4 C O N T E X T 1 4 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 7 Periodically Some, perhaps many, readers of this column will be members of one or more of the invaluable voluntary third-sector heritage organisations whose publications it falls to me to review here. It seems appropriate in this issue of Context to say something about the publication bonuses that such affiliations provide, above and beyond supporting and informing their members from time to time about what they do. The bonuses I am thinking about are the annual or intermittent scholarly journals and transactions that add so much to our knowledge and understanding, and arrive together with or in lieu of printed newsletters. As an example, in recent years in addition to publishing its excellent magazine, the Twentieth Century Society has produced a series of substantial journals. The most recent (No 12) on Housing: regional practice and local character ran to 224 pages and appeared last year. As I covered it in my recent columns with others such as the Journal of Construction History, it is worth highlighting the specific benefits that stem from membership of three other heritage organisations. The annual Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society (2017) has now reached Volume 61. It runs to 164 pages and alone is worth the cost of the annual subscription. Like the remit of the society itself, the content is broad and always stimulates wide interest. It opens with a consideration by EurwynWiliam one of the towering figures in the study of Welsh vernacular architecture from the 1930s to the 1980s: Iorwerth Peate, Sir Cyril Fox and Peter Smith, whose work was significant not merely inWales but further afield. The paper assesses their respective contributions and influence, and explores the relationships and tensions between them. Peate is particularly known for his 1940 book TheWelsh House, and the establishment of theWelsh Folk Museum at St Fagan. Smith demonstrated the existence of distinct regional building cultures within the principality. Fox is known to many for his innovative in-depth study of the houses of Monmouthshire that formed a valuable analytical model for many other professional and amateur investigators to follow. Anthony Rossi looks at flint secular buildings from different periods in Norfolk, the fourth largest county in England but largely devoid of conventional building stone. He points out that the building types and period over which flint was a truly vernacular material were comparatively short, but highlights its arts and crafts revival, and more modern decorative uses such as the wonderful precast panels of knapped flint used on Norwich Central Library in 1960–62 (regrettable destroyed by fire in 1994). Rossi illustrates a splendid range of examples but concludes that while traditional use of flint has not died out, it is being kept artificially alive, particularly in new housing in north Norfolk as lip-service paid to local distinctiveness – often for dwellings as expensive second homes. Anthony Peers has used the analysis of a 19th-century dairy farmstead in North Shropshire to reflect on the thoroughness of the mid-Victorian quest to improve agricultural productivity in a golden era for farmers between 1840 and 1880. The resultant form of the buildings reflected the advanced scientific thinking of the time. Peers shows that a considerable amount of thought was given to the siting of the Whitegates Farm shippon (cattle shed), with a sophistication that could not have been imagined 50 years earlier. He notes that this type of building is under-represented in the statutory list, and if they fall into disuse they may be compromised by uninformed alteration. The author shows that the heritage significance of farmstead buildings extends beyond their visual appeal. In this instance careful and thorough assessment has led to the appropriate conversion to a new use. The AMS Transactions carry a longer version of Malcolm Airs’ discussion of the extraordinary, unbuilt 1966 Pier Luigi Nervi circular design for a new Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford that was also noted in my last column, and featured on the cover of the most recent issue of C20, the magazine of the Twentieth Century Society. Peter Guilly has produced a polemical essay entitled ‘Vernacular Revival and Ideology: what’s left?’ taken from a lecture he gave at the 2015 Vernacular Architecture Group conference on vernacular revivalism. He comments on how vernacular revival has gone hand in hand with leftist ideology since 1900. Penelope Harris describes hitherto unresearched connections between a major church project by JA Hansom in Plymouth and three churches in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Northern France, in the mid-19th-century. These involved a complex network of Roman Catholic aristocratic patronage and zealotry on both sides of the Channel. A particularly valuable benefit of membership of ASCHB (Association for Studies in the Conservation of Historic Buildings) is its excellent Transactions, which for 2017 has reached Volume 39 and runs to 68 pages. This issue commences with an explanation by Roger Bowdler, director of listing at Historic England, of the statutory protection now offered to commercial office buildings of the era 1965 to 1995 (a cut-off date, you will note, well within the 30-year rule).
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