CONTEXT 188 : JUNE 2026 3 Forty years on, former staff meet to celebrate the GLC historic buildings division (Photo: Polly Stock Photography) GLC historic buildings reunion Sixty elderly stalwarts of the Greater London Council’s historic buildings division (comprised of historians, archaeologists, architects, surveyors, planners, illustrators and administrators) gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the GLC on 31 March. The GLC was created in hopefilled 1965 and thrived for 21 years until Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished it. The council’s heritage powers for London were both forceful and effective, helping to save swathes of the capital from demolition, including Covent Garden Market and much of the east end. The GLC pioneered rescues of historic theatres and numerous great churches, including Hawksmoor’s Christchurch, Spitalfields. The division was the first and largest metropolitan body devoted to historic buildings and area conservation. Building on the small cadre of expertise inherited from the London County Council, it combined the older topographical Survey of London, the Museum of London’s Sites and Monuments Record (now renamed Historic Environment Record) and the fledgling Heritage of London Trust. It recorded, restored, repaired and maintained numerous landmarks, ranging from York Watergate in Embankment Gardens to venerable almshouses and great country houses such as Kenwood, Ranger’s House and Marble Hill. Statues and monuments, including the South Bank Lion and Cleopatra’s Needle, were also within its purview. In its time and in later diaspora, the division’s staff created many hundreds of publications; developed new county conservation planning services after local government re-organization in the rest of England; and took an important role in founding professional bodies such as the Association of Conservation Officers, which became the IHBC, and the Theatres Trust. As the GLC had a budget twice as large as that of Belgium, a little largesse under both the Conservative and Labour party administrations went a long way, enabling staff to pioneer technical studies of the behaviour of castiron structural columns in fire; testing then current town planning legislation to breaking point; and prominently defending the city against unthinking development. When the GLC was dissolved in 1986, many functions and staff were transferred to English Heritage and resided in its London Region. In 2015, Historic England was created following a restructuring and maintained the statutory functions, while the English Heritage Trust was established to run the propertiesin-care. Please stop it! From Bob Kindred MBE It is concerning to note that some local planning authorities continue to advertise heritage officer posts requiring the processing of conservation area consent, suggesting a serious failure to review the job specification. Would applicants be confident in the council’s own competence when this measure was abolished on 1 October 2013? Bob Kindred has been monitoring the job specifications for conservation officer posts for IHBC since 1998. Letter The writer’s voice Always return From Bob Kindred MBE Prompted by the observation in Context 185 (page 3, ‘New life for Smithsons’ school’) about fundamental failings from the outset of the lauded, Grade II*- listed Hunstanton School by Alison and Peter Smithson, I have recently been re-reading parts of the monumental 736-page Modern Architecture Since 1900 by William J R Curtis. The book was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion (1984) by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for making ‘an outstanding contribution to the study and knowledge of architectural history.’ Apparently, it had also been considered one of the five most significant books on architectural history published between 1982 and 1984. I was struck by the seeming failure by Curtis to have visited many of the key buildings he was so lyrical about, including Hunstanton, and Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester University Engineering Building (also Grade II*), where I have had direct experience of rectifying its huge construction faults. One building that almost immediately From ‘Cooling towers are a powerful presence in the landscape – and deserve to be saved’ by Otto Saumarez Smith, Apollo Magazine, 24 February 2020 The Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire is one of the most beautiful places in England. Tourists visit it as the ‘Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ and as a Unesco world heritage site. I suspect many of them are surprised to find these historic industrial attractions embedded within such a lushly Arcadian landscape, in which the River Severn carves through steep wooded hills on which dark reddish-brown brick buildings precariously perch. There isn’t a hint of the satanic here; indeed, it is barely urban. Although the focus of visitors is exclusively on 18th- or 19th-century sights, the landscape they experience is in large part a result of a forgotten late 20th-century history. Ironbridge is one of a number of former settlements swallowed up within the sprawling new town of Telford, which was designated in the 1960s to take overspill population from the West Midlands conurbation. The area’s long history of industrial exploitation and subsequent decline had left a blighted hodgepodge of disused mine shafts, derelict pools and abandoned colliery spoil mounds. The new town would transform this unsightly and dangerous mess into what the development corporation called a ‘Forest City’. The landscape plan for Telford harnessed the vigorous forms left by dereliction, merging them with massive projects of earth moulding, tree planting and new grassland. Using its own nursery, the development corporation planted more than five million trees, resulting in approximately 80 sq metres of woodland for every resident of the new city. Telford healed but did not erase the industrial past, as places such as Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale were restored and celebrated as an integral part of the new town project… Visiting Ironbridge for the first time, I clocked that I was in a new town only when I saw a signpost to Silkin Way (Lewis Silkin was the Labour politician most associated with the early new towns). Telford gave thousands of people a decent place to live, and was an astonishingly ambitious and ecologically sophisticated response to deindustrialising landscapes, but these achievements are forgotten because they are largely invisible. You can’t see the new town for the trees.
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