and voluntary groups. New life for Brute’s bridge Torfaen County Borough Council in South Wales is to conserve Aaron Brute’s Bridge in Blaenavon. The iron bridge, dating from the period 1820 to 1845, carried a primitive railway from the mine to the ironworks at Forgeside and Brute’s Row, the earliest industrial terraced housing in the area. Named after Aaron Brute, a stone mason and building contractor, the bridge is constructed from three cast-iron arches joined by iron plates on top and tie bars between the arches. It is considered to be one of the earliest examples of this type of bridge still surviving in South Wales. Following the removal of the bridge from its abutment walls, it will be restored, the abutment walls will be re-built and the restored bridge replaced. The task is complicated by the fact that a modern pedestrian bridge was installed on top of it during the early 1980s. Capita Symonds has been appointed as consultant. Letters Telford’s close shave From Dave Jump,Wales branch secretary I appear to have been misquoted in the report of the study tours I helped organise and guide (IHBC Annual School report, Context 121, September, p26). What I said regarding the survival of the Telford Bridge was: ‘Following the opening of the new road bridge, the residents of Conwy held a referendum, concerned that they would have to foot the maintenance bill for the obsolete bridge. A vote was cast 1,825 in favour of its demolition and 1,299 against. Luckily the authorities realised that the bridge’s attractiveness to visitors was important to the town. Later the bridge was purchased by the National Trust, which still looks after it and maintains it today. Unfortunately, as we saw, a piece of the town wall was lost to progress.’ The referendum was held in 1965. The published article implies that the people of Conwy were responsible for the bridge’s survival, which is not the case. Dave Jump intention to set up its own scheme’ was unfortunately out of date. Some conservation architects were critical of the assessment method adopted by the AABC and chose not to apply for membership. A number of years ago I published in the technical press two revealing observations. First, a significant number of schemes that were not conservation-based were being submitted by AABCaccredited architects for secular and non-secular historic buildings alike. I estimated the proportion of these inappropriate schemes to amount to as many as 20 per cent of the total, which is not to say that most members did not have the expertise. Second, only a small proportion of English Heritage regional offices included an AABC architect on their staff, although by then such registration had become a requirement of grant approval of conservation schemes that EH were themselves assessing for funding. Neither observation was countered at the time. In my view, entry criteria for the RIBA scheme are more appropriately drawn than for the AABC scheme, although there is still no provision for interview. The three levels of registration – specialist conservation architect, conservation architect and conservation registrant – may prove to be more helpful to the public. Like any scheme, its success will be in whether it is effectively monitored. JohnWinstone RIBA accreditation From JohnWinstone,Wells The article you carried in the May issue (‘Caring for the building and the client’, Christopher Catling, Context 119, p13) about the independent AABC scheme of architects accreditation in building conservation 10 years on, was surprisingly not followed up by an article on the new RIBA conservation register of architects scheme, now one year old. The author’s claim that the RIBA had merely ‘announced its
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