C O N T E X T 1 4 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 27 These brand values had achieved the aims all heritage professionals believed in by promoting education about, understanding of and enthusiasm for heritage. These were now expressed differently by encouraging people to ‘do things’ in buildings, allowing them to experience heritage rather than merely observe it. The home page of the website of the newly rebranded ‘Sydney Living Museums’ was now aimed at families, hitting you with FUN – Make, Play, Visit! The expectations of new generations needed to be met if the heritage professional was not to be sidelined. We might need to think about the way we presented ourselves. As Clarke summed up: ‘There is a cold winter coming and we need to be clear about the value of what we do’. Her message was, though, a positive one and the audience reaction was approving. We could get the conservation message across, but we needed to rethink how we presented heritage and work harder to capture the public’s imagination and enthusiasm. Barbara Hornbrook Change in communities: how the historic built environment adapts Speaker: Shahed Saleem There is no central organising body for mosques: they are individual entities and anyone can start one. Nor is there any definitive list of where mosques are, although there were some attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to produce mosque directories. In 2003 a study by Ceri Peach and Richard Gale on ‘Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in the New Religious Landscape of England’ was published in the Geographical Review. Covering all 916 places of worship, this was the first attempt to map a landscape of mosques. There has been no other overview, only studies of individual buildings, generally from a sociological perspective. There has been no serious architectural review or history of any British mosque.The history of the mosque in Britain is uncharted, unrecorded and in danger of being lost completely. The Mosque Directory of Muslims in Britain lists 1,616 mosques in the UK and Ireland (www.muslimsinbritain.org).There are three main types of mosque in this country: house mosques (45 per cent), conversions from other buildings (39 per cent) and purpose-built mosques (16 per cent). Early examples of house mosques in residential properties were in the 19th century for Yemeni and Somali lascars settling in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. Styles of purpose-built mosque have developed from early exotic (Woking 1889 and Fazl 1925), through mid-post-partition vernacular, folk and self orientalising (Bolton 1994, Kingston 1978– 2000, Birmingham 1998 and Gloucester 1990s) to the more recent historicist and interpretive (Sheffield 2002, Leicester 2010, Bradford 2012, Westbourne Park 2002 and Hackney Road 2013). How do you recognise the value of groups in society which have not been around long enough to have built up a substantial material culture, which can be valued in terms of conventional criteria of monumentality and aesthetics? What the nation ‘means’ is a continuing project under constant reconstruction, but there is a momentum of new histories, stories, forms of representation, story tellers and audiences. The research in Saleem’s work ‘The British Mosque: an architectural and social history’ will be used to help heritage bodies understand significance of mosques; to inform the regulatory framework of planning authorities; to develop recognition, inclusion and belonging in under-represented communities; and to aid academic critical enquiry. Sharing training Speaker: Darren Barker, Great Yarmouth Preservation Trust Barker took to the stage with great humility, feeling that the IHBC school was somewhat larger than the audiences he found in the village halls where he usually spoke. There was no need for nervousness as this was a brilliant presentation of an innovative and socially motivated heritage skills project. Charles Dickens described Great Yarmouth as ‘the finest place in the universe’. Barker spoke about present-day Yarmouth as a place of high unemployment, deprivation and social exclusion. But he also spoke of an incredible community spirit and sense of defiance in the face of decline.The decline GreatYarmouth has faced includes fading historic buildings and a lack of practical heritage skills.The presentation showed some poor conservation practice that made even the most robust heritage professional wince. The Great Yarmouth Preservation Trust has used some of the £40 million in regeneration funding it has attracted in the past few years to increase the local supply chain of skills and address the unemployment issues in the town. The trust has created projects to train anyone who wants to get involved in how to repair historic buildings. Shahed Saleem: the history of the mosque in Britain is uncharted, unrecorded and in danger of being lost completely.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=