Editor Rob Cowan Editorial Coordinator Michael Taylor, ihbceditorialboard@gmail.com Editorial Board Nigel Crowe Aimée Felton Peter de Figueiredo (book reviews) Rebecca Madgin Duncan McCallum Fiona Newton Jonathan Taylor Michael Taylor (chair) Cartoons and illustrations by Rob Cowan Context is distributed to all members of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation. © Institute of Historic Building Conservation 2025 ISSN 0958-2746 Publisher Cathedral Communications Limited, High Street, Tisbury, Wiltshire, England SP3 6HA 01747 871717 context@cathcomm.co.uk www.buildingconservation.com Non-member subscriptions to Context Context is available to corporate bodies at an annual subscription rate, including postage, of: United Kingdom £65.00 Elsewhere £100.00 Context on-line archive Past issues of Context can be viewed on the IHBC website. The archive provides a searchable database and reference for key articles. See www.ihbc.org.uk/page55/context_archive. The views expressed in Context are not necessarily held by the IHBC or the publisher. Neither the publisher nor the IHBC shall be under any liability whatsoever in respect of contributed articles. We gratefully acknowledge the support of firms whose advertisements appear throughout this publication. While every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this issue of Context is current and correct, neither the IHBC nor the publisher can be held responsible for any errors or omissions which may occur. Context themes and copy deadlines Context is published four times a year in March, June, September and December. The next three themes and copy deadlines are: Infrastructure, December, issue 186 (10 October) Regional: Wessex, March, issue 187 (9 January) The Listing Process, June, issue 188 (10 April) Please contact Michael Taylor at ihbceditorialboard@gmail.com to discuss any editorial submissions or for information about the Context editorial board. 2 CONTEXT 185 : SEPTEMBER 2025 Briefing Roofing Reslating an ancient water mill A carbon case for indigenous slate Hampstead Garden Suburb’s roofscape Understanding pitched roofs Institute of Historic Building Conservation No 185 September 2025 Cover: Highland Border Slate from Aberfoyle, termed ‘tartan variety’ for its distinctive banding with alternating purple and greenish grey colours, against a background of a traditional Scottish slate roof. (Photo: British Geological Survey, UKRI) See page 34. Ten years of Planning Club Duncan Marks ofYork Civic Trust writes:York Civic Trust (YCT) and the University of York recently celebrated 10 years of its innovative initiative for heritageplanning professional development. Planning Club – more formally known as the Heritage Planning Studio – is a unique, awardwinning collaboration between the two organisations. Since 2015 it has provided more than 350 postgraduates with reallife experience of the planning process. The students join from a range of the university’s Department of Archaeology’s heritage-related MAs, especially Building Conservation and Cultural Heritage Management. Working with professional mentors, the Clubbers, as the postgraduates are known, critically appraise live, York-based planning applications. With the training provided, they submit detailed planning recommendations to the City of York Council through YCT in its role as a local planning consultee. This gives the students first-hand experience of planning casework, in critically appraising applications, analysing them in line with national and local planning policy, drawing on professional guidance from the likes of Historic England and the IHBC and drafting and submitting substantive professional comments. The students also benefit from being able to test and apply conservation theories of the classroom through the dynamics of live planning casework. The mentors provide an added layer of reality in challenging the Clubbers to be objective and to acknowledge that conservation in an English planning context is about managing appropriate change, not preventing it. York has a wealth of heritage and a corresponding range of designations. It has one of the most complex and varied conservation areas in the UK; it is one of the UK’s five areas of archaeological importance and it has over 1,300 registered buildings and sites, including 71 that are Grade I-listed. The ‘Planning Club@10’ anniversary event in June helped raise the profile of the initiative, which through its founder, Jane Greville, received the Marsh IHBC Award for Community Contribution in 2018, and an award from the University of York earlier this year. The event was one part CPD, one part reunion; more than 60 Clubbers returned to York, some even from overseas, bolstering an attendance that was more than 100. Each year Planning Club participants review in detail over 100 applications. In its first 10 years, it has produced over 1,000 written comments. Collectively volunteering up to 10,000 hours each year, the postgraduates provide YCT with an equivalent capacity of five full-time members of conservation-focused staff – the envy of many a local planning authority. The quality and value of the postgraduates’ work quickly convinced YCT to annually employ one of the graduating students as its caseworker. All of the first six YCT caseworkers have moved into fulltime heritage positions across the UK and overseas. Planning Club graduates can be found across the world – from Harrogate to Hawaii, Scunthorpe Jane Greville (left) with current Clubbers
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