C O N T E X T 1 2 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 2 1 Cover: Farmer’s Bridge Locks – historic waterway engineering in the heart of Birmingham (see page 11). (Photo: English Heritage) Institute ofHistoricBuildingConservation No 124May 2012 The transport heritage Editorial Transports of delight www.ihbc.org.uk Registered as a charity in England andWales number 1061593 and in Scotland number SC041945. Company Limited by Guarantee. Registered in England number 3333780. Registered Office: 3 Stafford Road,TunbridgeWells, Kent TN2 4QZ. Officers President Trefor Thorpe email president@ihbc.org.uk Chair Jo Evans email chair@ihbc.org.uk Vice Chair Sheila Stones email vchair@ihbc.org.uk Secretary Eddie Booth email secretary@ihbc.org.uk Treasurer Richard Morrice email treasurer@ihbc.org.uk Membership Secretary Paul Butler email membership@ihbc.org.uk Education Secretary John Preston email education@ihbc.org.uk Publicity Secretary Doug Black email publicity@ihbc.org.uk Law & Practice Coordinator vacant email law@ihbc.org.uk Director Seán O’Reilly email director@ihbc.org.uk Projects Officer Fiona Newton email projects@ihbc.org.uk Consultant Consultations Coordinator James Caird email consultations@ihbc.org.uk Membership Services Officer Carmen Moran email membershipservices@ihbc.org.uk Administration Officer Lydia Porter email admin@ihbc.org.uk Committee Chairs Policy Mike Brown email policy@ihbc.org.uk Membership & Ethics Paul Butler email membership@ihbc.org.uk Finance & Resources Richard Morrice email resources@ihbc.org.uk Education John Preston email education@ihbc.org.uk Communications & Outreach Charles Strang email communications@ihbc.org.uk Branch Officers North Geoff UnderwoodTel 0191 433 3435 NorthWest Crispin Edwards Tel 0161 474 2620 Yorkshire David Blackburn Tel 01943 603479 West Midlands Charles Shapcott Tel 0121 7044312 East Midlands Roy Lewis Tel 01636 619335 South Julia Foster Tel 01296 585888 SouthWest JamesWebbTel 01202 732849 East Anglia Phil Godwin Tel 01263 516131 South East Sean Rix Tel 01483 523379 London David McDonald Tel 020 8881 6724 Scotland Stuart Eydmann Tel 01506 775279 Wales Nathan Blanchard Tel 01492 583443 Northern Ireland Colin Hatrick Tel 028 9064 1126 Republic of Ireland Cormac O’Sullivan Tel 00353 5677 62907 Business Office Jubilee House, High Street, Tisbury, Wiltshire SP3 6HA England Tel 01747 873133 Fax 01747 871718 email admin@ihbc.org.uk Briefing 2 Out of Context 4 The writer’s voice 4 Periodically 5 Supporting columns 8 Canal history in the making Nigel Crowe 11 Training the gang Kevin Malone 15 Britain’s transport heritage Neil Marshall 16 Moving with the times Elizabeth McCrone 18 Monitoring for Crossrail Nigel Sunter 22 The motor car and the country house Pete Smith 24 Off the rails Fiona Newton 27 A future for historic signal boxes Andy Savage 31 The Green Deal is coming John Preston 35 Historic statuary at Trent Park ChristineWhite and Rupert Harris 37 Architecturally speaking 39 Director’s cut 42 Vox pop 44 Book reviews 45 Products and services 49 Advertisers index 52 Nothing shapes the landscape like the technology of transport. Roads and streets laid out hundreds of years ago shape the distribution of modern settlements, and also much of the layout of their development, even though the vehicles that run on them today are dramatically different. The boom in English canal building, using an ancient technology on a hugely expanded scale, was soon overshadowed by the railways, but the infrastructure survived to find new uses today. (Nigel Crowe writes about the latest form of its management on page 11). The railway system in turn shrank in the face of developments in road transport in the mid-20th century, but continues to adapt to new technologies, leaving its own distinctive heritage (as Andy Savage describes in his article on mechanical signal boxes, page 31, and Fiona Newton discovers in her examples of redundant railway carriages ingeniously reused as houses, page 27). Sometimes it is the glimpses of the impact of new technology that are most fascinating. Pete Smith (page 24) writes that an early effect of the coming of the motor car was – not surprisingly – to make the landed classes more mobile, changing the pattern of weekend house parties, with King Edward VIII an early adopter. As Smith explains, some of the motoring-related heritage that survives from this period relates to the facilities – workshops, heating, electricity and the storage of spares – that were an essential part of a car’s garaging in the short period before a network of commercial garages developed. No doubt the pioneers also had to keep supplies of fuel at home, as recently recommended by our own government. Elizabeth McCrone, writing about Scottish buildings associated with transport from the 18th to the 20th centuries (page 18), describes an exceptionally early purpose-built public garage in Glasgow, dating from 1906–12. Likely to be the earliest surviving example in Scotland, this building is even more remarkable for having two storeys, with a ramp for cars to reach the first floor. Intriguingly, McCrone notes that the reason that owners required somewhere to store their vehicles was because parking on the street was prohibited in the early 1900s. Parking on the street! As Crossrail also asks, as it tries to anticipate the consequence of its tunnelling under London’s historic buildings (as recounted by Nigel Sunter, page 22): whatever next?
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=