The IHBC’s heritage business register HESPR – our Historic Environment Service Providers Recognition quality assurance scheme for heritage services – emails members weekly ‘News and Tender Alerts’, with notices from across the development sector’s publications, and this week features the AJ on the competition just launched for the restoration of Highgate Cemetery.
…Highgate Cemetery has launched an open international competition..
.consider how to conserve historic structures and improve facilities …
The AJ writes:
Highgate Cemetery has launched an open international competition to restore and upgrade its historic 15ha north London site [Deadline: 20 January 2021]
The two-stage competition – organised by Artelia UK – will select an architect-led multidisciplinary design team to preserve and enhance historic structures across the Grade I-registered site which is the resting place of Karl Marx, artist Lucian Freud, Christina Rossetti and George Eliot.
The project, planned to complete in 2025, will improve facilities for staff and visitors at the landmark cemetery, which features Craig Hamilton Architects’ 2018 Golhammer Sepulchre and adjoins John Winter’s iconic 1967 Winter House. A separate competition – run simultaneously by the Landscape Institute – will meanwhile select a design team to create a new landscape masterplan.
According to the brief: ‘Highgate Cemetery is looking for an architect-led team to consider how to conserve historic structures and improve facilities at the cemetery. The competition is open to architects registered with the Architects Registration Board in the UK or the equivalent in their home country.
‘The successful team will be talented enough to produce exceptional quality of design and respectful enough for this to sit happily within the Grade I-registered landscape and adjacent to the many listed structures.’
Highgate Cemetery opened in 1839 as a private enterprise offering a captivating landscape for wealthy Londoners to be buried. The site – which holds the remains of around 170,000 people – was partially abandoned in the 1970s and saved from dereliction by Friends of Highgate Cemetery, who now maintain its ruins and facilitate safe managed public access.
The two competitions will help identify a way forward for the site’s many trees, paths, monuments and buildings which have been threatened by long-term decay and overgrowth. Concepts must ‘respond sensitively’ to the landscape so it remains a site of ‘enchantment’ and ‘sanctuary’ while also meeting contemporary demands and expectations.
Applicants must first complete a four-part standard selection questionnaire outlining their approach, experience of delivering similar projects and team details. Six shortlisted teams will then be invited to proceed to the competition’s second stage and submit initial concepts and fee proposals.
The winners of both competitions will be announced in May.
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