44 CONTEXT 176 : JUNE 2023 that our discipline must, at one time, prioritise managing carbon captured across the ages – that being the most urgent thread in 21st-century conservation – while also balancing client and community values, and reconciling social and economic pressures over the short and long term, all in a way that delivers sustainable outcomes? Ultimately, operating within the informed, holistic and ethical context of the IHBC, our members are uniquely well placed to understand, convey and address the complexities of working with today’s built and historic environment – old, and, given its context, new. If a charter adds weight to these messages, and enthusiasm for our membership standards, it would only be the icing on the petition. Evidently, the focus on public interest in itself makes the strongest case for the IHBC to explore the charter. To aid such thinking, I would like to suggest a first, easy and personal ‘A B C’ to frame early thinking on the public interest, good and benefits that the IHBC, our members and our networks deliver. For A, there are many choices: areas, aesthetics, awareness, actions; but I tend to look to amenity. Not either the amenity of ‘site’, as the euphemism for a dump, or the ‘public’ amenity, which does the same for toilets, but rather amenity as it was applied within the early planning system, at the start of the 20th century. There the aim was to manage the complex values of a changing society – of society’s role in supporting a person’s health, especially, including the quality of life on offer in the places where people lived. Responding to the legacy depredations of the industrial revolution, the solution was to control the worst of the environmental and human ravages caused by unrestrained development. In answer, planning looked to shape how places might be changed to secure the true dividends to society on offer in modern development, promoting the wide-ranging, crosscommunity and multidisciplinary appreciation of what should be valued, and where it could be enhanced. That is how ‘amenity’ should be recognised, and that is just one critical aspect of the public interest the IHBC works to secure, enhance and promote through its charitable work. As B, the choice is no less diverse, from buildings, bonus and boost to even the policy-abused beauty. For myself, the affirmation of ‘benefit’ seems the best focus here. The handy catch-all of ‘public benefit’ outlined above is not enough – its application is too often used and bruised to death – but a benefit needs to be fully evidenced and succinctly articulated across the spectrum of what actually enhances amenity: detailed and specific in its analysis, but rounded and holistic in its scope. With C, the link to public interest could be community, consultation or even change, or better still perhaps ‘competence’, to set skills both as a central issue and an urgent problem or, similarly, as we know from our research on employment, ‘cash’. Then again, for the big picture of public interest today, C surely must stand for climate? In a world where the environment has been presumed as free for so long, climate costs now need to be at the centre of our budget planning. However, rather than climate, I am opting for ‘conservation’, but here again of a specific form: the conservation practice defined and advocated by the IHBC outlined above. Conservation modelled in the IHBC’s Conservation Cycle and our underpinning competences ties our members’ practice to the holistic outcomes that ‘benefit’ all our ‘amenity’. The IHBC’s conservation mandate, of measured approaches to change (mostly simply put as ‘look before you leap’) requires interventions properly informed by precautionary management; management in turn shaped by proportionate evaluation, all operating within conservation principles and practice standards promulgated by, among others, the IHBC. For the IHBC, might we better say why, and how, our conservation aims to bring ‘benefit’ to ‘amenity’ in society, by drawing out the substantial threads and textures of our special place within the diverse worlds and words of conservation? If so, there can be no more relevant reason for us to explore a petition for charter. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk
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