40 C O N T E X T 1 7 4 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2 The online archive in the public domain seeks to capture the architectural spirit of a place over time. A digitised archive on the internet will remain there forever. Historically, fashion has been the enemy of drawings like this. The collection of drawings of Tudorbethan houses from the interwar period is rich, but while they are at the moment terribly unfashionable, they are important illustrations of a significant period in British domestic architecture. The same is true of many of the drawings of post-war suburban Britain, not brutalism or the international style, but at least in part a product of those developments. Architects or architecture need not be ignored just because they are unfashionable in 2022. There is a strong vernacular tradition in these collections, reflected not just in style, but in materials, form and scale. Political consensus has shifted towards asking that new buildings might be best to respond to these local traditions, not by copying them but by expressing some of the same language. A humble house or a bus stop has relevance in architectural heritage as the background to our lives. Stedman Blower approached the RIBA some moons ago. The institute said that it had no interest in this marginally important architectural archive and pointed instead towards a suitable local archive.The local (Farnham) Museum simply does not have the resources for such a large collection, being barely able to look after the material that it already has. For example, it has some surviving documents (a fraction) from the eminent 20th-century revivalist architect Harold Falkner, retrieved from a builder’s skip in the 1960s by a passing neighbour. These, never catalogued in 60 years, sit on a shelf in an attic under a leaky roof, with no security to prevent their loss. The local county records offices, Surrey in this case, might be interested in such an archive, but the archive might well get lost in their vaults and never see the light of day, let alone be available for researchers. The Blower Foundation’s online database is basic, built at modest cost and from charitable donations over the years. The archive is in the public domain and free to access. The records exist in the digital domain in perpetuity, so a facsimile is saved if the originals are lost. The trustees have worked in the past with a publicly funded and professionally managed archive database for the visual arts generally, VADS (https://vads.ac.uk), but each image or artefact needs to be recorded with a considerable number of data fields filled in. It is unwieldy and not for the average user. There is a place for a much simpler database, probably not to the taste of an archivist, but with a rather more wiki-type approach. It may be better to get the material up and available simply and easily, rather than painstakingly catalogued. The RIBA Collections, being a globally important archive, rightly take the archivist approach, but there is room for a cut-down archive database in parallel. Damien Blower is the principal of Stedman Blower Architects and founding trustee of the Blower Foundation, the UK’s only privately funded charitable trust dedicated to the protection of architectural archives and records. A design for the New Inn, Worplesdon, Surrey, drawn in around 1938 by Guy Maxwell Aylwin for the Courage Brewery
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