Building Conservation
There has never been a better time to go back to basics in the care of buildings. To sell a building advantageously in a difficult market it needs to be as free from defects as possible. In a booming market anything went. Now we are back to very careful due diligence and a building defect can unsettle a sale. We will see the number of flagship new building projects diminish as the economy declines but now is not the time to neglect an existing building whether old or relatively new. Dilapidation claims at the end of a commercial lease can be crippling. A stitch in time saves nine.
The term “conservation” suggests an active process, of performing some sort of intervention, in the case of building conservation to make a building or part of a building conform with some preconceived condition. In fact “preservation” would probably be a better term because the best form of conservation consists in doing as little as possible. In buildings this means, first and foremost, maintenance. It means cleaning out gutters, unblocking pipes, cleaning gullies, rodding drains and painting outside woodwork and metalwork. It is only when these activities have been neglected that more interventionist “conservation” becomes necessary.
Modernisation, refurbishment and adaptive reuse are not to be scorned however. Every generation has sought to adapt buildings to the needs of their age and to developing technologies. The best of these adaptations has always been based on knowledge of and respect for the techniques, workmanship, designs and cultural context of the past. The term much used for this by conservationists is “significance”. Sensitive modern design has a major role to play.
The worst enemy of good conservation is the sort of person who talks of “gutting a building out”. Building conservation is best done slowly, deliberately and with a great deal of thought.
It is neither sensible nor desirable that building conservation should be undertaken on the basis of guaranteed outcomes. It is easy enough to cure a defect by knocking something down and rebuilding it. Often, however, what is required is to try a series of “suck it and see” remedies in a sensibly planned sequence, usually starting with the least damaging and least costly first.
There are various disincentives to good conservation. One is the way Value Added Tax is applied. So-called “improvements” or alterations to a listed building requiring listed building consent are zero rated but ordinary repairs are not. Restoring or converting a Listed building can therefore attract a great deal of VAT whereas knocking it down and building a new house will not. This lamentable situation has persisted for decades and no Chancellor of the Exchequer has been persuaded to budge an inch on it. Another source of unneccesary work has been the grant aid system. Grant giving bodies like Historic Scotland have a great liking for comprehensive schemes and have been reluctant to fund minor “stitch-in-time” interventions in historic buildings. This can result in more work being done in a single package than, at any one time, is strictly necessary. Another driver that has a similar effect is the increasingly stringent Health and Safety legislative environment. This has made it increasingly expensive to carry out work at height. Once a scaffolding has been erected it makes economic sense to do everything that can possibly be done at the same time. However it is difficult to see a way round this and no-one involved in construction would wish to see a return to the very risky working practices of the past.
