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Rhys Jones had been promoting the conservation and reuse of vernacular buildings in Wales
and the Prince of Wales had been involved in a ‘regal restoration’ which had included a ‘police
bobby’s house’.
Thorpe cited the notion of the vernacular terrace that had been adopted in the 19
th
century
to build workers houses in towns. He showed an example of a new vernacular design: Ty
Unnos, in Ebbw Vale - a Welsh Passivhaus that he described as “a reinterpretation of the
Welsh longhouse in the 21st century.” He looked at volume housing in Swansea and asked
whether they were examples of ‘contemporary vernacular or not.
It was important to look at conservation areas: these places all had their local idiosyncrasies
which often gave them their sense of place and local distinctiveness. Studying them could
inform development and planning.
The final part of the presentation focussed on examples of new vernacular: delegates were
shown an eco-house that had been developed from a traditional building and had not
required planning permission or Building Regulations approval; and other examples where
new builds involving traditional timber construction.
There were examples of new conversions and/or adaptations which incorporated some
modern sustainable technology. There were also examples of pseudo traditional buildings
and of modern design echoing vernacular tradition.
Having shown the delegates these examples, Thorpe finished by asking the question: “why
can’t we manage to achieve a new vernacular?”
The third speaker in this section was Chris O’Flaherty, Course Leader of the MSc Building
Conservation & Adaptation at the University of Central Lancashire. His presentation was
entitled:
Lancashire Vernacular – A Case Study of the Fylde
.
O’Flaherty began his presentation with a short tribute to Nigel Morgan, who had been a
leading architectural historian in Lancashire and someone with whom O’Flaherty had worked.
He then moved on to introduce the Fylde. The prominent features of the land in the Fylde
were the rivers and estuaries. Delegates were told that not much predated 1600 in the area:
John Speed’s 1610 map simply showed numerous small and dispersed agricultural
settlements; and in his survey of 1586 Camden had found it “an in hospitable land”.
Rather than the oldest child in a family inheriting land, the land had been split between
siblings: this had resulted in the prevalence of many small farms. Some of the land was moss
land and some of it was sand dunes. In the late 16
th
century there was extensive drainage of
the mosses: the peaty top soil would be dried and used as fuel for the fires.
O’Flaherty referred delegates to two local studies – a book by Kathleen Eyre (1970) Fylde Folk:
Moss or Sand and a paper by the Centre for North-West Regional Studies, at the University of
Lancaster, Traditional Houses of the Fylde. According to Eyre, the people of the Fylde were
known as “the Moss’ogs” and they were backward people which she attributed to
“pestilence, poor harvests, ignorance, superstition and isolation. Sobriety was not common