24 CONTEXT 182 : DECEMBER 2024 Robyn Pender, who has retired from Historic England, is involved in the Climate Heritage Network and Whethergauge, and at Cathedral Communications, where she is one of the editors of the Building Conservation Directory and Historic Churches. Katie Steele is the founder and CEO of Cheribim, and a visiting tutor at Birmingham City University. Previous roles include historic churches support officer with the Diocese of Sheffield and listed buildings committee secretary for the Baptist Union. Amy Graham, chief heritage officer of Cheribim, is a former local history officer for the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. South suggest that it might actually be perfectly achievable. People-first retrofit can be seen and felt immediately, so good practice is quickly supported by lived experience. Robyn and Bill’s ‘teach a man to fish’ approach to sharing their deep technical and applied expertise feels as innovative in the project’s context as making environmental monitoring sensors accessible to all churches everywhere. Equipped with the fundamental principles which underpin phenomena that impact - and give clues to - buildings’ thermal performance, anyone grappling with the day-to-day management and adaptation of historic buildings towards a sustainable status quo suddenly has the ability to make progress against their big-intervention decisions, without reliance on expert or specialist input. Far from accelerating poorly-informed maladaptation, or threatening the business of conservation-services provision, the approach in fact safeguards and stimulates on both fronts. Knowledge of the fundamental principles of building physics and thermal physiology, combined with digital tools to share a single-source of truth amongst stakeholders, enable those on the ground to knit together discrete expert insights with their daily experience and activity, and make visible pertinent factors over time. Immediately they can recognise missteps and the manifestation of common issues or opportunities in the context of their unique circumstances. Consultants, by virtue of this, are freed to focus on more complex, specialist tasks, better-informed from the outset to maximise the return on investment of time and expertise. Collectively, a step-change in the efficacy and economy of the sector can be created by such a shift, hiving off the relatively low-skilled information-gathering essential to getting clients up to speed, and eking out situation-specific factors. This project has cultivated many transformational learnings, but without doubt the most important and ground-breaking has been Robyn and Bill’s transformational modelling of the most strategic thing sector professionals at this critical, transitional time can do: support their client-base to become high-quality, highvalue ‘informed clients’ – and reap the benefits. With the Grenfell report now published, there is a sense of change in the air. Those of us working in the historic built environment have the opportunity and the knowledge – and indeed the responsibility – to help homeowners and building managers to move away from the destructive paradigm of air temperature and its offspring, fabric-first retrofit, and to replace it with fast, effective and sustainable people-first action. In the past curtains were commonly used to prevent draughts from doorways, while draperies were hung on cold walls to provide a radiant break: these ‘heat hacks’ were tested and were found to provide immediate benefits in two trials.
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