Context 164 - May 2020

C O N T E X T 1 6 4 : M A Y 2 0 2 0 9 or ‘mitigation’; the complexity of adopting the viability assessment model when used to mitigate planning obligations in place of conserving and enhancing the historic environment; and the lessons from enhanced awareness of the natural world in public policy terms for public interest in and public benefit for built heritage. The Victorian TheVictorian , the magazine of the Victorian Society, (No 63, March 2020) explores the work of the talented but elusive architect George Devey on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Timothy Brittain-Catlin remarks that his early work, cottages in Penshurst, Kent, ‘are extraordinary for one thing in particular: the fact that it is impossible to distinguish in them the old fabric Devey was remodelling, the interventions he was making, and (with the exception of a few applied decorative details) the entirely new work added to them.’ Architects, Brittain-Catlin writes, ‘have remodelled old buildings throughout history; but when this was done consciously in an art- architect kind of way, it was always possible to see what was new and what was old.What Devey did therefore was to go back into the old fabric of these buildings and breathe new life into it.’ Devey’s contribution to the vernacular revival which took place in the 1860s was important and innovative. He was the first architect to apply theWealden style to cottages and small estate buildings, and to use the Flemish manner found in east Kent and East Anglia in combination with the Jacobean for the houses of high-society clients, anticipating architects such as Richard Norman Shaw andWilliam Eden Nesfield by at least 10 years. Devey’s interest in the use of local materials directly contributed to the emergence of the arts-and-crafts movement and thereby to the model for British middle-class housing up to the second world war, but he remains a somewhat neglected figure and it is good to see this corrected here. SPAB Magazine The practice of facadism has recently returned to central London with a vengeance. Some of the very disturbing results are well illustrated in the latest SPAB Magazine (Spring 2020) taken from a recent book The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Facadism . The article quotes William Morris writing prophetically on behalf of the society in 1890: ‘The value of these buildings has more than one side, they have many parts, and we are unable to discriminate between the value of one part and another. If we are asked what side of them, what part of them, we want to preserve, we must say our only possibility of preserving them at all is to preserve them whole as they are.’ Also worth noting is an article about the key principles guiding Quaker meeting houses, their alterations in the 19th century and the project undertaken between 2014–16 to provide an evidence base on all 345 meeting houses for future discussion about their management; and the recent Historic England listing review leading to additions and re-gradings. Finally, this issue explains the issues surrounding the recent installation of a lift for a new three-level exhibition space inside Winchester Cathedral, where the SPAB’s key concerns were the loss of 11th-century fabric in the tribune and the disruption that the lift would cause to ‘layers of space’ within the cathedral. The project, described as having heroic ambition, is the first passenger lift to be installed within the body of a medieval cathedral in this country. Bob Kindred MBE Ghastly facadism in Spitalfields, London: ‘a creeping plague’