CONTEXT 185 : SEPTEMBER 2025 5 Periodically SPAB Magazine The Summer 2025 edition of the SPAB Magazine celebrates imaginative and respectful contemporary approaches to new designs for old buildings with three well-illustrated examples: additions to Darwin College and St John’s College, Cambridge, and the integration of new design with a ruinous single-storey stone agricultural building in North Ayrshire, with the design approach behind each case explained. It should hardly need stating that the encouragement of good contemporary contextual architecture is an important argument against easy reversion to pastiche. It is also a timely reminder that the advice in the first version of the National Planning Policy Framework (very regrettably not replicated in subsequent iterations) was that ‘planning policies and decisions should not attempt to impose architectural styles or particular tastes and they should not stifle innovation, originality or initiative through unsubstantiated requirements to conform to certain development forms or styles’. Periodic exhortations to create excellence in architecture in historic settings seem to be cyclical without necessarily much evidence of a general improvement. Some readers can trace these pleas in the modern era at least to the ill-fated Building in Context publication in 2001 (jointly by English Heritage and CABE). Excellence is seemingly always reliant on enlightened, well-funded clients and an absence of value-engineering. Mills News SPAB’s Mills Section produces its own twice-yearly publication Mills News, the latest issue of which is April 2025 (No 182). This substantial, very well produced and illustrated 42-page contribution to the specialist professional literature should stimulate interest beyond molinologists. Irrespective of whether readers engage with surviving wind or water mills of heritage value, this publication is informative for articulating both a philosophy of approach to repair and the embodiment of appropriate practical repair techniques. This is reflected in the current issue by Andy Beardsley in Part One of a report on the recording of milling sites (particularly but not exclusively ruins) by the geospatial surveys and detailed digital recording, using terrestrial laser scanning, 360-degree imagery and drone photography. A second instalment will look at three uniquely documented mills. Beardsley makes the point that the surveys are intended to go beyond documentation: to actively shape conservation decisions for structures that are more than mere picturesque landmarks. In a similar vein, the April 2025 issue has a helpful explanation of the content and coverage of the SPAB’s Mills Archive Trust. It draws attention to a specialist library of over 5,000 books and journals and an archive of 3,000,000 records of architectural plans, photographs and reports. It is an invaluable resource to bear in mind when considering future mill projects. While the issue discusses a number of mill-specific repair projects, there is also a useful explanation of RENEWAT, which aims collaboratively to revitalise Europe’s watermills for the generation of sustainable energy. It has project partners from France, Italy, Albania, Croatia, Slovenia,
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