REVIEW AND ANALYSIS 23 OVERVIEW: ADAPTATION AND CHANGE THERE IS a sensitive balance to be struck between adapting historic buildings and places so that they can remain useful, and on the other side of the scales, preserving them so that their fabric and their significance are retained largely unaltered. Outside of a museum environment where a heritage asset may be kept away from human contact in an environmentally controlled and hermetically sealed display case, perfect preservation is an impossible dream. The use of buildings and place has always been shaped by changes in activity arising from human behaviour, from changes in technology and our economy, and from our environment. As Terry Levinthal discusses (page 47), change in historic cities is a layering process, ‘where one alteration is placed on top of another, until over time, an adaptive transformation has taken place’. Changes in society and human behaviour include how we spend our leisure time, where we go to work and where (or whether) we worship – the numbers of redundant churches and public houses are both currently rising. Economic factors include the cost of materials, how and where we manufacture goods, their transportation, and how and where we manage the services that support these activities. Technology too is part of that process, with the effects of the digital economy visible wherever we look, not least in our traditional high streets which are struggling to adapt. Today we also have the climate emergency to contend with. Alterations to the majority of older and traditionally constructed buildings are essential, firstly to increase their resilience to the effects of severe weather events, and secondly, to reduce their use of fossil fuels to heat and cool them, as Steve Berry discusses in the following article (page 24). All of us working in the historic environment have expectations of where that balance between preservation and adaptation should lie, but the fulcrum will shift according to the weight applied to different values. Within the heritage sector itself, these variations may sometimes seem huge, but it is important to maintain focus on the bigger picture. From an environmental perspective, our goal is the reduction in the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses which cause global warming, whether they are released in the heating and cooling our buildings, or in the construction of new buildings to replace our older ones. In some historic buildings it can be safer to decarbonise the heating system than to damage fine works of art and architecture with inappropriate retrofit measures. Where the regeneration of historic places is concerned, the conservation and adaptation of historic buildings makes sense from both an embodied carbon perspective and a heritage perspective. As Owen Barton says (page 29), where schemes respond positively to the established character of a place and reuse heritage assets, ‘the results are environments that are unique and frequently exhilarating, intriguing and valued by the public’. Conversely, the over-protection of heritage values in isolation from the need for a building to remain in use, will ultimately lead to the loss of heritage. It is all about balance.
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