After 13 years and still carrying the burden of the £130,000 mortgage raised
on his home to keep the project going, Michael Taylor, chairman of the
Trustees of the St Stephen’s Restoration Trust in Hampstead, wrote, ”my
wife and I still worry as to whether we will have a roof over our heads”,
but it was wonderful to have the public recognition of getting an English
Heritage Angel Award. In many cases these awards are coming to the rescue
just in time.
In essence they acknowledge publicly the largely unseen, unsung and often
unacknowledged dedication of a host of people of all ages and many skills
and none.
Other projects that narrowly failed to win last year also have heartening
stories to tell. Newland Furnace in south Cumbria, for instance, built in
1747, was one of eight charcoal-fired and water-powered iron furnaces in the
area. In 1989 Dr John Marshall of Lancaster University saw that it was about
to collapse and raised some volunteers, rendered it safe, and it now offers
guided tours. It may soon be removed from the Heritage at Risk Register.
This meticulous volume relentlessly records an annual reduction of such
buildings at risk. It is a continuous salute to the volunteers who do it.
There are a few professionals parachuted in by English Heritage but it is
the steady territorial army of those who are determined to leave the past in
better shape who are literally invaluable.
There are, necessarily, jobs which must be professionally done by the likes of
English Heritage; one of them is just about to get underway at Kenwood
House, the magnificent 18th-century Robert Adam masterpiece.
More than a million people a year go into the grounds of Kenwood and I’ve been
one of them, two or three times a week, for more than 40 years. It is always
a heart-lifting pleasure to see this cream-coloured mansion suddenly burst
through the trees of Hampstead Heath. In a year or so, it will be open
again, glowingly refurbished and rid of the worrying damp and the wear and
tear of decades.
There’s a not wholly dissimilar project at the beginning of restoration near
where I’ve had a cottage, again for 40 years, in Cumbria: Lowther Castle.
I had a little to do with this project, which is to restore a massive
19th-century castle designed by Sir Robert Smirke, now a roofless ruin. The
gardens – covered in weeds and worse, and chicken sheds – were barely
discoverable. The whole sad edifice which was the gateway to the Lowther
Estate was overdue for demolition despite its ghostly attraction by
moonlight.
Now English Heritage has put in 50 per cent of the costs of structural repair
and the castle is well on the way to being a tourist-viable representation
of its former glory. The point to be made here is that this is just one
example of English Heritage’s willingness to engage with the economic
potential of such places. Lowther Castle could become a job and wealth maker
for a part of Cumbria in need of both.
Under Simon Thurley, its vigorous chief executive, English Heritage continues
to recover treasures often buried under the silt of time: 757 (53 per cent)
of buildings at risk have been removed from that category since 1999.
Eighty-six per cent of local authorities have been encouraged to take part in
the conservation area survey providing information on 7,800 areas. Each year
eleven million people visit English Heritage sites, including 450,000 or so
with their schools; and English Heritage advises the Government on about
2,000 listing requests.
In my own area of north London, the successful project is to give all its
complexity back to Alexandra Palace in Haringey. Its Victorian roof will be
repaired, for instance. (I remember Prince Charles appealing for money at
the VA many years ago. “It’s the roof,” he said, “the most important part
of all. But it’s very hard to get people to contribute to such an
unglamorous task!”.)
Nearby, the Kentish Town public baths have been reopened in all their
three-pooled terracotta glory.
And back in Cumbria we have Backbarrow Ironworks, one of the key industrial
sites on the Heritage at Risk Register, of outstanding importance to
England’s industrial past. Its water-powered blast furnace, erected in 1711
boasts many features that are nowadays unique. This too is well under the
way to full restoration, and takes us into a fascinating aspect of our
country’s great industrial heritage and our view of it.
There’s a general view that English Heritage wants to preserve and the
Heritage Angel Awards were instituted to celebrate the “olde worlde” aspect
of our past, such as ancient picturesque parish churches, attractive
crumbling corpses of Cromwell’s crunched castles, charming hillside chapels,
fading overgrown melancholy mansions and intriguing architectural
eccentricities. Yes, that is part of it, but only a part.
