MSc Historic Conservation: Adventures in the Borderlands

Students on the Oxford Brookes MSc in Historic Conservation travelled to the Welsh Marches last month for the programme's annual residential field trip. The built heritage of the border counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Gloucestershire bears witness to a long history of territorial strife, social transformation and industrial development - a narrative sharply at odds with the area's present image of idyllic rural seclusion. Our recent trip took a broad sample of this legacy, spanning from prehistory to the present day, and from the habitations of medieval barons, bishops and burghers to those of quarrymen and coal miners. We heard from an array of local experts and explored a range of conservation issues, from the physical preservation of ancient monuments to the adaptive re-use of historic buildings and the economics of heritage-led regeneration.

Words: David Garrard - click on the blue links for more information
Pictures: Christiana Shovlin, Stephen DeNeui and David Garrard

Lost in Ludlow? This tangle of narrow alleyways (L) reflects the gradual colonisation of Ludlow’s former market place, first by semi-permanent stalls and later by a succession of shops and houses - a common process in medieval urban contexts. Local conservation and craft skills expert Colin Richards (R) guided us through the streets of this handsome border town, which at one time served as the de facto capital of Wales.

Upstairs, downstairs: The raised 'solar' chamber and south tower (L) at Stokesay Castle, a fortified manor house of the late 1200s, now owned by English Heritage.

Conservation contractor Steven Treasure (R), scion of the 250-year-old building firm of Treasure and Son, explained the long history of repairs to the fabric.

The heights of Clee: Tracing the ramparts of the vast prehistoric enclosure atop Titterstone Clee Hill, the third highest point in Shropshire. Archaeologist Glynn Barratt of the Titterstone Clee Heritage Trust helped us to unpick the complexities of this multi-layered historic landscape, which also includes Bronze age burial mounds, medieval coal-mining remains, 19th-century stone quarries and a Cold War-era radar station. 

Back at the manor: The parlour at Wilderhope Manor, an Elizabethan mansion on the slopes of Wenlock Edge. Originally built in the 1590s as the seat of the Smalman family, it was rescued from dereliction in the 1930s and converted to its present function as a Youth Hostel. We spent a comfortable night there, seemingly untroubled by Wilderhope's many reputed ghosts.

Byways of Hereford: Local architects Alex Coppock and Jacqui Demaus showed us some of their recent conservation and projects in the cathedral city, including the Old Mayor's Parlour with its lively Jacobean plasterwork...

...and the renovation of an alarmingly crooked – but now, thanks to some timely reinforcement, structurally stable – timber-framed house at 14 Church Street.

The feast of All Saints: Lunch at All Saints' Hereford, a pioneering and award-winning project carried out in the late 1990s by RRA Architects to adapt this crumbling 13th-century church into a thriving multi-use space incorporating a café, arts centre and parish offices.

A second chance: Llanthony Secunda Priory in Gloucester, established in 1135 as a suburban retreat for a community of Augustinian canons who had been driven out of their remote monastery in the Black Mountains. This building represents a fragmentary survival of the sprawling medieval complex; suffering until recently from severe timber decay, it has now been restored thanks to a £3 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

On the waterfront: Gloucester Docks, a vast engineering project of the late 18th and early and early 19th centuries, aimed to give ocean-going vessels direct access to the city's markets, and thus to the hinterland of the Severn Valley and West Midlands. Largely redundant by the time of the Second World War, the huge dock basins and towering brick warehouses were rehabilitated from the 1980s onwards for a mixture of leisure, retail, office and residential uses. Tony Conder, former curator of Gloucester Waterways Museum and a key player in the project, took us through the site's varying fortunes from the 1790s up to the present.

For more information on the MSc Historic Conservation take a look at our website or watch the course video below: