Context 159 - May 2019

C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 7 Periodically The main thing to note in this column at this time of year is the added value of publications that form part of the membership of third-party heritage organisations. These provide scholarly annual transactions or study volumes on specific topics, allowing greater length and more detail than is possible in their associated regular newsletters or magazines. Such supplementary publications are a bonus beyond supporting and informing the membership intermittently about their activities. Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society The annual Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society (2019) has reached Volume 63 and runs to 158 pages. It is alone worth the cost of the annual membership subscription. The society has a wide remit, covering buildings of all periods. This is reflected in the wide-ranging and stimulating contents of the present volume. The latest issue opens with a fascinating evaluation of ‘Baricsio: the slate quarrymen’s barracks of north-west Wales’ by Rhiain Bower. Her MArch dissertation from the University of Westminster on the subject was awarded the RIBA President’s Medal in 2017. The paper explains the emergence from the late 1700s (and eventual disappearance) of boom towns, transforming an area previously only occupied by dispersed subsistence smallholdings into an industrialised landscape to exploit Snowdonia’s slate mountains to roof much of Great Britain and supply slate all over the world. New towns emerged near bountiful veins of slate, with men moving their families to take up employment opportunities, notwithstanding the remoteness of the locations. Many slate quarry employees commuted on foot to lodge from Monday to Saturday in purpose- built barracks, with the sites housing hundreds of quarrymen throughout the 19th century. Building construction was robust, using slate deemed unsuitable for sale. The ruined remains captured in evocative photographs help to convey the hardships that accompanied the grueling work endured in bleak conditions in a hostile landscape. The author has provided a valuable service in highlighting this neglected subject which, it is to be hoped, will receive greater attention as part of the wider slate landscape nominated on the UK’s Unesco World Heritage Site 2012 Tentative List and as a potential nomination for world heritage status in 2018. The second essay, by John Bold, editor of the AMS Transactions , covers another neglected subject, so mundane in its way, yet when uncovered and evaluated, proves not only fascinating but may prompt the reader to wonder why it has probably not been analysed before. In ‘Familiar, ordinary things: the corridor in English architecture’ the author looks at both domestic and institutional buildings, defining their historical, spatial, social and functional characteristics and distinguishing them from passages and galleries. He demonstrates their evolution in country houses and mansions and compares and contrasts this with their purpose in highly specialised buildings: prisons, hospitals, workhouses, government offices, town halls and courts. As part of his concluding reflections, Bold writes: ‘Corridors are a means to an end but those ends became ambiguous. Originally conceived as a mechanism for efficient, rapid movement and the avoidance of unnecessary or undesirable society, they became over time, with developments in usage, potentially intensely social spaces, albeit often fleetingly. They acquired the power to fire our imaginations and (in the case of [London] County Hall) play a starring role in our dreams: sites of trepidation, conviviality, assignation and threat (at school), where scores were settled and relationships formed. They were sites of banishment and discipline (‘wait in the corridor’), order (‘walk don’t run’) and chaos as much as they were routes.’ Read this essay and you will certainly never consider them in quite the same way again. Peter Howell, former chairman of the Victorian Society, examines the religious life and architectural career of Father Benedict