Context 159 - May 2019

64 C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 64 New member profile Alfie Temple Stroud I joined the IHBC first as an affiliate, when I moved from the flux of consultancy into the public sector. As one of a small gang of conservation officers in a planning department, where pressure can be high and resources for professional development are scarce, IHBC events and news blogs kept me in touch with the conservation community and happenings beyond the London development bubble. Conserving the extraordinary heritage of the London Borough of Camden has been an awesome responsibility, made possible by team spirit and the council’s sincerely progressive attitude. The switch from advising to taking decisions on proposals for bold interventions and historic fabric of the highest significance was a huge challenge. As an affiliate member I found structure for clarifying and consolidating what I was learning fast and forcefully at the Camden coalface.With the help of a MATE training session and a little support group of co-affiliates coordinated by Anna Shelley, I was on the way to full membership sooner than I imagined. For now, while doing some freelance consultancy, I am spending time away from London to study again, looking for international and interdisciplinary perspectives. I am pursuing the Erasmus Mundus 4Cities urban studies programme, studying in Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen and Madrid until next year. A diverse, critical and activist course, it is helping me understand what makes professionally planning and caring for places so challenging. I am glad that the IHBC wants to build worldwide links just when, generally, that approach is threatened. It matters to me because back home inWales the stakes in conservation are almost a world apart from Camden. Conservation, you might say, is all about context, and we need a broad and cooperative outlook to engage with it. I hope that the IHBC network will help me find future projects and collaborators at home and abroad. Alfie Temple Stroud is a new full member of the IHBC. I trained as a historian, and I think I owe my preoccupation with the past to the historic built environment of my Swansea childhood. It is not my hometown’s most renowned characteristic perhaps; but between Celts and castles, the transformation of industrialisation and trauma of its reversal, the layers of the place revealed a passion to me. All the same, it took me a while to find my way to conservation and urbanism as a career path. My lucky break and my formation in the professional ethos of conservation came from Alan Baxter and his inimitable company of engineers and urbanists. In the conservation team there I learned rigour, conviction and care from brilliant colleagues, now friends. I could not believe my good fortune working on places and buildings as special as St Bartholomew- the-Great Church and Biggin Hill airfield. Those experiences were especially important as I came to complete the section on evaluation competencies in my full membership testimonial.