CONTEXT 175 : MARCH 2023 3 Marple’s kilns saved Repairs and restoration work have been completed at the 225-year-old Oldknow’s Lime Kilns in Marple, Greater Manchester, after the kilns had been on Historic England’s heritage-at-risk register for nearly 10 years. The project was funded by a grant of more than £90,000 from Historic England, and match funding from Stockport Council and the Association for Industrial Archaeology. Damaging vegetation has been removed, weaker areas of stone repointed and structural support built inside the kilns. The lime kilns are named after the local industrialist Samuel Oldknow (1756–1828). They featured decorative gothic tracery, creating the appearance of a romantic ruin. Unusually, the structure also contained housing for workers. Brighton Hippodrome The decorative plaster ceiling at the Grade II listed Brighton Hippodrome Theatre is being restored as part of the renovation of the building that had stood empty for 16 years. Artisan Plastercraft is restoring a barrel ceiling section that in its workshop, and will use it to mould new fibrous plaster casts to restore the circular auditorium ceiling. The Theatres Trust has described the Hippodrome, sited in the Old Town Conservation Area, as Oldknow’s Lime Kilns in Marple (Photo: Dave Dunford, Wikimedia) Blind tracery being carved for the restoration of the Palace of Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower, home to Big Ben. DBR (London) was the conservation contractor and Purcell the conservation architect. 800 repairs The restoration of the Palace of Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower has been completed. The work included repairing the cast-iron roof, clock faces and other highlevel metalwork, water-proofing the belfry tower, external stonework conservation, installing a lift and upgrading the building’s services. The stonework has been repaired in about 800 locations, covering nearly ten per cent of the tower’s surface area. The tower, formally the St Stephen’s Tower, was renamed Elizabeth Tower at Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. Originally it also functioned as a ventilation system for the Palace of Westminster: the ventilation shaft has been converted into a lift. A section of broken plaster from the auditorium of Brighton Hippodrome (Photo: Artisan Plastercraft) ‘the UK’s most architecturally significant circus theatre: the finest surviving example of its type in the country’. It was built in 1897 as an ice rink, with a large, glazed domed roof, made up of concentric rings with 16 steel raker beams sloping from the top and held in place by an outer ring. The building was converted in 1901 to a circus by architect Frank Matcham and later redesigned as a theatre by Bertie Crewe. It closed in 1964, reopened as a bingo hall three years later and closed again in 2006. The new owners plan to reopen the venue in November 2024 to coincide with the 60th anniversary of its closure as a performance venue.
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