Context 169 - September 2021

C O N T E X T 1 6 9 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1 7 and problems resulting from Covid-19, but simply stripping out Victorian fittings will not solve these problems. The churches could lose their attraction as special and unique spaces. The RevWilliam Whyte’s piece ‘Learning to love the Victorian church’ explores these issues in some depth. A challenge for the society is establishing a better dialogue with parishes to explain that its role is not to be difficult, but to establish what is special about these buildings and ensure that proposed changes to interiors cause as little harm as possible. Elsewhere in the issue the society’s churches officer James Hughes explores a worrying trend of faculties permitting harmful alterations to listed Victorian and Edwardian churches. Hughes asks whether the current ecclesiastical system offers listed churches a sufficient level of protection to secular planning control. He takes a close look at several recent outcomes causing disappointment to the society. At Holy Trinity Hurstpierpoint the society invoked a consistory court. Hughes highlights certain flaws in the operation of the faculty system as part of a brief overview of some of the society’s more salient concerns about the exemption. He notes, among other things, that the role of some chancellors causes considerable concern. Too often they seem to make judgements based on a personal assessment of significance that is at odds with the considered, expert advice of the amenity societies. He cites several other recent judgments. At All Saints,Worcester, the church’s pews, designed by AstonWebb, were described as ‘standard Victorian benches, such as may be found in churches of the period all over England’, despite clear advice from the Victorian Society to the contrary. A chancellor found compelling evidence for the removal of a fine Harry Helms reredos from St John the Evangelist, Bourne End, despite it forming an integral part of the church’s exceptional east-end decorative scheme. And the original porch at St Peter, Stoke upon Tern, was demolished and replaced with a different design in contravention of accepted conservation principles. The SPAB Magazine Scotland was not a country with whichWilliam Morris was particularly enamoured. Despite regular visits between 1883 and 1889, he was unimpressed by Scottish architecture. More than 100 years later the SPAB considered it necessary to have both a presence and a voice in Scotland to discuss and champion the buildings that Morris loathed. The SPAB Magazine (Summer 2021) devotes itself to celebrating the society’s quarter-of-a-century presence north of the border. The SPAB archives show that there has been a long-standing interest in Scottish buildings, with some of the most illustrious ones having been visited and commented on during the course of the 20th century. Unlike in England andWales, the society receives no funding for commenting on casework in Scotland as it is not defined as a statutory body and therefore is not automatically alerted to listed building applications, and feels that it can not devote formal dedicated staff time to casework. This is considered a real loss to both Scotland and the society. This issue looks at the beginnings of the work of the SPAB in Scotland in 1996; discusses the history and future conservation issues surrounding urban Scottish tenements; and looks back at the fundamentally important 2015 SPAB comprehensive survey of rural Scottish thatched buildings. Also examined is the recent work at Hill House, the unique and important building, interiors and collection designed in the Glasgow style by Charles Rennie Macintosh and Margaret MacDonald Macintosh. A controversial approach to care and management of the architecture has been adopted. This has resulted in the complete encapsulation of the building by the Scottish National Trust while it buys time to understand the problematic past piecemeal repairs, and understand the building’s pathology, before reinstating its architectural and structural integrity (see ‘Innovation and investigation at the Hill House’ by Sophia Mirashrafi and Maureen Young, Context 167, June 2021). Construction History Construction History (Vol 36, No 1 2021) presents its usual international outlook. One paper that may be of particular interest, in the light of forthcoming English zonal planning, design codes and the national design guide, might be Susan Galvan’s paper that looks at the impact of a municipal authority on the design and construction of late-19th-century row houses in the Belgian capital. It focuses on one block built in a middle-class neighbourhood, the north-east district of Brussels. The author explains the process of regulatory control of the buildings from the submission of documentation and timelines to communication with building owners and imposition of design quality. It examines how permissions shaped the houses and were used by the municipality as an instrument of control; who were responsible for the developments; and what their prime motivations were for speculative development. The paper sets the topic within a