44 C O N T E X T 1 7 4 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2 Director’s cut These are 20 of the director’s best for #IHBC25. What are yours? The IHBC’s current subscription year – April 2022 to March 2023 – sees your institute mark a quarter of a century since our incorporation as a conservation charity and professional body supporting and accrediting built and historic environment conservation specialists across the UK and, since our 2020 Articles of Association, beyond. We kick-started the anniversary by launching the logo and social media branding (#IHBC25); posting a NewsBlog series inviting ideas on how to mark this special year; and developing a web hub for reference and updates at https:// ihbc.org.uk/ihbcat25. Since then, we have had our new volunteer and branch support officer, JudeWheeler, contacting branches about the anniversary, helping sort events as required, and advising on funding applications and updates. Most recently our new (part-time) education officer, Angharad (Anna) Hart, has in her job description the building of links between training events and the like and our quarter-century anniversary. Aspects of IHBC25 pervade the pages of this issue of Context too, but here I wanted to take a slightly different tack on this special year and offer some of my own – personal and provisional – highlights from our past that also serve as signposts to our future. The obvious numerical target for such a list in such a year is 25. I have to acknowledge abject failure on that, stopping at 20 because there are already too many. So I will continue the list in the next issue of Context. I also want to raise the matter noted in this column’s cryptic title: ‘What’s yours?’ 1. As an opening and hopefully sobering reminder as we face a challenging economy and worse, there is this: the £80 membership fee in 2004 – uplifted to fund the new national office – cost more than the highest fee today after inflation, by some £10. So IHBC membership, supported by a professional executive, is cheaper than it ever was.The list below highlights just some of the services, benefits and advocacy that have been added for our members and their sectors since 1997, not only no extra cost to you, but at a lesser cost. 2. Our incorporation in 1997 as a charity and professional body, led by such luminaries as David Lovie, was a remarkable achievement, all the more so as it was delivered through an entirely voluntary network, while also securing our governance for more than 20 years. The recent recast of our constitution only reaffirmed the strengths in the original. 3. Context, as always, is central. Particularly important here are those issues where our history resonates: those coinciding with our foundation; our 10th anniversary issue; and the current one; all accessible on our digital archive. 4. Indeed, our digital archive of Context is another key marker in our history, taking us back to Context 1 in 1983, and making the entire history accessible and, mostly, searchable, all following a painstaking compilation led by Peter Badcock. 5. Our Gus Astley Student Awards were launched at the Guildford School in 2007, and have been ably managed through the office – and stewarded by Bob Kindred – ever since, all with a stunning array of awards and guest judges including, this year, Clara Arokiasamy, chair of ICOMOS-UK. 6. 2007 also saw the formal AGM adoption of our first Corporate Plan – distinct from our earlier and no less commendable suite of annual Business Plans, also now online. The 2007 plan took a short timescale – only three years, to 2010 – reflecting a precautionary approach for a then-revolutionary step. AGMs are the go-to for such corporate planning now, demonstrating members’ formal buy-in, with five-year plans the norm. 7. Few involved forget the huge achievement in our leadership around the orchestration of responses to the (then) English Heritage initiative around heritage protection reform (HPR). How far away that seems! With the publication in June 2008 of the ‘Joint Response to the Draft Heritage Protection Bill’, we led the consolidation of views of the most distinguished construction sector leads: RTPI, RICS, RIBA, CIOB and the Planning Officers Society (POS). Our earlier, internal briefing note on the plans, which ultimately formed the foundation of the consolidated response, was circulated with a Context too, of course. 8. The first NewsBlogs of our members’ news service started gently in 2007, with a post on the then CABE and another on architectural history, but it really got going only in 2008.Today the service reaches far beyond the membership and more than 20,000 networks, and serves as our de facto press hub, now with some 20 headlines across two email alerts a week. 9. Complementing and extending the value of that investment in the
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