C O N T E X T 1 7 2 : J U N E 2 0 2 2 9 Heritage Now In Context 170 (December 2021), we referred to Historic Buildings and Places, the new working name of the Ancient Monuments Society, and its new magazine Heritage Now. The second issue (Spring 2022) has now been issued, with the theme of facing the challenges of maintaining and regenerating historic buildings. The director, Lucie Carayon, picks up on the feedback from its member survey and explains the unique selling point of Historic Buildings and Places. Peter Howell, the author of a new monograph on triumphal arches, explains that, although these monuments were usually freestanding, it might be thought that they would be left untouched. He illustrates and explains that this has not always been the case. Elsewhere, James Grundy MP, chair of the House of Commons’ Conservation, Places and People All-Party Parliamentary Group (an APPAG ably supported by the IHBC) gives his personal take on how heritage transcends stately homes and other highend properties. Alastair DickCleland, the Landmark Trust’s conservation manager, outlines the origins of the trust in 1965 and its ethos, expanding its excellent work of repurposing difficult buildings often at risk. In a varied issue, Roger Wools sets out the campaigning concerns of Historic Buildings and Places about the c1774 Grade I listed Bootham Park Hospital by John Carr of York. The building inYork has been vacant since closure by the NHS in 2015 and in need of more sympathetic proposals. Elsewhere in the magazine, the comment column questions whether the initial enthusiasm for the widespread applicability of heritage partnership agreements was a false dawn. The Victorian In TheVictorian (No 69, March 2022), theatres are placed in the VicSoc’s spotlight. This is a useful complement to the remit and work of the Theatres Trust and a reminder, if any were needed, of the complementary and mutually supportive roles of the national amenity organisations. To that end, Mark Price of the Theatres Trust explains its fight to preserve Victorian and Edwardian theatres across the UK. Griff Rhys Jones, the Victorian Society’s president, shares his instinctive love of the great Victorian theatres and his memories of being involved in the campaign to rescue the Hackney Empire, one of the longest conservation campaigns of modern times. In northern Ireland James Grieve of Consarc Design Group describes the major restoration of Belfast‘s Grand Opera House, one of the most important surviving works Frank Matcham. Elsewhere, Jon Newman considers how John Ruskin’s life in south London (Herne Hill, then Denmark Hill) shaped his attitudes and ideas, as set out – with Laurence Marsh – in their book Sunset over Herne Hill: John Ruskin and south London. They expound on the significance of place as a critical aspect of Ruskin that has previously been relegated to the status of local historical footnote, and argue that his south London life impinged on, influenced and finally came to embody many of the larger preoccupations of his writing. The Construction Historian In The Construction Historian (Issue 9, March 2022) Michael Heaton offers a short article entitled ‘Another Fine Mess…’, looking at mistakes (or mistaken understanding) in construction. Heaton observes that engineering history, especially that of vernacular structural carpentry, assumes that craftsmen builders had an innate understanding of the capacity of materials and structures to withstand and transfer the forces created by and operating on the structures they built. As we rarely find, or report, evidence of failures, we assume that structural forms were developed and improved in response to the changing demands of society in careful empirical stages. In the case of roof trusses for duo-pitched roofs, the many forms developed in Europe during the last c2,000 years all perform the same two functions in slightly different ways: restraining the outward thrust of the pitches under load while, if possible, creating a usable space within the roof (the interrupted tiebeam roof truss is a good example of this). A common truss form in small 19th-century British stables is needed for a usable space in the low-pitched roof for storing feed or staff accommodation. A rigid structural triangle has to resist outward thrust of the loaded principal rafters without needing the full span of the tiebeam that would ordinarily render the roof space difficult to use.
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