54 C O N T E X T 1 4 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 Vox pop Mike McConnell, the guest commissioning editor for the annual school coverage in this issue of Context, is a historic building consultant (‘almost retired’) with MKT Associates. Who has been your greatest inspiration? While I was still working as a builder repairing historic buildings I met Beth Davies. She and John Selby were setting up a part-time course in historic building conservation at the University of Cambridge. Shortly after completing the course I got a job as conservation and buildings-at-risk officer in Suffolk and started working with Michael Munt. These three individuals were my conservation mentors. What has been your best idea? Resigning from my job at the Ministry of Defence after a holiday in Crete when I was 18 and going overland to Australia. My second best idea: leaving Australia. What would you like to have been if you had not become a conservationist? I have already done it. Many years spent travelling in the middle and far east, including a spell buying old buses in Europe and selling them in Afghanistan or Nepal. How do you reply when at a party someone asks what you do? I give them the Lime Lecture until my wife notices they have glazed over and comes to rescue them. What is the biggest frustration in your job? The myth of raising damp; purveyors of plastic windows; and most, but not all, developers, builders, surveyors, structural engineers and architects. Take your pick. What would you like to be doing in five years’ time? Breathing. What is your favourite building? There are a few. The Basilica Church of St Mary Magdalene in Vézelay is a stunning example of Romanesque art and architecture. One of the many temples in Angkor, Cambodia, such as Prasat Pre Rup or Ta Kao. The high-rise mud houses of Shibam in southYemen, some of them 500 years old, are also astonishing. But my favourite building is the one I live in. Mid three-bay, crosspassage, 16th-century, timber-framed and long-straw thatched, it has been described by one local architectural historian as bog-standard Suffolk farmhouse. It is a building with very nearly all of its original timber frame, lime plastered, with most of the original wattle-and-daub infill and every original window opening, including several intact mullions. The frame sits on two courses of brick, with no damp-proof course and no membranes under the floors. No cement, no non-breathable paints, no plasterboard. And no damp! Your favourite place? Georgetown, Penang, wandering the back streets past 19th-century shophouses, stopping for a beer or coffee. The most intact Chinatown outside of China, it is resisting the best endeavours of the developers to raze it to the ground to make way for more shopping malls and high-rise accommodation. Check out the Penang Heritage Trust’s website at www.pht.org.my. Your favourite book? Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. What do you do in your spare time? I still like to travel. I read, listen to jazz and I am secretary of our local Labour Party. And occasionally I still ride a friend’s horse, Rolo. What organisations are you a member of? The Labour Party, St Edmunds Bury Town Trust, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Suffolk Preservation Trust, SuffolkWild Life Trust, National Trust, Norwich City Football Club. I am cutting down in my old age. Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on? The conservation skills deficit. It is just as easy to repair a historic building the right way as to do it the wrong way. It ain’t rocket science. Here in the East Anglia branch of the IHBC we are actively supporting a conservation course at a local college.You might have seen their stall at the annual school. If the IHBC doesn’t do it, who will? And when are we going to see more women in the top positions to reflect our membership? The high-rise mud houses of Shibam,Yemen (Photo: Jialiang Gao, Wikimedia Commons)
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