Building Conservation Summer School 2025

Our countryside is replete with redundant historic buildings, aching for sensitive reuse.

They offer opportunity to reuse all that embodied carbon and natural material to provide places to live, for community use and (I feel) more importantly for rural economic development.

Their reuse is important too simply for their own sake, for their fabric, their design, their contribution to an area’s setting and character and sense of place and for the enfranchisement and contribution they provide to the lives of their users, visitors and people who happen to live near them or simply pass by…

We’re taking this work ever more seriously at Wreyland, from our nascent experiences as rural planning consultants who happened to work with historic buildings because there happened to be a lot of them in the hands of our clients who wanted to do things with them, to rural becoming rural planning consultants who, among other things, work with historic buildings.

Earlier this year I commenced a second Masters Degree in the Conservation and Management of Historic Buildings.

To integrate theory with practical I have just completed the Building Conservation Summer School

31 practical lectures covering subjects ranging from structural diagnosis and retrofit design to mortar mixing, traditional roof conservation and glass assessment, all bound up in a package delivered by captains of the heritage industry and integrated with practical approaches to moving heritage conservation through the planning system.

Planning appraisals regularly have me leaning back in my chair with my eyes closed and fingers at my temples waiting for my brain to whir into action. I was particularly heartened in one lecture delivered by PJ Stow when he said;

“If you’re not confused, you don’t understand the situation.”

Sound advice.