Context 168 - June 2021

4 C O N T E X T 1 6 8 : J U N E 2 0 2 1 Cromer War Memorial, Norfolk, was named as the joint winner of the carving, lettering and sculpture category in the Stone Federation’s Natural Stone Awards. Cliveden Conservation was the main contractor (Photo: Paul Damen) Audit Committee’s recent report on Energy Efficiency of Existing Homes , which does not even mention the need for a different approach for traditional buildings. While the draft interim building regulations Part L retained special consideration for historic and traditional buildings, the Future Buildings Standard that will succeed it does not. And just think of the potential for political pressure to further extend permitted development rights to make it easier to apply external insulation or other retrofit measures, as government targets bite. The heritage and traditional buildings sectors have to get their act together quickly, to present a unified voice. To end on a positive note, look on the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance (STBA) website at Harry Paticas’s Bournville Low Carbon Retrofit, which takes a model whole-life-cycle approach to 2050; Russell Smith’s presentation on ‘A National Retrofit Strategy’; and Andy Sutton’s on ‘Optimised Retrofit’, which sets out aWelsh approach arguably more promising than that so far taken by the UK Government. John Preston, heritage chair, Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance OPINION: CAMBRIDGE MARKET’S INTANGIBLE HERITAGE John Preston writes: I write to update readers (see ‘Significance and heritage protection at Cambridge market’, Context 165, August 2020), and to seek your help. Do you know of any examples where the ‘intangible heritage’ of markets has been recognised with any form of formal protection? Do you know of any open-air market stalls that are listed? These are urgent questions because Cambridge City Council is pressing ahead with its plans to turn the central civic space and market square into a ‘flexible space’. Public consultation on its vision and concept design is planned, to be followed by seeking approval in October to go forward to detailed design and a planning application. The council’s plans involve taking up, grinding and re-laying the listed setts to achieve a more level surface. The issues are with what happens above that listed surface. Cambridge is rare and special in having a thriving seven-day- a-week market. The council’s claimed intention is to maintain a seven-day market, but with its space ‘shared’ with new evening and some daytime activities, involving partial and sometimes total clearance of the stalls. The council also proposes Christmas markets, which would displace the existing traders at their most profitable time of the year. The space is so limited that take down of the day market and setting up of evening activities could not take place at the same time, so the market’s trading day would have to be cut to enable evening events. No thought has been given to the disturbance to residential and student accommodation overlooking the square. The council has set a May– June timescale for its public consultation. Two prototype demountable stalls may be ready ‘in the summer’ for traders to test and the public to see. It may seem a pointless waste to hold the consultation before trialling the stalls on which the whole project depends. The traders remain vehemently opposed to demountable stalls. Some locals fear a hidden agenda in which a seven-day market is ‘maintained’, but with a totally changed character as existing stallholders are driven away, and replaced by more pop- up catering and tourist tat. The battle continues to get the council to recognise the intangible heritage significance of the existing market community (see Kati Preston’s article ‘Cambridge market’s living heritage’, Context 165). Public interest has been intensified by the council’s disastrously heavy-handed closure of the market during the winter lockdown: it closed the market at barely 24 hours’ notice, following overcrowding caused by customers of surrounding takeaways. Unable to control these, the council shut what was within its control, the market. The council clearly does not love the existing traditional market, and remains fixated on having a flexible space. Cambridge market was established ‘well before the Norman Conquest’ but, in the absence of a market charter, are there any means of formally protecting the market activities? Could the existing stalls be protected by listing? A 1905 photo shows six rows of timber stalls with multicoloured canopies; by the 1960s the middle rows had been replaced by car parking, and the stalls had striped canopies. A photo of around 1970 shows the current layout with seven full rows of stalls, with large multicoloured canopies. The existing metal-framed stalls with their multicoloured striped canopies are known to date from the 1970s. Do any readers know of similar stalls which have been listed? Please contact me at jpreston@ phonecoop.coop.