CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 7 accede to pastiche. Dealing with heritage of all periods brings us to a re-evaluation of the iconic BT Tower in London in the Historic Buildings and Places Stephen Croad Prize essay for 2024. The award was established in 2019 in memory of the former head of the National Building Record at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. Contributions for the prize document new discoveries about historic buildings in the UK, and essays on building conservation and heritage crafts, are also welcomed. The 2024 winner, Tavia Swain, explores the historical framework of the BT Tower, placing it within a political, social and technical context, and evaluating the structure’s trailblazing unique qualities both in form and function. The author also references the excitement, glamour and pride surrounding its former unprecedented popular appeal. The paper argues that by comparison with its contemporary status, its progressive engineering was a technical triumph that marked it as a monument to past glories – or a lost Britain. The future of the BT Tower appears to depend on the 2024 sale by BT to MCR hotels for £275 million, with the objective of preserving it as an iconic hotel and securing its place as a London landmark. The journal also includes a Stephen Croad Award entry for 2024 by Christopher Painter, a London architect. He looks at the contested narratives surrounding Binney Walk, a linear block at Thamesmead, which Stanley Kubrick used as a location for his 1971 dystopian film A Clockwork Orange. The paper discusses the spatial criticisms of post-war modernist architecture and looks at lessons such designs have to offer and how they could shape future housing delivery in the UK. Painter touches on the political pressures facing the building in the late 1970s and the debate about the dismantling of modern design features in the name of safety, which came to a head in the 1980s. He concludes by asking: what if more people thought differently about the buildings we built for housing after the war? And what if, instead of saying those welfare state buildings are bad and tearing them down (which wastes the energy used to build them and means we build new things), we tried to learn from them? What if we respected why they were built and found a better way to use them? The journal (formerly the Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society) is well known for shedding new light on both buildings and their architects. In this issue, Richard Hewlings puts Mount Edgcumbe in Cornwall in a context that could be discerned as international as much as local and national. Peter Howell examines the life of Samuel Joseph Nicholl, a somewhat obscure figure from the 19th century but an important designer of many Roman Catholic churches; and Chris Miele discusses the rebuilding of St Mary Abbotts, Kensington, by Sir George Gilbert Scott. The church, one of a group of large parish churches dating from the end of Scott’s long and illustrious career, was designed over the course of 1866 and 1867, and opened for worship in 1872. Particularly notable is the beautifully detailed and proportioned tower and spire that rise 278 feet from the ground, making St Mary’s one of the tallest church spires in England and Wales. SPAB Magazine The Spring 2025 issue of the SPAB Magazine, highlighting women in conservation (‘Forging brilliant careers’), is introduced by trustee Jo Thwaites, chair of SPAB’s education and training committee. She draws attention to the fact that while most of the UK construction industry pays some attention to the gender gap, and that excellent equality diversity inclusion strategies reach a wide audience, the proportions have not increased much over the last 20 years, with only 15 per cent of surveyors being women, compared to 11 per cent in 2000. Barely two per cent of the construction workforce on site are women. Fortunately, the gender gap appears to be much lower in professional heritage management. The current issue of the magazine highlights women in conservation and those who are already forging brilliant careers in the sector, highlighting role models past and present, but illustrating the old maximum ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. Thwaites notes that conservation and heritage work has attracted more women than the rest of the industry, but it is hard to find the data and research as to why. She asks why the building construction industry, which contributes five per cent of the entire UK economy, cannot be more like its own heritage sector and try to include women as an equal part of the workforce? The overall number of women working in the sector is low compared to men even though there are skills shortages and currently 36,000 job vacancies, the highest in 20 years. She thinks that some of this is regrettably down to outright sexism but also often to a lack of the opportunities in construction offered to young women and girls, and to a simple lack of vision. Readers might like to refer back to this reviewer’s recent THE SPAB MAGAZINE SPRING 2025 Women in conservation Forging brilliant careers Rochdale Town Hall The challenges of revitalising a 19th century masterpiece E M Gardner’s rich legacy From national suffrage to watermill campaigning Lucy Newport Life as a Conservation Accredited Engineer
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