Adrian Green

Standing buildings and built heritage.

SUMMARY: This essay examines the available archive of articles on standing buildings published in Post-Medieval Archaeology. After setting out some general trends evident in a brief analysis of the number of buildings archaeology articles published over the last 50 years, their subjects and authors, this essay places these articles in three key wider contexts: the relationship of buildings archaeology to architectural history; buildings archaeology in Post-Medieval Archaeology in an international context; and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology’s relative lack of engagement with modern buildings and contemporary built heritage.

Building with History: Exploring the Relationship between Heritage and Energy in Institutionally Managed Buildings

Abstract Drawing on interdisciplinary research focusing on Durham University estate, we describe how buildings constructed as part of an eighteenth century transition to a high carbon coal-based economy, are used and understood by their current inhabitants. Applied heritage research has tended to focus on the thermal and energetic properties of historic buildings, as distinct from their social meaning and use. A similar separation between the physical building and its social use is inherent in methodologies such as energy audits that constitute key devices through which buildings are institutionally managed. We argue that these perspectives have overlooked how a significant element of energy use arises from the complex practical interactions between people and infrastructure. From this perspective we argue that better outcomes for energy and heritage would result if greater contextual consideration was given to the existing possibilities afforded by historic buildings and their users.

Heartless and Unhomely? Dwellings of the Poor in East Anglia and North-East England

‘Home is where the heart is.’ Nineteenth-century ideals of homeliness left a large proportion of society occupying dwellings that, by virtue of their poverty, were seen as heartless and unhomely. Historians’ acceptance, however, that homeliness was the preserve of the middle classes may risk perpetuating assumptions of the desensitising force of material deprivation. It would be unfeeling to underestimate hardship and distress, but it requires an equal lack of empathy to assume that poorer people were unable to find consolation in their own home. In the absence of detailed investigation into the material reality of poor households, historians have emphasised the testimony of reformers that housing conditions were both bad and squalid. While accounts of squalor and cramped conditions reflect, in part, a real deterioration in housing conditions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these emotive descriptions are problematic because they also reflect a new set of concerns over the home. Alternative sources for the materiality of poorer households do not quite accord with remorseless misery, and archaeologists have recently found that the excavated evidence for nineteenth-century cities contradicts ‘slum’ conditions.1

Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places and Material Culture, 1600–1850

Building the British Atlantic World, 1600–1850 is an invigorating collection of essays that places the process of colonisation and its role in cultural behaviour at the centre of analyses of the bu...