C O N T E X T 9 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 37 Notes from the chair very Anglo-Saxon moral materialism is usually confined to the conservation of buildings and certain kinds of museum artefact. Keeping the fabric untouched is secondary to perpetuating the design in the conservation of most other things, whether they are Chippendale chairs or Spitfires. All of this is reflected, implicitly, in English Heritage’s current drafting of its newConservation Principles, Policies and Guidance (the Savile Row Charter, perhaps?) on which we are about to be consulted. It will be interesting to see how the conservation world reacts to a value system that is based more on significance to society than on fabric. Will those great Victorian battles of scrape and anti-scrape be lovingly reenacted? The wider world will look on in blank incomprehension. They like their old places old, but they like them to tell their stories clearly. All this conceptual stuff is heady indeed, compared with most of the present agenda of process and management. Within the institute, it is great to see how we really have raised our game in so many ways.We have still got too few people doing too much, but we are now providing a better service to our members and to the historic environment. I do hope that the revised committee structures will encourage more members to come forward – if only virtually – to join in on the great debates of government policy and practice, and on the educational activities that define us as an organisation. In our external affairs, the biggest show in England at the moment is heritage protection reform, about which much has already been written. However, we must keep up the momentum of our high-level involvement. Discussion is starting on how this unification of the designation system, and subsequent integration of management systems, will affect the provision and pattern of local authority historic environment services.We shall need to work particularly closely with our archaeological colleagues on this, as they too will be facing the same issues. Unified teams for unified consents? Meanwhile the white noise of consultations on policy initiatives continues unabated, with Karen Holyoake as the ringmaster for our responses. This will presumably rise to a crescendo when the heritage white paper emerges early(ish?) next year, to be followed by the Heritage Bill. Then PPS 15 will come out of the long grass, and off we go again. On big politics, one new issue for the historic environment is that national identity has suddenly become a major priority at cabinet level. For example, the Treasury now has a ‘Britishness Unit’. David Lammy as the new culture minister for England is keen to make heritage one of the defining elements for national identity, in an inclusive and diverse way. This should help raise governmental awareness of our causes, although I suggest that we should be very wary of anything that smacks of jingoism. For me the big story about our historic environment is how all those influences from far away in time and place have formed the unique place where we are now. John Yates, chair@ihbc.org.uk ‘R’ has more than its fair share of loaded words in conserving the historic environment. Regeneration, reinstatement, renewal, renovation, replication, reproduction, repair and then the real killer – restoration. As part of the over-commitment of middle age, I am contributing to a television series that follows the fortunes of some couples as they tackle the conservation of their own historic houses.When the BBC executives changed the title of the programme to include that most dreaded R word – restoration – the specialist contributors all cringed. But no one else did.We conservationistas each had an imaginary parrot on our shoulder shouting ‘conserve as found… conserve as found…’ into our ear. Everyone else seemed to be oddly parrot-free. How could this be? Were we imagining this venerable bird? Could it just be that this particular bird is now a threatened species, after ruling the conservation jungle for so long? Might we be edging towards the eclipse of what Jane Grenville described as ‘materialism’ in her truly excellent and provocative contribution to the IHBCYork Summer School? Are we at last giving fresh intellectual respectability to a recognition that the conservation of fabric is not enough? That is certainly what I have been practising (and preaching) for some years, as the significance of a historic place or structure is so often as much about how we thought and designed as about how we built. The idea can be at least as important as the stuff. Heresy! Indeed perhaps the idea is the only durable characteristic of anything in the longest term. Maybe that is a step too far for now. Need we be so queasy about ‘restoration’? Perhaps we should start by putting it in context – excuse the pun – and recognising that this is a peculiarly British preoccupation. After both world wars the rest of Europe repaired and often restored their battered cities, while we completed the destruction of our own in the interests of architectural and archaeological morality. We can also acknowledge that this The imaginary parrot on my shoulder
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