7 - Conclusion: Ending the Tyranny of Ruskin and Morris?

Summary

Walter George Bell, the author of London Rediscoveries, noticed how in the early 1920s Post Office workmen were laying earthenware conduits for their telephone cables within a trough created by the wall of a Roman villa lying in Gracechurch Street, so that, he said, ‘our messages go whispering’ through rooms where once the citizens of a lost London spoke in an alien tongue.

(Ackroyd 2000, 562)

Chapter 1 began with the case study of Hellifield Peel. Since the completion of that conservation project several others have taken place, or are in progress, such as at Astley Castle, Warwickshire, a project awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture in 2013. On close examination it is possible to state that, for a great many years, there has been a creative or adaptive response to ruins. We have seen in Chapter 2 (pp. 30–1) that some historic ruins were adaptively reused, became ruins again, or were retained as dwellings. Some, such as Martello Towers, easily lent themselves to reuse. But in general terms those stories are not immediately apparent and do not always make their way into the public or academic arena. For some professionals, ‘restoration’ and ‘reconstruction’ are still problematic terms (and practices) which lead to an assumption that this element of conservation practice is best reserved for the conservation specialist rather than the public. Similarly there is a sense that ‘restoration’, as a word and set of practices, does not actually capture the nature of the changes that can happen at a place – as was seen in Chapter 6 with the example of Hellifield (p. 190). Perhaps it is necessary to think about using a new word.