Context 152 - November 2017

C O N T E X T 1 5 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 41 on the side of a hill overlooking a broad landscape of fields and trees, dotted with a few buildings built in local materials and in a recognisably local style. There is such a place near where I live. Unfortunately, the local planning authority and the current permitted development rights have allowed this delightful spot to be desecrated by some really crass house extensions. The permitted development gives maximum eaves heights and roof-ridge heights. This leads to extensions with very low roof pitches that look ridiculous when added to a traditional building with a steep roof pitch. The same issues apply to six-foot, close-boarded fences, behind which England is slowly disappearing. Your favourite book? The Shell Book of the Countryside , with watercolours of the seasons by artists such as Roland Hilder. It has a tremendous atmosphere. It would be the book to take on a desert island, to remind one of the still, grey September skies, the bone-chilling cold of January, the bleak wastes of February and the windswept days of March. What organisations are you a member of? Urban Design Group; Royal Archaeological Institute. Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on? I would like all built environment professionals to have an understanding of how the landscape and society worked at different times through history. Everyone should understand why fields are of a certain size; what a village really is, and how it works or worked; what a market town does or did; what a city is; and so on; of the structure of society, and the nature of trade and the economy. We can see how advances in transport technology reduced the amount of energy required to move goods, enabling resources to be drawn from ever-wider areas, and providing the means for key towns and cities to flourish.We can see how food preservation technologies have been one of the driving forces behind our current suburban model of development. Without fridges, freezers, cook-chill, UHT or pasteurisation, or car boots, there would be no suburbs.We would not be witnessing the proliferation of car-based housing estates built on the edge of towns or in isolated pods in open countryside. We hear people saying ‘you can not predict the future’ as though the future is a blank sheet of paper with limitless possibilities. This form of thinking is used to absolve the current generation of responsibility for its actions, as though there is no need to worry about future problems as future generations will be able to solve them magically. Alan Bennett writes in The History Boys : ‘Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it, this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.’ By studying the not- quite-so-recent past, we have a way to understand the present and predict the future; and to understand how grave is our responsibility for what we do and what we leave for future generations. Robert Huxford, guest commissioning editor for this issue of Context, is director of the Urban Design Group. The first recorded use of the word street (straete) was in 604. It referred to Rochester High Street, now in essentially the same place as it was when it was created shortly after 43AD. Romaldkirk Church: the nearest thing to time travel