The reality is much broader and tougher. But most surprisingly of all, the
greatest gap in received wisdom – our industrial heritage – is no gap at all
for the British public.
The biggest ever research project into the condition of England’s industrial
heritage (published by English Heritage last autumn) reveals that 80 per
cent of the population thinks our industrial heritage is as important as
“castles and country houses”. This is great news. At last, it seems, this
country has moved to acknowledge its essential part in the greatest
revolution of them all – the Industrial Revolution. But is it too late?
For despite the public’s positive view, industrial buildings are more
beleaguered than any other segment of our heritage: nearly 11 per cent of
Grade I and II* listed industrial buildings are at risk. 40 per cent of
these could be adapted to serve useful and economically sustainable new
purposes. As for the other 60 per cent, courage and imagination will be
needed if they are to survive.
People living in areas where the Industrial Revolution reverberated have a
deep respect for the machinery, the bold engineering, the daring innovations
of their ancestors. The rest of us, when we visit those sites, are awestruck
by what we were once capable of. And if then, why not now?
All of us on last year’s judging panel were not only impressed by the work
that had gone into the industrial examples we were shown, but also struck by
their beauty. Yes. Beauty. In the craft, in the shapes, in the materials. It
is often the case that time can be the alchemy which turns objects thought
to be merely functional into things we can hold in the same breath as more
traditionally accepted works of art.
To take a very small example. On the back lane up to my cottage several kilns
have been cleaned up and restored. Their Gothic arches, the stone and
brickwork gives me, who never knew them as working kilns, as much of an
authentic aesthetic zing as many a sculptor of our day. It could be argued
that the pyramids of Egypt and the cathedrals of Europe, for instance, were
built like those lime kilns to fulfil a function – to praise and connect
with God or the gods, which was crucial for those people in those times.
Only later did their immense aesthetic resonance reach us.
English Heritage is devoting more resources to this. And, perhaps more
importantly, out there, the Angels have beaten them to it and, with
resources often limited to their own time, effort and ingenuity, they are
already on the case, seeing further than most of the rest of us, knowing
that those “dark satanic mills” could not only be cleaned up to illuminate
the past but recycled to activate the future.
We used to make so much here. Maybe the recovery of our industrial heritage
will give some sorely needed vision to those on all sides dithering with our
destiny.
John of Gaunt, a high-born villain with some remarkably radical tendencies,
regent to the young boy king Richard II and flailer of the poor, was given
by Shakespeare the timeless phrase “this sceptred isle”. And many of us can
still see it.
We see it in the uniquely rich geological variety of these islands which gives
it the most diverse landscapes for its size on the planet. We see it in the
Brontë bleak uplands, the bosomy Cotswolds and Chilterns, the cliffs of
Cornwall, the flats and great skies of East Anglia and on it goes. We see it
too in our built heritage – often pummelled, neglected, sometimes wilfully
razed and turned to dust but rising again and again through the efforts of
those who want to enrich the present with the infinite riches of the past.
How to enter
There are two changes to last year’s entry criteria. First, those eligible now
include rescues of Grade II listed buildings and heritage sites, as well as
Grade I and II* . Second, projects no longer have to have been on the
English Heritage Heritage at Risk Register, though they still have to have
been significantly “at risk” of neglect and decay before being saved.
Awards categories are:
• Best rescue or repair of a historic place of worship
• Best rescue of a historic industrial building or site
• Best craftsmanship employed on a heritage rescue
• Best rescue of a listed building, scheduled monument,
registered garden, landscape or battlefield, protected wreck or conservation
area.
The shortlist will be published in July, after which Telegraph readers
and English Heritage members will be able to vote for their favourite
project.
For more information and full details on how to enter for an English Heritage
Angel Award visit english-heritage.org.uk/heritageangelawards
or call English Heritage Customer Services 0870 333 1181. Deadline for
applications is Friday June 15.