C O N T E X T 1 4 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 6 7 inspection and maintenance, stressing the importance of risk assessment and prioritising mitigation strategies. Concerns about the effects of climate change on sea levels will have a particular resonance in the UK. Two articles look at this from an American perspective, but some lessons might also be drawn from them here. In the first, in an excellent article entitled ‘Planning before Disaster Strikes’ Ann D Horowitz discusses the debilitating effects of sea-level rise in terms of flooding, storm surge and coastal erosion. She rightly emphasises that the future of heritage assets on tidal shorelines is uncertain without public sector action to implement protection. Much work is being done in America on assessing coastal vulnerability. The author sets out the benefits and disadvantages of ‘hard’ adaptations, such as sea walls and breakwaters, ‘soft’ adaptations, such as berms, dykes and wetland reclamation, and infrastructure, elevation and planning and construction policies. She looks at retro-fitting for dry flood-proofing, such as sandbag barriers or floodgates, and wet flood-proofing, such as moving electrical equipment and appliances to upper floors and sump pumping in basements. Horowitz acknowledges that some of these adaptation solutions are imperfect and temporary, but they may extend the timescale over which present and future generations can experience our commonly inherited past. Fortunately, we are not yet advocating managed retreat to the uplands, but serious consideration will be needed about what we want to save and how we manage it and pay for it. The practical aspects of coastal vulnerability are addressed in the second article regarding sea-level rise. Written by Benjamin Curran, Michael Routhier and Gopal Mulukutla, it explains in detail how a vulnerability assessment was undertaken in New Hampshire at the Strawberry Banke Museum. This an open-air museum contains 11 contemporary and 31 historic structures, the earliest dating from the late 17th century. Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) was used to provide a spatial context, and sensors were used to determine the transitional boundaries between freshwater and saltwater in relation to mean sea-level increases.Water level and environmental monitoring then formed the basis of a discussion about potential conservation issues. These may be equally applicable in parts of the UK. Two other papers in this issue show the range of climate change issues that arise outside the temperate zone familiar to us. One addresses the potential loss of fragile aboriginal cultural landscapes in the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada as a consequence of thawing of continuous and discontinuous permafrost. The other looks at the lack of reliable sources of information on the energy retro-fitting of older houses in hot and humid climates, using a historic district of San Antonio, Texas, as an exemplar. The latest issue of Construction History, the international journal of the Construction History Society (Vol 31, No 1, 2016) has a number of wideranging papers. One is the second part of a study by Michael Mark Chrimes of architectural dilettantes working in British India. This part, covering the period 1860 to 1910, looks in particular at how the public works department of the British government managed the design of public buildings in the second half of the 19th century. This was achieved mainly by using civil engineers, who were generally anachronistically referred to as architects, although most held engineering positions in the Indian army, or latterly in offices of public works. For those interested in heritage materials science, there is a paper by Jasenka Gudelj about the historical use of pozzolana as a component of hydraulic mortar in the baroque era, particularly in the rebuilding of Dubrovnik cathedral after the great earthquake of 1667 destroyed most of its renaissance art and architecture. Archival documentation from the period illustrates an otherwise poorly documented process of changing building technology in responding to seismic resistant construction during that era. Jacques Heyman provides a long, well-illustrated paper on the development of crossing spaces, with particular reference to St Paul’s Cathedral and the significance of this after the Great Fire of London had abolished the medieval way of building. A new orthodoxy saw the disappearance of master masons as the designers and builders of cathedrals, and the emergence of the modern professional architect and engineer. The paper draws particularly on the work of Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. There seems to endless fascination in heritage circles with railway bridges (some might say, like endless fascination with lime). This column has referred to papers on the subject from past issues of the ICE journal Engineering and Heritage. Here Nicholas A Bill looks at timberbridge construction on British and Irish railways from 1840 to 1870. The author’s exhaustive research shows that timber bridges were neither relatively few in number nor used wood out of economic necessity. Bill demonstrates that timber bridges were built in their thousands across the British Isles. They varied in structural form, technical complexity and the use of differing types of timber species. Bill shows that economy was not the sole reason for using timber. For those with more of an interest in fired-earth materials, a paper by Qinghua Guo of the University of Melbourne interprets the wide range of clay roofing tiles fromYongcheng, imperial capital of the Qin state in China around 400–300BC. The research is based on large quantities of tiles excavated there in 1981–84 and 2005–06. The latest issue of The Historic Environment: policy and practice (Vol 7, No 1, 2016) also concerns itself in part with railways. Christopher D Reeves provides a timely paper regarding a policy for the conservation of heritage railway signal boxes in Great Britain. Modern computerised control systems are making traditional signal boxes obsolete, and most of those owned by Network Rail will close by 2026. Many are listed, and while current good practice is predicated on historic buildings being retained in their original positions wherever possible,
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