26 C O N T E X T 1 2 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 2 S an inverted grass pyramid, sunk into the ground with a spiralling grass path descending to a square pool deep below ground level. The resulting composition is very much in the spirit of Bridgeman’s formal geometrical approach and is almost architectural, but with a strong landscape influence with views across to the wider parkland. Lone LeVay Significance and climate change Chris Wood, head of English Heritage’s conservation team, began by saying that, without doubt, one of the primary issues that historic environment professionals had to grapple with today was the effect that climate change would have on the world we inhabit. The contentious assertion put about by the more resolute of the environmental lobby is that everything should be subsumed to the effort of combating climate warming. The science is incontrovertible. We are heading for meltdown of the earth’s ecosystems unless drastic action is taken to reverse recent trends of warming. Few would deny this. If you do, or even if you are a sceptic, just carry on and we will see if you are proved right. Most recognise that action across the board is essential. The green approach is to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. That is conservation to you and me. The historic building stock is seen by some in the environment movement, and many more outside it, as being part of the problem. It leaks energy and the green thing to do is to remove it and replace it with airtight, hermetically sealed new building stock that will save all that dissipation of heat and energy. I do not know if anyone has calculated the energy input required to recreate all the existing old building stock and the climate consequences of doing so. But it is not going to happen, so we will continue to fret over the possibilities for making the existing estate more eco-friendly. Wood has probably more experience than anyone of analysing the likely effects of the many postulated remedies for the inefficiency of our historic buildings. His focus is on the micro-effects of combating global warming, not the wind turbines in the treasured landscapes or the flood prevention engineering in our ancient towns, but the retrofitting of energy improvement measures in our houses and commercial premises. He is doing the science that demonstrates the limitations and contradictions of the current approach as reflected in the government’s Green Deal, energy assessment practices and industry standards. Wood guided us through a series of case studies that illustrate the ineffectiveness, even the destructiveness, of orthodox energy efficiency practices when applied to historic fabric and traditional materials. The examples increasingly point to the counter-productiveness of the ill-considered approach that is the current norm. These studies are carried out in both the laboratory and in the real world. Timber-framed windows, salvaged from a waste skip, have been subjected to accelerated weathering at the labs of Caledonian University, Glasgow. Standard insulation measures on a house in the London Borough of Camden have been analysed. Heritage-sensitive measures have been applied to a Derbyshire terrace. The results of these, and other experiments, although as yet few in number, are generating an increasing body of evidence to allow us to challenge the orthodoxies and practices of the ‘green’ building lobby, who beguile the unwary and ill-informed with their promises of energy and carbon savings, sustainable lifestyles and financial savings. The work of Wood and his colleagues, and other vanguards, notably the National Trust, is providing the increasingly embattled heritage professional with more hard facts to challenge the practitioners who have aligned themselves to the Green Deal. We will have to mitigate climate change, and will be increasingly confronted with demands for changes to our historic buildings and places. We can be increasingly confident, though, that asserting a conservation-sensitive approach to achieving better energy performance in our stock of historic buildings will be underpinned by research and practice-based evidence showing that the way we have always done it remains the most sustainable, effective and cost-efficient means possible. When this is embedded in the minds and practices of government and industry as the standard approach to energy saving, we as a collective body will have made our contribution to saving the planet. Our bonus will be that we will have done so while protecting the significance of the very thing that, for many of us, makes the world we inhabit worth saving. Alan Byrne ChrisWood of English Heritage discusses retrofitting historic houses to combat the effects of climate change, and the impact on significance.
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