The recording and analysis of a building should be an integral part of a programme of repair or alteration of a historic building, and the costs of such work should be born either by the applicant in the case of listed building consent, or be included as part of any grant aid. However, EH does have a small separate budget available for building recording, specifically for those cases where the works are not normally grant eligible or where the work should not be the responsibility of the applicant. The budget may be used where work is not grant aided, but where there are exceptional circumstance which justify assistance with recording, where recording may be funded as an exemplar, where a generic survey of a particular type of structure or group of buildings may help with their management, or where there may be a need to publish work which has already been funded by grant-aid. The budget has also been used to fund national research projects that improve our understanding and management of particular building types. Where possible, we try to use the budget to work in partnership with other organisations.
City walls suffer from a number of common problems: they may be protected by a mixture of scheduling, listing, or be undesignated; they are often be in multiple ownership or alternatively no-one will admit to ownership, making maintenance a problem; and their survival often has to be considered in the context of town centres planning issues such as traffic management. In an initiative aimed at improving the care of such structures, we funded a survey of Exeter City Walls, which drew together all available information about the walls as a basis for drawing up management proposals.
Bell-ringing is an increasingly popular past time, but proposals to re-hang bells, or improve ringing facilities may put at risk surviving medieval and later bell frames. In Essex we have funded a pilot study to look at the survival of these structures and the work revealed a considerable number of unknown but important bell frames.
Smoke blackened thatch is one of the most important archaeobotanical resources in Europe, preserving whole plants, and potentially containing a huge amount of information about medieval crops and their weeds and unique data about harvesting techniques. We have now commissioned research into the development of the craft of thatching in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries in response to changing economic and social factors and this information will be vital for developing guidance on the conservation of thatched roofs.
This was a large Royal Navy victualling yard of the early 19th century.
In conjunction with Plymouth Development Corporation, we funded a study of the history and archaeology of the structures of the yard as a basis for developing proposals for major development. The work included the identification of a group of original plans for the yard by the engineer John Rennie.
