House Mill, Bromley-by-Bow, Newham.
St Ethelburga, Bishopsgate, City of London.
Fulham Palace, Hammersmith and Fulham.
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 exceptional circumstance 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 is a need to publish work which has already been funded by grant-aid. The budget has also funded national research projects which improve our understanding and management of particular building types, and the production of strategic documents such as Conservation Plans which set out the significance of a site, and how it should be managed now and in the future. Such plans rely strongly on bringing together an archaeological understanding of the fabric of a structure with an understanding of the historic importance of its context, and using that understanding as a basis to formulate practical management policies. Where possible, we try to use the budget to work in partnership with other organisations.
House Mill, Bromley-by-Bow, Newham
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This house mill built in 1776 on the River Lea in East London was the largest tidal mill in the country with four wheels used for grinding grain. EH is assisting the House Mill Trust with a grant of £500k in the restoration of the mill so that it can be opened to the public. The building was the subject of a detailed survey by the GLC Historic Buildings Division in the 1970s but a further grant of £20k from the EH Buildings Recording budget has been allocated for additional fabric detail and physical evidence for the original workings of the mill to be recorded and analysed by a team of historic mill specialists and a documentary historian assembled by the project architects, Julian Harrap Partners. The project will add to our understanding of the early development of the mill and the installation of the Fairbairn machinery in the late nineteenth century. Evidence lost or obscured by the repairs will be recorded and the information obtained will be used to inform the restoration of the mill and its workings and will provide essential material for the proposed interpretative displays.
St Ethelburga, Bishopsgate, City of London
This church is a rare survival of what was once a typical small parish church in the medieval City of London. It survived the Great Fire of London and the Blitz but in November 1994 it was partially destroyed by the explosion of a large bomb in the adjacent street. EH are funding a project by the Museum of London Archaeological Service to record and analyse the debris retrieved from the site. Although the nave was re-roofed in the nineteenth century, the tower at the west end, reduced to rubble by the bomb, contained a timber bell tower probably dating from the original construction of the body of the church in c1400. The identification of the masonry fragments has allowed the reconstruction of various features including the west window, west door, and west arch. The project aims not only to record this rare fabric but inform any future rebuilding or restoration which, to a greater or lesser extent, will probably recreate some of the building's original medieval architecture.
Fulham Palace, Hammersmith and Fulham
The Palace, owned until 1973 by the Bishops of London, has a long and complex building history which was the subject of investigations in the late 1980s. In 1996 EH granted £5k towards the further recording and analysis of Bishop Sherlock's dining room, north of the medieval hall. The room, part of a block substantially dating from the 1750s, had been stripped of its wall linings and evidence was exposed not only for the later development of the dining room but also for the development of the medieval hall. Analysis and interpretation depended on the drawing of the four elevations and a careful assimilation of the fabric evidence with the adjacent buildings combined with good documentary evidence. The results, not only clarified our understanding of this sector of the complex, but form the basis of a Lottery application for the restoration of the room's eighteenth-century interior.