ENGLISH HERITAGE BUILDINGS AT RISK Vanessa Brand discusses the Buildings at Risk survey package, and in particular the computer program which is being offered free as part of the package. The Buildings at Risk (BAR) survey package was sent to all Chief Planning Officers last November and should have been passed on to conservation officers. If anyone has not seen it, please contact BAR branch (01-973 3817). The aim is to promote a positive approach to conservation by highlighting those buildings which are at risk from neglect. The survey of the historic buildings stock is the starting point for action tO save the individual buildings which are identified but it will also allow an analysisof the problem of neglect. This article concentrates on the computer program which is being offered free as part of the package bur it also contains details of a new grant scheme for authorities doing the survey now. CONTEXT 25 Let me emphasise at once that I write this as a computer innocent interested only in what computers can do for us and with no knowledge of their internal workings. Anyone who has tried to handle survey forms, even for a few hundred buildings, is likely to be a convert. Computers enjoy sorting pieces of information in a variety of ways. They also do it very fast and, provided that you stick to the rules, very efficiently. Computers are strictly logical and almost always right. (Some of you will have spotted that Appendix D listing the building types in the survey booklet is confused. The original disk is correct and ungarbled copies are available. A small prize is offered to anyone who can explain how the computer managed ro print it in that form.) I inherited a programmewhichwasused to record and analyse the Kirklees pilot project. This proved how useful a program would be but reinforced my insistence that it had to be simple to use and written in English. Fortunately not only are computers more user friendly than they used to be, so are computer programmers. The BAR program has to serve the interests of some 400 authorities plus English Heritage and it has therefore been designed as a basic tool which can be used by anybody and "bolted on" to other systems which may be in use. It is complete in itself, needing no other software, and will work on any IBM-compatible PC with a hard disk: a common enough animal in most offices. For BAR, the real advantage will be the facility to receive information via a disk. There is no duplication of effort. This does create one limitation. The program has to be used in the approved form. If alterations are made to its structure the ability ro pass information from one machine to another will be compromised. If, however, you want to relate information about a building at risk with, for example, details about its planning history, this can easily be done using DBase, a common database program. If your authority already uses some other system it is usually possible for those with some computer skills to pass information from one system to another by converting it into "computer-speak". Optional features have been included following requests from a number of conservation officers. A strong lobby in favour of National Grid references has secured the inclusion of fields which will accept references at any level of detail up to eight figures. It is also possible to use the program to record unlisted buildings though English Heritage is only seeking information about listed buildings. If sufficient authorities show an interest it may be possible to form a users' group which could commission approved changes. The computer will, of course, list the names and addresses of those buildings which are at risk (or indeed, of those which are not at risk) but it also provides a quick means of analysing the information so that it can be presented to Council committees with the most impact. The standard table summary prints out the numbers and percentages of buildings by list grade, position in or out of a conservation area, ownership type and risk category, and plots condition and occupancy. This information can be produced in less than five minutes for all the buildings recorded or for any chosen group. A local authority may wish to compare different towns or villages within its area. For Kirklees figures are available for the numbers of buildings at risk in each of the eight statutory list volumes. These 7
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