Joint meeting with the Islington Society, presented by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

Speaker: David Heath (Chairman, SPAB)
Time: 8:00 PM
Venue: Islington Town Hall, Upper Street, London N1

David Heath is chair of The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), founded in 1877 by William Morris.  He is a conservation architect with wide-ranging experience of building repairs and maintenance and of the adaptive reuse of historic buildings. Until May 2007, he was chief conservation architect of English Heritage. He trained at Cambridge University School of Architecture and has been a registered architect since 1975. David Heath has taught, lectured and written on conservation topics. He has had a long involvement with the Architectural Association (AA) Post-Graduate Course in The Conservation of Historic Buildings, where since 2007 he has been the thesis tutor. He has lived in the same house in Islington since he was two.

In his talk, David will reflect on the continuing excellence and relevance of the SPAB Manifesto, as written by Morris. In 1877, Morris identified the main threat to historic buildings as the hubris of Restoration. Whilst it could be argued that many of the ideas of the Manifesto have since become mainstream conservation thinking, it is regrettable that the key problem of architectural hubris has not gone away. David will try to summarise the relevance of the Manifesto ideas to today’s conservation dilemmas. Using current examples, he will explore problems of authenticity and memory and interpretation. He will argue that whilst the threat to major mediaeval churches was the reason for SPAB’s foundation, the founding ideas are highly relevant to a multi-cultural present.