The recent IHBC ‘Amenity’-themed Context article by Matthew Saunders, former Director of the AMS – now Historic Buildings & Places – has been headlined first in the Newsletter from Designing Buildings (DB) – host of IHBC’s Conservation Wiki – to its 15K+ registered construction sector users.
… it is those who come together through a shared passion for a cause, not political resolve, that have spurred government into action…
The IHBC writes, via Context and Designing Buildings:
… In 2018 Historic England commissioned Matthew Saunders, former secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, to consult with the national amenity societies and the broader voluntary movement prior to advising on a future strategy for statutory listing. The recommendations are available at https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/about-the-list/saunders-report/…
Matthew Saunders writes, via Context and Designing Buildings:
Statutory listing needs to be done by building on the same spirit of partnership between the government and the citizen that has underpinned it since its introduction…
… The sort of partnership that I entered into with Historic England in 2018 was markedly different. For partnership in effect read commission, for Debbie Mays, Historic England’s head of listing, came to me to seek an outsider’s overview of listing. There is a tradition to such scrutiny. In 2010 a similar task had been given to the then newly-retired earlier holder of the post, Martin Cherry (and Gill Chitty). What Mays sought in particular were the views of the National Amenity Societies. As AMS covered all listed buildings, regardless of age, and I had been secretary of the joint committee that coordinated its work between 1983 and 2005, my experience suited the brief.
The first stirrings of conservation in this country have been relentlessly bottom-up rather than top-down. There have been occasions when politicians have run with the baton big-time, none bigger and bolder than Michael Heseltine, who added just short of 200,000 to the lists in the 1980s. His speeded-up resurvey, when some 110 people were employed to bring the survey much closer to completion in five years not 50, was a classic prototype for the public/private partnership that the principal recommendations of my own report depend on. Heseltine, very much in the interventionist Tory school, valued bringing in the skills and, dare one say, vocational commitment, of the private sector to stand alongside his own civil service. He stands out by exception in the history of listing since its introduction in 1947.
Generally, national government has followed not led the voluntary movement, and indeed has lagged behind local government. The first effective introduction of a form of listing, that to protect the exterior of 1,253 Georgian properties in Bath in 1937, was in an act promoted by that city’s corporation. There were similar private municipal Acts of Parliament to protect the physical Shakespearean legacy in 1891, and very selective preservation in London (1897), Manchester (1904), Surrey (1913), Lewes (1933) and Winchester (1937). But it is those who come together through a shared passion for a cause, not political resolve, that have spurred government into action with national remit and national effect; not least the granddaddy of us all, SPAB, founded in 1877 (and the Cockburn Association in Edinburgh set up two years before that).
Listing remains a partnership in so many ways – between Historic England, which makes the recommendations, and the secretary of state, who accepts those or not (a refusal to accept is rare, even if occasionally high-profile, as at Dunelm House, Durham) – but also in the identification of candidates. It is one of my principal recommendations that the existing lists need to be systematically revisited. This is to achieve two principal purposes. The first is to address the ‘minimalist’ list descriptions, which may number as many as 366,000 entries, and which lack the comprehensiveness and authority of those compiled since 2005. The second is to increase the pace of additions. The present rather stately pace, excluding war memorials and residual thematic surveys, is some 350 a year.
This article originally appeared as ‘The joys of partnership’ in Context 169, published by The Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC) in September 2021. It was written by Matthew Saunders.
See more on Designing Buildings, the construction wiki and sign up to the free NewsletterHERE
See more on the Conservation Wiki
See more on Historic Buildings & Places
See more background on how ‘IHBC welcomes publication of HE’s report from Matthew Saunders’…
Download the original report: Towards a Strategy for the National Heritage List for England: A View from the Amenity Sector
