It's the end
of the teaching year for students on the Oxford Brookes MSc in Historic Conservation. To mark it, we organised a day out in London, with visits to four
organisations involved – in their different ways – with the conservation of the
capital's historic built environment. Report by David Garrard, Course Leader.
Our first
stop, just north of Oxford Circus, was the London HQ of the international real
estate agents and planning consultants Savills. Over coffee in the plush corporate restaurant
(not something you often get in this line of work) we talked to Brookes alumnus
and head of heritage planning Jason Clemons and his
colleagues from the company's recently-established team of historic environment
experts, who give in-house advice on negotiating the complex regulatory
framework that surrounds listed buildings, scheduled
monuments and other heritage designations.
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| Coffee and conversation at Savills |
A stroll up
Portland Place, passing by John Nash's neoclassical church of All Souls' Church, McCormac Jamieson
Prichard's extension to BBC Broadcasting House, and
Grey Wornum's exquisitely-crafted Royal Institute of British Architects, took us to the Devonshire Street premises of architecture practice Donald Insall
Associates. This illustrious firm, established in 1958 and
still presided over by that doyen of conservation architects Sir Donald Insall, has been involved in
hundreds of major heritage schemes from Liverpool to Shanghai, and is currently
at work on the forthcoming £4bn restoration programme for the Palace of
Westminster. Director of historic buildings consultancy Hannah Parham
and her colleagues talked us through some recent projects, and discussed the development
and influence of Insalls' distinctive conservation ethos.
Pausing only
to peer through the scaffolding at Park
Crescent West – a famous Nash terrace reconstructed in
semi-facsimile after the Blitz, now being pulled down and re-reconstructed as a
supposedly more accurate copy of its former self – we took the Tube across town
to the City of London. The district within and
around the former walls of Roman Londinium is the capital's historic
core; it is also one of the world's leading financial centres, where the insatiable
hunger for office space sends ever more glass shards and pinnacles thrusting
skywards from among the medieval alleyways, Wren churches and Edwardian banking
halls of the ancient Square Mile.
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| Architectural contrasts in the City of London |
Presiding over this architectural
wrestling match is the planning department of the
City of London Corporation – the world's
oldest continuously-elected municipal authority – whose conservation and design
officer Ben Eley gave us a fascinating walkabout. Meeting outside the great
15th-century
Guildhall, we dropped in on
the
City Centre model (a
continuously-evolving 1:500-scale reconstruction of the City's urban fabric),
Edwin Lutyens' palatial
Midland Bank (lately renovated
and reopened as
The Ned hotel), James Stirling's
celebrated/notorious
1 Poultry (one of a series
of 1980s Postmodernist buildings recently given
statutory listed status), and the church
of
St Stephen
Wallbrook (a miniature Baroque masterpiece by
Christopher Wren with a huge central altar sculpted by Henry Moore).
 |
| The City of London model (left) and the Ned Hotel (right) |
Our final call
was at the offices of Historic England. This is the public body,
until recently part of English Heritage, that gives statutory advice to central
and local government on all aspects of the historic environment, from the
selection of listed buildings and scheduled monuments to the giving of
maintenance grants and the training of heritage professionals. Historic
buildings inspector Claire Brady and her colleagues discussed current issues
and gave us a tour of the office, including the extraordinary roof gardens suspended above the Thames between the twin Italianate towers of
Cannon Street station.
 |
| On the roof at Cannon Street |
Last stop: the
pub - in this case the Ship, a tiny back-street tavern under the looming
shadow of Rafel Viñoly's gargantuan 20 Fenchurch Street , a.k.a. the ‘Walkie-Talkie’. A suitable end to a
day of startling contrasts.
 |
| The Ship and its neighbours |
To find out more about the MSc Historic Conservation, take at look here:
MSc Historic Conservation -
course details
MSc Historic Conservation -
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