C O N T E X T 1 3 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 4 7 30 years worth of supplies from the Bowers Basebed, Whitbed and Roach seams from mining operations only. The interesting mix of papers in the latest print edition of the Journal of Architectural Conservation (Vol 20, No 2 2014) can be divided very broadly into two types: assessment and repair of buildings and interiors; and repairs to masonry involving stone cleaning, and structural repairs to dolmens. Fiona Raley describes the repairs carried out by Donald Insall Associates to the Café Royal Grill Room in London, following serious damage by fire in 2010. The room is largely a 1920s recreation of the original 1865 room. The author describes the drying out process required following the fire, and the subsequent extensive analysis of the surviving fabric as a basis for determining the construction and repairs to an interior that was already in need of refurbishment. Raley draws four significant lessons from the completed scheme including how to deal with an interior that was culturally more significant than the fabric it contained. She writes that the analysis undertaken provided evidence to justify proposals which did not follow a slavishly historicist approach ‘setting the room at “a moment in time”’ with all the ‘fakery pokery’ of theatrical grime and aging effects, despite this being a theatrical room and a commercial interior designed for effect. From questions of authenticity, Dennis Roubien’s paper on 19th-century construction techniques in Greece expounds the proposition that style was more important than construction at a time when the nation was newly independent, building form had a strong ideological content, and the country was isolated economically and geographically from the construction techniques of the industrial revolution. Consequently new buildings aped the classical style but were often not well built, leading to problems and defects that now have implications for conservation and repair. The third paper concerns itself with the dilemma of conservation of two ruined small medieval monasteries in Cyprus. Maria Philopkypou uses these as case studies to illustrate the alternative approaches of continued preservation as a ruin (and the conservative interventions required); or restoration and extension to permit reoccupation (by an order of nuns) while respecting the building’s architectural, aesthetic, cultural, historic and symbolic values. Techniques in conservation, particularly relating to the alternative methods of cleaning monuments, are constantly evolving. Jakub Ďoubal’s paper investigates the use of lasers on fine-grained silica sandstones, using sites in Bohemia as examples. He compares this to alternative methods such as micro-abrasives and chemicals, concluding that laser cleaning offers the benefit of a high degree of controllability and sensitivity. While minimal intervention is often advocated, the final paper considers monuments where high levels of intervention have been considered appropriate. These involve the structural repair and conservation of dolmens, the oldest architectural structures preserved in Spain. Luis Marínez-Torres outlines the phases of the conservation process, the methods of calculating the structural forces at work, the discrete stabilisation methods used, and the risks of collapse from not intervening in a region potentially at risk from earthquakes. The interventionist methodology makes an interesting contrast to the conserve-as-found approach generally adopted in the UK. Bob Kindred MBE From Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (1928) From the old crumpled bridge which took us southward into Cuinchy, the street northward was not displeasing in appearance. That is to say, it had not yet lost its rows of brick dwellings, which stood up externally presentable if inwardly dismantled; and it was perhaps wholly protected against enemy observation posts by the slight ridge which gathered gently to the east of it. The ridge was still adorned with a shrine, from which a machine gun nightly instructed the enemy in obeisance. Between the village line and the front trenches lay another road, roughly parallel with them, and originating at Givenchy Church. Some houses here yet retained their outline, and when one had walked up the communication trench — Wolfe Road, if I am right — it was curious and touching to see them, after the thought that one was past all houses. I walked among their white shutters and painted garden railings in the thick mists of morning, with that compelled spirit of reverence which those village ruins awoke in me more vividly perhaps than a Wren masterpiece can to-day. To visit such relics of a yesterday whose genial light seemed at once scarcely gone, and gone for ages, relics whose luckless situation almost denied them the imagined piety of contemplation and pity, was a part of my war… Bethune… was a marvellous little town to be found so near the trenches. It was old, it was young; its streets were not of 1916, but its pretty faces were immediate, and the heartiness of ordinary life prevailed. C’est triste, la guerre; ah, malheur, malheur. That note was there, but above it for the time played the spirits of delight in whatever baffled war’s gray tentacles. In the church the twilight bloomed with art’s ancient beauty; the music adored its own centuries of grandeur. In the shops the white fingers that turned over pictures or books for one’s choice were pure poetry. It is a bitter reflection that, perhaps on account of the aforesaid ceremonial parade, with the gleaming bayonets and accoutrements not unnoted by German flying scouts, the town was shelled by heavy guns on the day that we departed, and many citizens were killed.
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