36 C O N T E X T 1 7 4 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2 DAMIEN BLOWER Where will the drawings go? The construction drawings by which most buildings of the last 200 years have been built are at risk of being lost if they are not catalogued, recorded and safely stored. We have consigned the drawing board and the set square to history, but in attics and storerooms all around the country lie rolls and boxes of drawings, sketches and blueprints equally beyond a useful life, unloved and gathering dust. Entire careers rest in these dark corners. Over a handful of generations before us and in the not-so-distant past, the nation’s built fabric was largely remade, design skills professionalised and new ways of building evolved, including the wholesale use of technical drawing to guide the construction process.The post-18th-century British Isles we see today were largely first imagined and drawn on those drawing boards. Their records tell a story beyond the fabric of the building but once these archives of a career are gone, like any heritage asset, they are gone forever. Stedman Blower Architects, a family practice in the fifth generation, is one such archive, filling three shipping containers with models, documents and drawings, the earliest dating back to 1895, spanning 125 years of the built history of one corner of England, in and around Lutyens country in the Surrey hills. They are beautiful objects in their own right. Not only do they tell stories, but those they tell are relevant today. The archive is a both a legacy and a burden, one repeated across the country. If we accept that these documents have value, whose loss would be irretrievable, how do we manage the cataloguing and recording of them? What is the value to be attached to such records, both individually and as a collective? These are questions that the Blower Foundation (https:// blowerfoundation.org) has set out to answer. Established in 2003, the foundation has been slowly digitising the documents from Stedman Blower’s containers and making them available online. As the years have gone by and word has spread locally, the trustees have received other archives, one from another local family of eminent architects spanning from 1920 to 1980, and even the odd roll of drawings by building owners for cataloguing into the collection. The foundation’s focus is, broadly, on architecture of general practice between the 19th to the 21st centuries. While there are big names in there – Detmar Blow, PhilipWebb and Sir Edwin Lutyens – many of the drawings are by relatively unknown architects. Without the archive, these careers would become lost. Yet their impact on the world today is impressive. There are not just plans for grand homes, but for pubs, shops, housing estates and bus shelters.They are works of art, but also documentary evidence of a working life rooted in a community. There is a practical application to this ceaseless Macdonald’s Almshouses, West Street, Farnham, Surrey, designed in around 1905 by Arthur J Stedman (1868–1858) for the George Edward Macdonald Will Trust All images are copyright of the Blower Foundation.
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