C O N T E X T 1 3 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 5 7 with the geological and quarrying history, properties, testing methods and uses of Ffestiniog slate. This article usefully isolates the characteristics of this slate, particularly for those who have a tendency to lump together all Welsh slate as a single product. Barry Hunt ably explains the reasons that this particular slate is considered one of the world’s best for roofing. C20 continues to provide an excellent mix of features, casework, reviews and illuminating event reports. The main feature worth highlighting in Issue 1, 2015, is a remarkable set of interwar photographs of the Boots d10 Factory in Nottingham, taken from the company’s archive. The building, by Sir William Owen in Beeston, completed in 1932–3, is widely seen as one of the most important industrial estates of the 20th-century. It was listed (now Grade I) as early as 1971. The photographs had a clear social purpose in promoting the company’s inter-war publicity message that machinery could be used to create a better society. The Boots archive is not currently open to the public, but a five-year programme to make the collection more accessible has begun. The issue features the life and work of pioneering designer and champion of design, Misha Black. His work will be familiar, even if unconsciously, to all Londoners. Black was responsible for all the Westminster street signs with their distinctive black-and-red Univers Bold Condensed lettering. The article illustrates and explains much more of the work completed up to his death in 1977. This included, for example, the once derided and ubiquitous house style of pub lettering for Watneys Brewery. These two examples perhaps do Black an injustice: in a career spanning more than 50 years, he did more than anyone else to shape the British design profession. As the director of Britain’s first major design consultancy, a leader of professional organisations, and as a prolific writer, teacher and lecturer, Black opened up the possibilities of 20th-century design. But in many ways he remains a mysterious figure. This article by Harriet Atkinson may help to dispel that. The most recent edition of The Victorian (No 48, March 2015) provides appreciations by former chairman Peter Howell and Louise Nicholson of the former Victorian Society secretary, distinguished architectural historian and general editor of the Survey of London, Hermione Hobhouse, who died in October last year. Hobhouse ran the society during a period of great change, and as the attitudes to Victorian architecture were changing from abhorrence and widespread dismissal to proper appreciation. These tributes provide an affecting picture of her impact on conservation. The cover features Tower Bridge. This iconic building (not an overused epithet in this instance) has been the subject of a major art exhibition (now closed) at the Guildhall Art Gallery, depicting the bridge over 120 years. For those who missed it, some the striking images from the exhibition are reproduced in the article. On the technical side, Moses Jenkins of Historic Scotland answers some of the questions that recur regarding the maintenance and restoration of fireplaces, chimneys and flues. Bob Kindred MBE From the manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, written by William Morris and others and issued in 1877 For Architecture, long decaying, died out, as a popular art at least, just as the knowledge of mediaeval art was born. So that the civilised world of the nineteenth century has no style of its own amidst its wide knowledge of the styles of other centuries. From this lack and this gain arose in men’s minds the strange idea of the Restoration of ancient buildings; and a strange and most fatal idea, which by its very name implies that it is possible to strip from a building this, that, and the other part of its history – of its life that is – and then to stay the hand at some arbitrary point, and leave it still historical, living, and even as it once was. In early times this kind of forgery was impossible, because knowledge failed the builders, or perhaps because instinct held them back. If repairs were needed, if ambition or piety pricked on to change, that change was of necessity wrought in the unmistakable fashion of the time; a church of the eleventh century might be added to or altered in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, or even the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries; but every change, whatever history it destroyed, left history in the gap, and was alive with the spirit of the deeds done midst its fashioning. The result of all this was often a building in which the many changes, though harsh and visible enough, were, by their very contrast, interesting and instructive and could by no possibility mislead. But those who make the changes wrought in our day under the name of Restoration, while professing to bring back a building to the best time of its history, have no guide but each his own individual whim to point out to them what is admirable and what contemptible; while the very nature of their task compels them to destroy something and to supply the gap by imagining what the earlier builders should or might have done. Moreover, in the course of this double process of destruction and addition, the whole surface of the building is necessarily tampered with; so that the appearance of antiquity is taken away from such old parts of the fabric as are left, and there is no laying to rest in the spectator the suspicion of what may have been lost; and in short, a feeble and lifeless forgery is the final result of all the wasted labour. Themagazineof the TwentiethCenturySociety Issue12015/£4.50 Amodernwonder: the1930sBootsfactory MishaBlack: pioneeringdesigner Seasidepleasures: C20Bournemouth 9772055503003 15 ISSN 2055-5032
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