Context 155 - July 2018

C O N T E X T 1 5 5 : J U L Y 2 0 1 8 21 Theory and practice be. But there is a real reticence about having these discussions in public. CD: At all of the sites that I look at in the book there were people who were making those pragmatic decisions, and even sometimes quite profound ones, about managing change and decay. In a sense the book is about surfacing some of those conversations, rather than saying ‘this is what you should be doing’. In the exam- ple you have just described I would be curious to know how many of the people who visit that castle perceive the unstable character of that feature. It seems likely that many of them do not notice if their attention is not called to it. I think there is a real project to be done in educating people about preservation practice and the decisions that are made in the name of consolidation, surfacing the work that goes on, and that has gone on. At some of the sites that I have worked with, people who know sites well and love them have no sense of their histories of collapse and repair, and think of them as being inherently stable and reliable. The question of how you begin to engage people in some of those histories of change over time, the way that places have come apart and come back together again, is a really interesting one. If we are going to manage places through their changes and share that with the public, we really need to share it. Not just tell them, ‘oh, by the way, we’re going to let this fall down,’ but try to understand how those processes are unfolding, and try to engage people in understanding some of the science of that degradation and the cultural significance of the aesthetics of decay. We have an appreciation of this but I it tends to be quite passive. A more active engagement with those changes is probably important. DM: The policy thinking has started to shift. My colleagues who manage consents and designations talk much more about the process of managing change than they did in the past, and they have been looking at how we attribute value and recognise it.Those are fascinating and exciting new perspectives. CD: I’m curious about whether there is accept- able change and unacceptable change.When you start to talk about absolute deterioration and total loss of structural integrity, and breaking something down to its constituent materials, are people really talking about managing that kind of change? DM: No. I was talking to our students recently at the Engine Shed about transience:‘you take iron ore out the ground, you process it into wrought iron or cast iron, or whatever, then it’s in a transient state and all it wants to do is go back to being ore because that’s its state of equilibrium with its environment.’ You talk about this in your book, saying that we’ve taken it out of its context and done something else with it. I have spent 25 years writing and teaching people on how to conserve and care for iron struc- tures. To be honest I love the stuff that’s starting to go and has not been touched, because I can interpret what has gone on. It is quite a conundrum for me because I know how to preserve things like that and I know how to perpetuate their life, but I think in doing so it quite often takes away quite a big chunk of the thing that’s special about it in the first place. I find that really difficult. CD: I think that is a great example of how these principles operate on multiple scales, so it can be an iron feature in a park or it can be a whole structure. One thing that I talk about quite a lot in the book is that we are perfectly happy for a lot of these things to just carry on with their changes as long as they are at the fringes of our consciousness. The UK is full of ruins, but it is when they get drawn into the remit of professional attention there is not a category for ‘just let it be’, so there is a presumption that we have to act. DM: There is a wonderful building a few miles from where I am sitting, Bannockburn House. There has been no public access pretty much, I don’t think ever. It goes back to the 17th century and the community have just bought it. It’s one of these time capsules.What has been fascinating me is that the community love it so much. I have never seen such a response. I went in quite early on and saw an army of ladies cleaning the place. I’m like, ‘no, don’t touch it!’ We had a conversation: I’m like, ‘what’s special about this place?’ and the fact that nobody’s been in here and nobody’s touched anything. There’s been a fire in here... somebody’s just shut the door, you’re at risk of loving it to death. CD: Something that really fascinates me is the idea that when we love these places, like those ladies love Bannockburn House, we want to care for them and so ‘care’ for them is cleaning and tidying. On one post-industrial site that I was working at there was a similar sort of public effort. People had initially been attracted by the abandonment and the decay, but the impulse to tinker around the edges and tidy things up was so powerful that they needed to be reminded to back off, as you described. I am interested in thinking about modes of care that do not involve that kind of intervention necessarily, where you can care without taking out the broom and the spade, and clearing things away. That is also part of the puzzle. We are not saying ‘just step back and let these things go’, we are saying, ‘step sideways and let them be, and figure out ways to care about them and to interpret them that do not necessar- ily involve having your hands right there on them and reassembling them all the time’. David Mitchell and Caitlin DeSilvey will carry on the conversation at an event on 12 December 2018 at the Engine Shed, Stirling, entitled Conservation Ethics and Approaches. https://www.engineshed . scot/ whats-on/ event/ ?eventId=00f3f074-bb9d- 459e-aa0b-a88f00f3aec6