Recent Updates

Join us to learn more about managing the impacts of climate change on the historic environment and the work Historic England has been doing on understanding climate hazards. This webinar will introduce the results of two recent projects on climate change hazards that cause damage or loss for heritage, such as sea level rise, heat waves, and soil heave. The aim of both projects was to define these hazards and their data sources for heritage. This webinar will be of particular interest to local authority historic environment teams and those managing the impacts of climate change on heritage more generally.

Speaker - Joanne Williams, Helen Thomas, Scott Orr, Phil Carlisle

Joanne Williams is a Conservation Accredited Building Surveyor working in the Historic Building Climate Change Adaptation team in Technical Conservation. She specialises in conservation, regulations and adaptation of historic buildings to climate change, with a particular focus on flooding.

Helen Thomas is a collaborative doctoral student between Historic England and the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage. Helen is part of the research group Heritage Environmental Risk and Data Analytics (HERADA) at UCL and is an affiliate member of the UK Centre for Moisture in Buildings.

Dr Scott Allan Orr is a lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage. He leads the Heritage, Environmental Risk and Data Analytics (HERADA) research group.

Phil Carlisle is a Senior Data Standards Specialist at Historic England. He advises on the use of data standards and controlled vocabularies in recording systems and is the chair of the FISH Terminology Working Group.

We all now are subjected to an increasing level of advertising of thermal insulation products and services that claim to reduce our energy bills and are good for climate change etc. Are they really? Are we creating future building pathology problems that don’t need to exist..?
This lunchtime cpd will be a discussion between myself and Gemma Cornwall MRICS. Gemma is on the RICS Building Surveying PGP.

There are many social media sites offering a wide range of enthusiastic contractors, homeowners who like to do DIY as well as professionals each offering ideas and projects that we can use to insulate our homes and other buildings. Unfortunately, we are also now seeing the failure of many schemes due to the lack of understanding of moisture movement in traditional buildings. Condensation is a considerable risk.

This lunchtime cpd session will explore the topic and will raise some interesting questions that we can all ask ourselves next time a retrofit scheme is proposed.

Duncan is one of the UK’s most experienced Chartered Building Surveyors regarding historic and Listed Buildings, having been doing this work for over 35 years. He runs Listed Building Surveys and he was Chair of the RICS Building Conservation Steering Group 2017 – 2023. He is the lead author of the new RICS Professional Standard – Conservation of Heritage Buildings and Assets, which will be published in 2024. Duncan teaches building surveying, architectural history, building pathology and building conservation to undergraduate, postgraduate and mature students and also to the general public and the trades.

FRH invites its members and those interested to a new online face-to-face meeting in which we will explore ongoing efforts to safeguard abandoned religious heritage sites in Turkey. The session will be led by Çağla Parlak, Vice-Chair of the Association for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (Kültürel Mirası Koruma Derneği – KMKD) which specialises in the documentation and risk assessment of abandoned sacred heritage buildings, offering recommendations for mitigating threats. After the earthquakes of February 2023, KMKD’s work has focused on the damage assessment of cultural heritage. Their findings and recommendations will be reflected in a report that will be released soon.

During the session, Çağla will provide an overview of the preservation challenges faced by abandoned sacred heritage in Turkey, along with the documentation efforts and protection initiatives undertaken by KMKD. She will also share some of the reports published in recent years and the new report to be published.

Featured speaker - Çağla Parlak

Çağla Parlak holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Istanbul University and furthered her studies in Museum Management. Between 2015 and 2020, she worked as a Projects Manager at the Association for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.

She has led numerous endeavors in the field of cultural heritage, including post-earthquake documentation, architectural heritage at risk and capacity-building projects. Throughout her career, she has also actively contributed to research projects focusing on threats to religious sites and policy-level changes in cultural heritage management. In 2017, Çağla was nominated from Turkey to participate in the International Visitors Leadership Program of the US Department of State, where she focused on cultural heritage preservation. In 2022, she was honored as a Europa Nostra fellow in Brussels.

Currently, she is the Vice-Chair of KMKD and a freelance project manager for different organizations mainly in the cultural preservation domain with a specific focus on minority heritage, cultural rights, and promotion of intercultural dialogue.

Paul Dobraszczyk is a lecturer in the history and theory of architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He’s the author of many books, including 'Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain' (Routledge, 2014) and, forthcoming in the autumn, 'Botanical Architecture: Plants, Buildings and Us' (Reaktion, 2024). He’s also a photographer and artist and built the website www.stonesofmanchester.com in 2018. More details can be found at www.ragpickinghistory.co.uk.

This talk explores how ornamental iron founders developed practices of advertising their products for international markets in the 19th century. This will focus on three important contexts: first, illustrated trade catalogues; second, international exhibitions; and third, iron buildings destined for export. Taken together, these three developments spearheaded the creation of an international market for prominent iron-founders like Walter Macfarlane. These visual cultures of display – catalogues, exhibitions and public display of buildings for export – were overlapping and mutually reinforcing promotional tools that, particularly in Macfarlane’s case, became key elements in defining how iron founders wanted to present themselves to the world.