44 C O N T E X T 1 2 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 2 Vox pop John Yates is an inspector of historic buildings with English Heritage, in the West Midlands local office (region now being an unword) in Birmingham. Who has been your greatest inspiration? I am wary of hero figures, as we are all so flawed, but Ernö Goldfinger, my first employer, has certainly had a lasting influence when it comes to keeping an eye on the bigger picture rather than taking refuge in detail and process.While he cared passionately about detail – visiting every drawing board twice a day and on occasion reducing his staff to tears – he was always keen to talk about the purpose and context of his work. That is a good basis for collegiate and creative working relationships, but perhaps less easy for the manager/managee structure in which we so often find ourselves. What has been your best idea? I have almost always worked as part of a team, adding value to lots of projects rather than having ‘ownership’ of anything, so it would be a bit cocky to claim particular features as one’s own. Out there I know of many places where I have suggested where to put the facilities in a historic church, or how to design an extension to a house, but probably the biggest attributable effects of my work have been the occasions where I have brought together a new owner and a deserving building. Outside the world of work, but still in conservation, I am proud to have led the way in setting up a cooperative of boat dwellers in Battlebridge Basin near London’s Kings Cross in the late 1970s. Surrounded at the time by abandoned factories, waste land and forgotten people, we turned out to be the advance guard of a remarkable urban regeneration. What would you like to have been if you had not become a conservationist? An engine driver, of course. Perhaps more realistically, if heretically, I often wish I had been a property developer. That is the real hot seat in place making, and so few people fill it well. Bringing together the place, the vision, the design talent and the funding, then seeing it through all the opportunities and constraints to completion has always seemed to me to be the most creative role to play. How do you reply when at a party someone asks what you do? I tell them about guiding change to historic buildings to help them earn their living while still telling their stories. Phew. I tell them about the delights of new discoveries in old places – a wall painting in a cupboard, a piscina in a dairy, cusped windbraces in a loft – and about the continuing pleasure of travelling round Shropshire and Herefordshire to meet interesting people in extraordinary places. The party-goer then generally says how lucky I am to be doing something I love as an actual paying job, and I have to agree. I do not tell them about filling in all those forms and ticking all those boxes. What is the biggest frustration in your job? Coming in too late has to be the biggest frustration. If the first I see of a project is a finished drawing, fees all spent and minds all closed, there is often trouble ahead. Confrontation and public inquiries may get the adrenalin going, but they hardly ever produce special places. What would you like to be doing in five years’ time? Much the same, I hope, unless I am a late developer. What is your favourite building? If I can only have one, it has to be London’s St Pancras Station – for quality, scale and romance. The space, the skyline, the sheer virtuosity of planning and technology, the detail delight, the associations. Your favourite place? The sheer drama of the Shropshire Union Canal as it passes through Chester. It skirts the Roman and medieval walls, then sneaks through a stygian cutting to the Northgate locks - a vertiginous staircase cut through living sandstone - with distant views of theWelsh hills, then under a dripping railway bridge into a blind bend enclosed by more sandstone walls, an accidental sculpture all presided over by the poor battered city walls, outrageously penetrated first by the railway then a 1960s ringroad. Venice comes a close second. Your favourite book? From Tree to Sea by Ted Frost. This is a spell-bindingly detailed account of how to build a wooden steam drifter in Lowestoft c1916, beautifully illustrated with the author’s own drawings and sketches. A lost world. What do you do in your spare time? A historic house (c1650, Grade II) and a historic boat (1936, registered historic ship) fill my time quite well, even now I am half retired. Then there’s lecturing, and the new Canal and River Trust. What organisations are you a member of? Enough to create a teetering bedside backlog of journals: IHBC, Vernacular Architecture Group, National Trust, Association for Industrial Archaeology, Newcomen Society, InlandWaterways Association, Boat Museum Society, various canal and railway bodies, and so on. Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on? Taxation.We need a VAT exemption or reduction for works to protected historic places, and special provisions in direct taxation too. A useful first step would be a thorough survey of what happens in other countries.
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