IHBC Yearbook 2014

22 Y E A R B O O K 2 0 1 4 provoked creative thinking as early as 1972. Here the Landmark Trust, working with Paul Pearn of Pearn and Procter Architects, took on the roofless buildings and created a stacked dwelling in the old engine house to create a domestic building from an industrial one. A terrace of open timber slats was constructed at the top of the walls which carried the axles of the winding gear. On the top floor the open gap where the lever of the main engine once protruded was glazed in to form a bedroom with a wonderful view down the valley. The glazing was arranged in small overlapping pieces as often found in early industrial buildings. The result is a stacked tower that visitors have compared to a tree house. The design and materials were in an industrial idiom but the function had been transformed and a number of substantial features were completely new additions. Where a building is substantially ruined, as Astley Castle was, reinstatement can in some cases be made to work – indeed reinstatement has generally been the Landmark Trust’s preferred approach. In Denbighshire, North Wales, cut off from modern access routes stood the abandoned shell of Dolbeldyr, a manor house built in 1578. Here, in the wake of Henry VIII’s subjugation of Wales, the humanist Henry Salesbury wrote and published the first grammar of the Welsh language. Salesbury was attempting to place this ancient language on the same footing as Latin or Greek, giving the house good claim to be the birthplace of modern Welsh. With architect Andrew Thomas, the Landmark Trust undertook a major project at Dolbeldyr in 2002. The building was restored to what was believed to be its original form, using 16th-century methods and materials in the process. The fact that the building had a prominent and well-understood single architectural phase, which also represented its period of greatest cultural significance, underpinned the conservation philosophy. To secure a new use for a derelict building, Landmark has, on occasion, carried out extensive removal as well as reconstruction. Ascog House on the island of Bute was erected by John Stewart, coroner of Bute, in the 1670s. Two centuries later the house more than doubled in size with the addition of poorly built new ranges containing servants’ accommodation and reception rooms. By the 1980s the building, with its unhappy warren of rooms, had been abandoned. Structurally unsteady and architecturally incoherent, Landmark took it on and with Stewart Tod and Partners of Edinburgh reinstated its 17th-century form and scale by demolishing most of the Victorian additions, retaining only a small section of Victorian work remodelled as a new ‘tower house’. Technological and environmental change have also informed Landmark’s work in recent years. Old and less-old buildings alike can present challenges. In the sweeping landscape of north Devon the Landmark Trust acquired Anderton House (see page 23), a remarkable family home built by Aldington and Craig for Ian and May Anderton in 1969–71. The house that resulted is now Grade II* listed in recognition of its blending of local vernacular with the austerity of the modern movement, which Peter Aldington characterised as ‘listening to the past to make a building of the present that would serve for the future’. When Landmark was approached, the building had suffered from flooding to such an extent that the plate glass windows in the living room had been shattered by the floodwater’s outward thrust. Landmark acquired the house and undertook extensive works to address the drainage issues that had caused so much damage. While it has been furnished and decorated to celebrate the period Danescombe Mine on the Cothele Estate in Cornwall

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