Record Turnout for North West Clients and Professionals' Roadshow
21 July 2010, Over 70 clients and professionals attended the roadshow ‘Repair and Maintenance of Traditional Buildings’ at CUBE in Manchester.
English Heritage, ConstructionSkills, National Heritage Training Group and the North West Heritage Skills Hub joined forces to raise awareness about how the right expertise in repair & maintenance projects for pre-1919 buildings is essential to the quality of work.
National Heritage Training Group research shows
• A quarter of professionals find it difficult to specify traditional materials because of a lack of knowledge
• Almost two thirds of professionals felt that their formal education did not prepare them adequately for working on pre-1919 buildings
• For mainstream professionals 35% of their work is on pre-1919 buildings whereas it equates to 76% of conservation or heritage specialists’ workload
John Edwards, English Heritage Conservation Architecture Team stressed the need to ensure that appropriate expertise is available from all professional input applied to all traditional buildings whether they are listed or not.
Heritage accreditation schemes within the professional institutes have helped to raise the level of expertise. However, the numbers of accredited professionals is miniscule when compared with the 5 million traditional (pre-1919) buildings across the country and does not address the use of appropriate craft skills. Simon Holmes, ConstructionSkills provided an update on the CSCS Heritage Skills card which will help to ensure the upskilling and identification of appropriately skilled crafts people.
Feedback from the event was extremely positive
‘Brilliant presentation, very useful. Would attend more of these seminars’ a view shared by the rest of the audience as there was 100% feedback that the event had ‘updated knowledge’ and individuals ‘would be interested in attending future events’.
Kay Leech, North West Heritage Skills Coordinator, is now working with partners to develop a programme of future events both at CUBE and across the North West, which will be promoted through the North West Heritage Skills Hub.
Further information is available on the following websites:
English Heritage (http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/)
North West Heritage Skills Hub (http://www.ccinw.com/services/north-west-heritage-skills-hub/20671)