Long Hot Summer

The sun is continuing to shine at Armour Heritage HQ, and with it we’re pleased to report a significant increase in project work across the sectors in 2018. Fieldwork has been busy, with many of our clients taking advantage of the long hot summer days to clear conditions relating to excavations and watching briefs on their developments. There has been plenty of predetermination work underway too, with trenching and geophysical surveys being completed across a variety of developments, happily including a few new solar PV sites too. As ever, the archaeology has been a bit hit and miss, with a number of very interesting sites alongside some very dull ones too!

Heritage statements and desk based assessments continue to be our mainstay, with a marked increase in our workload across the southwest, southeast and midlands areas. We have a well-travelled path now from West Cornwall to Kent and increasingly have been venturing north of the M5 up to Leicestershire and beyond, with numerous places in between. The schemes are varied, but we continue to provide professional, independent advice through bespoke NPPF compliant heritage reports to our valued regular and new clients alike.

Not surprisingly, some of the work has been noticeably regional with an increase in proposals to convert agricultural buildings conspicuous in the southwest and new builds and regeneration schemes more common in the southeast. Providing advice and recommendations on Listed Buildings and works in Conservation Areas spans the regions and has been on the increase with schemes ranging from demolition to conversion of Listed Buildings to new builds potentially impacting on the setting of heritage assets.

Whilst the work streams continue to flow, we were also delighted to welcome the CIfA, our chartered professional body, to our offices for an inspection earlier in the summer. It was a very positive day although we await the official committee report, so we’re keen not to jinx anything before then!

The summer holidays may be here, but we’re still happily busy making hay (or more accurately heritage statements) while the sun shines!

Snowballing...

Its been way too long since our last blog, due in no small part to an exceptionally busy spell, which has seen Armour Heritage venturing out to sites across the southwest, southeast and middle of England.

Over the last few months we’ve had a marked rise in commissions for Heritage Statements, with a variety of proposals from new builds within Conservation Areas, conversions of redundant Listed Buildings and demolition of Locally Listed Buildings to provide more sustainable 21st century living and working spaces. Although no two projects are the same, the bespoke assessments we provide our valued clients for each project in line with local planning policy and professional standards, allows an independent, NPPF compliant assessment of the proposal to be made, which consider both the positive outcomes and potential harm of any given proposal.

Needless to say, it’s not just been the desk based work which has kept us busy, and despite some challenging weather conditions we have also maintained a steady succession of fieldwork projects over the autumn/winter stint. Watching briefs, large open area excavation and historic building recording have all been completed as conditions of planning consents, and we have also been working on some predetermination fieldwork too, with trial trenching and geophysical surveys being undertaken to inform on the archaeological potential of specific projects.

All in all its been a remarkably busy and very positive start to 2018, and as we embark on our 6th trading year, we’re not snowed under, or snowed in, but things are happily snowballing…

Summer's End (and time for daytime tv?)

After the brief UK event billed comically as ‘summer’ it feels like autumn’s here – all too soon clearly. With the change in the weather from damp and warm to damp and a bit chillier, we have something of a change in circumstances at the AH Offices in Trudoxhill, outside Frome, Somerset. 
After some time of being alone out here in the sticks, we’ve managed to let our downstairs offices/workshop area to a film and tv company from Glasgow who are around for the next couple of months filming a new series of daytime tv favourite ‘Money for Nothing’. The programme features the upcycling of what is basically junk into new saleable items, unlike our archaeology work which more often than not features the recycling of old(er) material into museum archive boxes, often never to be seen again! 
On the work front business remains brisk with a good cross-section of archaeology and heritage work coming our way. Some of our more interesting projects have involved some test-pitting alongside an old sea defence on the south coast, the refurbishment of a probably medieval barn, work on a new energy project for Keele University and an upcoming public enquiry for a mid-range housing development. All good then!
Of course the problem with the onset of autumn/winter is the shorter days and longer nights, both in respect of on-site working hours and with the need to drive long distances in the dark for site visits or to appraise historic buildings etc. I for one detest driving in the dark so roll on next summer!
 

We need to talk about setting...

