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Heritage buildings in City of London get ‘Retrofit Toolkit’
The City of London Corporation – the governing body in charge of listed buildings and scheduled monuments within the Square Mile – has recently developed and launched an open-access ‘Heritage Building Retrofit Toolkit’, which provides the steps needed to adapt these buildings in order to reduce carbon emissions and hit net-zero targets. The toolkit can be downloaded from http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/assets/Services-Environment/Heritage-Buildings-Retrofit-Toolkit.pdf.
Alderman Alison Gowman, Climate Action Policy Lead of the City of London Corporation, said: ‘At the City Corporation we recognise that an important part of conserving our heritage buildings is ensuring they are fit for the future. This means making them as energy efficient as possible, reducing their carbon emissions, and adapting them to changes to the climate.’
Access at Furness Abbey
English Heritage has reconstructed a timber staircase at Furness Abbey in Cumbria in order to allow full access to the first floor for the first time in 500 years. This storey contains the monks’ dormitory, and the new construction reinstates a route once provided by the old wooden ‘night staircase’, which the monks used to descend to the church to sing matins, the early morning services.
Dr Michael Carter, English Heritage’s Senior Properties Historian, said: ‘Today Furness has some of the finest monastic ruins in England, and by reinstating the night staircase between the dormitory and the abbey church, not only are we recreating an experience that was central in the lives of the medieval monks, we are also giving visitors the unique opportunity to look back in time and see these remarkable ruins through the eyes of the monks themselves.’
Crawick Multiverse designated
Historic Environment Scotland has recently added Crawick Multiverse to the inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes after it was nominated for consideration by a member of the public.
Crawick Multiverse, located near Sanquhar in Dumfries and Galloway, is a land-art project designed by landscape architect Charles Jencks between 2011 and 2017, and built on the site of a former open-cast coal mine. This was Jencks’ final land- art project and the largest in the UK. He designed Crawick Multiverse to explore cosmology, prehistory, and connections to the past.
Text: Kathryn Krakowka
