Essex County Council: Traditional Building Craft Skills
05 November 2009, To promote awareness of the need for traditional buildings skills and materials in historic building conservation, Essex County Council’s Historic Buildings and Conservation Team has run a series of practical courses for 14 years. The courses are open to everyone from owners of historic and listed properties to builders, carpenters and plasterers who are used to working with modern materials to improve their knowledge and understanding of traditional building methods and materials.
Old buildings, whether timber framed or of Georgian or Victorian brick, are important features of the landscape of Essex and its villages and market towns.
Essex has about 14,000 listed buildings and over 200 conservation areas. Maintaining this heritage is a challenge: there is a shortage of skilled craftspeople, and modern materials and methods are often harmful or inappropriate when used in historic buildings. Cement, for instance can be extremely damaging to timber and old brickwork.
The workshop is at Cressing Temple, the County Council’s historic property between Braintree and Witham, though many courses take place at live sites elsewhere in the county, giving students the unique opportunity to learn their new skills by repairing a part of an historic building or site. Students come from all over the country to attend the courses.
The programme offers everything from long straw thatching, flint walling and timber frame repairs, to lime plaster and wattle and daub courses. Running alongside the practical courses is a full programme of CPD lectures, which this year includes issues from energy saving and generation in historic buildings to design for conservation areas.
The county has a wealth of historic buildings many of which have stood for hundreds of years, sadly the loss of traditional skills and the use of inappropriate modern building methods and materials means that we could lose many features that make those buildings special. Through these courses Essex County Council aims to promote the use of traditional materials and skills so that future generations will also benefit from the wide variety of built heritage Essex has to offer.
Find Out More
For more information contact: Katie Seabright at Essex County Council or visit their website.