28 C O N T E X T 1 4 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 It all started with a cemetery project to repair historic tombs and graves. The project, which was oversubscribed, delivered 10,000 training hours, training 100 people, and intensively training 24. People have been trained so well that they are now employed. The project is moving on to a Grade II* listed ruin of a church to consolidate the ruin and provide more skills training. The project worked hard to reach those hard-toreach groups. No one was turned away. This led to some interesting perspectives that are not normally seen on projects such as this. The project also worked with European partners from Bulgaria and Italy. The Devataki plateau in Bulgaria suffers the same lack of local traditional skills as Great Yarmouth and lack of economic growth. The local vernacular buildings are under great threat. The project took people fromYarmouth, and shared skills and learnt new skills in Bulgaria. A mill was the focus of the work to create a cultural centre to promote tourism, a hope for economic growth. In Yarmouth the focus is on St John’s Church: the European team is working together to solve its problems. This inspirational talk demonstrated the great relationship that heritage has with establishing pride, confidence and technical ability in places, and how the heritage sector is instrumental in economic development. Peter Aiers Tales of an architect in foreign fields Speaker: Michael Morrison, Purcell Michael Morrison, a senior principal in the Purcell partnership, joined the practice as an assistant surveyor for Ely Cathedral. Over the past 30 years he has been responsible for a wide range of major projects on behalf of the National Trust, the National Gallery, the British Museum, and many public and private clients. From 1990–2002 he was the managing partner of Purcell, followed by eight years as chairman. His work has included conservation management plans for a wide variety of buildings, from the British Museum to Scott’s Hut in Antarctica. Morison was appointed a commissioner for English Heritage in 2014. Morrison gave an insight into the work of a conservation professional in the wider world. In its first business plans the Purcell Partnership had vowed never to work outside the UK. Somehow, though, the practice had found itself in 1989 required to make recommendations for the ‘regeneration’ of the Rathaus in the East German city of Straussen. It was a chastening experience: ‘regeneration’ in Straussen meant not restoration or conservation, but ‘rip out all the insides’. Morrison recorded his ‘misfortune’ of working with architects in Melbourne, Australia, who seemed to see conservation as an afterthought. When the city’s Flint Street train station was redeveloped, it was submerged beneath an over-powering new structure, just a few courses of the original station’s Edwardian red brick at ground level being left. In Hong Kong the partnership found itself involved in the conservation and adaptation of the former police headquarters, which had surprisingly escaped the demands for high-rise development in the former colony. The problem here was not only the lack of skilled craftsmen who could lay Chinese tiling (roofers were adept at skyscrapers but not 19th century roofs), but also the mindset and attitude of those involved. Housed in the offices of the former water company, Morrison and his colleague Heather Jermy produced an effective conservation management plan. Research included reference to records at Kew in London, and the original 1859 designs and drawings by Charles Cleverly. Morrison recalled that the battle to keep the balustrades of this fine Victorian building was especially fierce. In Antarctica Captain Scott’s and Ernest Shackleton’s expedition huts of a hundred years ago still stand, complete with piles of rusting cans of bully beef inside and out. For conservators and conservation professionals however the question arises: to replicate or replace?Very little of the contents of the buildings remain authentic. Yet what remains has become iconic. Morrison said that in his expedition tents there had been some serious ethical discussions as to what to do. In some instances the resulting conservation management plan came down to basic maths: how long would an artefact last? The legendary status of Scott and Shackleton would suffice to make retaining the huts worthwhile. Finally Morrison took us on an uncomfortable seven-hour military flight to the site of a historic Leith Whaling Station on South Georgia (described in Elizabeth Smith’s article ‘Southern assignment’, Context 129, May 2013). For industrial archaeologists it represented the complete industrial town and factory. Present was every aspect of human existence, including cinemas and chapels, mixed up with the tangled metallic remnants of a whaling factory that once employed thousands of people, all rusting away in a remote corner of the world. Morrison asked whether Michael Morrison: sitting in a tent having ethical discussions
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