and restoring buildings, whether they be six or 600 years old. One thought is to produce a manual listing sources of information relevant to buildings of different periods - whether it is in the CIRCA Society collection or still in print from one of the amenity societies. Another is to put on exhibitions about aspects of building conservation and repair. Please let us know what you would find useful. So what kind of material does the CIRCA collection hold? • Several thousand books going back to the early years of the centu1y and beyond; • journals from the UK and overseas on all aspects of construction, some going back to the last century, others covering just a few years; • British Standards both current and historic; • Guidance documents from professional bodies and trade associations; • documents from the various indust1y research organisations; • information about construction industry companies; • trade literature; • samples; • bills of quantities (a few from the turn of the century); • information on projects; • photographs, slides, film and video (though much of this will in due course be passed to organisations which are better able to conserve it); • government documents such as white papers, reports etc. In general the Society does not seek out material which will remain readily accessible from other sources. There is no intention, for example, to try to emulate or compete with the archives of the British Architectural Library. The emphasis is rather more on collecting material which is more ephemeral but still of long term importance; and on indexing all material whether in the collection or not so that researchers can be given a full picture of what advice is available. If you are interested in joining the Society or you have obsolete trade literature to offer, please write to the Secretary, Janet Brown, at 68 Paxton Road, London W4 2QX. If you might be able to give practical help, such as assistance when material is being moved or with cataloguing, please contact the curator, John Keenan, at 3 Cranleigh Gardens, Stoke Bishop, Bristol BS9 lHD, or phone him on 0117-968 7850. Also get in touch with John if you have technical documents for which you have no further use. 22 Thesettingof a conservationarea David Morton looks at another townscape issue which is dealt with in only a cursory fashion in PPG 15. Last year (Context 50, June 1996, pp 41-42), I looked at the issue of local listing. This is dealt with in just one sentence in PPG 15. This time I am looking at the setting of conservation areas, another townscape issue which in guidance terms is dealt with in a similarly curs01yway. Although in practice setting and views are very rarely mentioned in appraisals, they also need careful thought if implementation is to be sensible and effective. Because conservation areas vary tremendously, like the setting of a listed building, there is no simple and automatic way of defining eith_erwhat constitutes the setting of a conservation area or what might be important views into or out of it. Setting usually becomes an issue when applications are submitted for sites adjacent to or near conservation areas. It is thus dealt with on a site specific an dad hoe basis without any objective assessment as part of the appraisal of character and appearance. I am going to look at three cases which illustrate particular points of importance in relation to the issues surrounding the setting of a conservation area. My first experience with the issue of setting and views was in Durham City many years ago. The Cathedral and Castle precinct, set high on a promonto1y above the River Wear, is a key feature of the Conservation Area and certain views looking up towards it from a distance were particularly important. These were protected and the height, bulk etc. of proposed buildings were very carefully checked when applications were submitted. I have to admit that this approach was not set down in an appraisal or local plan at the time but this was in the early 1970s, the Conservation Area had only just been designated and the legislation was new! The view points (from memory I think there were five of them) were however identified objectively as part of an assessment of the importance of the Cathedral and the peninsula. They were permanent elements of what became conservation area control. They were not suddenly produced in relation to a specific planning proposal only to disappear when it had been dealt with. Durham brought home to me very clearly two things. The first was that there are points which are not of special townscape interest in themselves, from where important distant views of the whole or part of a conservation areas can be obtained. The second, as anyone who has travelled on the east coast railway line from London to Newcastle will know, was that distant views of some conservation areas, from railways and roads for example, can be an important element in their settings. In Durham, the issue of setting was very much the relationship between topography and townscape. There are conservation areas where topography alone makes a crucial contribution to the setting. Askrigg was designated in the late 1980s as a Conservation Area with widely drawn boundaries. The village and its setting have altered little since the end of the 19th century. Subsequent economic events passed it by and there is therefore little modern development surrounding its historic core. The Conservation Area includes the whole of the built form of the village and the surrounding countryside on the northern side of Wensleydale which looks down upon it. The issue of views in this case - downwards into the settlement - is the exact opposite of the position at Durham. The Pennine pastoral landscape, with its distinctive walls, field barns etc., comes right up to the edge of the built form of the village. These features extend for miles along the valley side and it would clearly be illogical to include a substantial part of Wensleydale in the Askrigg conservation area. There are, however, logical geomorphological boundaries to the village to the north Context 54 June 1997
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