It’s the last week of June and we’ve made it to halfway through what is turning out to be a very turbulent year politically. I’m pleased to report a steadier ship at Armour Heritage where we have maintained a relatively unbroken flow of work during the first six months of 2017. Nevertheless, we have noticed a change in focus in the day to day workload, particularly regarding Heritage Statements and desk based work, which is more often now centred around a specific heritage issue requiring a bespoke response in terms of our advice and output. Matters concerning the setting of heritage assets has been, as it so often is, our main focus. Much of our office-based work is broadly related to Listed Buildings and the need to make them compatible with 21st century living and sustainability, new builds and extensions to existing Listed or undesignated properties in Conservation Areas, or the impact of proposed new builds on specific heritage assets. 
In our day-to-day work AH produces a relatively large number of heritage statements, within the majority of which setting is an issue to a greater or lesser degree, and we are often surprised at the wide range of responses to the associated planning applications which will vary widely on a national, regional and local basis. We often find what we would regard as ‘non-issues’ blown out of all proportion and sites which we have advised as contentious sailing through planning with not so much as a comment, positive or negative, on our contribution.
It’s clear we’re not the only ones juggling with issues of setting, which is being widely debated in a number of heritage forums, due in part to the result of a landmark case in Derbyshire where a High Court judge recently overruled the planning inspector following a public enquiry which proposed up to 400 new homes close to a Grade I Listed Building, Derbyshire Hall. 
Whilst the Derbyshire Hall case concluded the Inspector had failed to focus on the "historic, social and economic connections" between the hall and the development site, the case also highlights the need for greater guidance on setting which is increasingly becoming a grey area in terms of planning policy, and which would benefit from further robust, rational and realistic scrutiny.
 

Looking Back, Looking Forward...

2016 was AH’s fourth complete year of operations and represented our most successful both in terms of the number of projects completed and company turnover, for which we are very grateful to all our clients, both returning and new. Last year also saw AH accepted as a Registered Organisation with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, a significant step forward for us and a guarantee of our competence and our professional approach to a wide range of projects, from small alterations to Listed Buildings or undesignated buildings in Conservation Areas, to large scale excavations for housing and mixed-use developments. Geographically, as anyone who follows @Armourheritage on Twitter will know, we have completed projects from the far west of Cornwall to Kent and Sussex, and from Greater London to the Midlands and Yorkshire – if road miles translated to air miles we’d be due a free holiday in the sun!
Looking forward to 2017, although the immediate future is fuelled by a high level of uncertainty engendered by the referendum result, our clients remain very positive, and the beginning of the year is happily just as busy as the end of the last. Construction of new housing, development led work in schools, and energy projects across the south is resulting in a busy project worksheet, with a happy balance of desk based and fieldwork set to keep us busy at the start of the year!
Here’s wishing all our clients, sub-contractors and everyone else a happy and prosperous new year!

AH Tour of Britain #2

It’s almost the weekend, and this morning at Armour Heritage we’ve been cataloguing some of the digital images we’ve taken from recent sites, and getting nostalgic about the projects we’ve been involved in over the last 12 months. 

Our whizzy new Lightbox software from Adobe allows us to map the areas we’ve worked in around the UK, through use of the photographs’ geo-tagging, and shows a concentration in Greater London and Cornwall, both areas where setting of historic assets, impacts of conversions or new build in Conservation Areas, and World Heritage Site issues are regularly contentious topics. Not surprisingly, the map also shows we’ve been busy closer to our main office in Somerset, and local areas of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Berkshire where we regularly complete watching briefs, evaluations and archaeological mitigation. It's worth noting that the numbers on the screen-dump refer to the numbers of photographs from the wider area rather than the number of projects undertaken. Penwith, for example, in West Cornwall, shows 101 photographs - these refer to around 15 recent sites.

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UK map showing a broad distribution of AH sites

Through the many projects we’ve been involved in, we’re in no doubt a bespoke, tailored heritage statement can help to identify and mitigate the impacts of any development proposal on heritage assets, thus providing a cost-effective approach to independently assessing the significance of assets in and around a site. Moreover, our desk based assessments can offer suggestions and solutions with regard to the potential affects the development may have on the historic environment, and ultimately may contribute toward that all-important resolution between the planners and our valued clients.

The AH Tour of Britain

The Tour of Britain cycling event finishes in the World Heritage Site city of Bath later today, and as well as a guaranteed early finish for Team AH (big cycling fans that we are!), we’re also reminded of our own excursions around the UK over the last few months.

Although we’ve not made it into Scotland just yet, work continues apace across the much of the rest of the UK. Regionally, Greater London and Cornwall seem to top the bill although we still can’t put our finger on why, when you get one project in a certain area, another seems to quickly follow. Chaos theory perhaps…

One thing we find continually is the learning curve working nationally engenders. Our recent work in Greater London for example has been across a number of the suburbs – Greenwich, Charlton, Lewisham, Catford and Brockley, as well as more centrally with a site in historic Southwark. Each site came with its own specific set of challenges, due in part to their varied locations and in part to the variety of works proposed, which offered Conservation Area & Listed Building issues as well as some insights into some exceptional archaeological potential – particularly true in Southwark with our site adjacent to the former major Roman road of Watling Street. We’d recommend an excellent monograph produced by the Museum of London Archaeology Service (now MOLA) which reports on excavations on Great Dover Street, very close to our site, available here http://www.mola.org.uk/publications/romano-british-cemetery-watling-street-excavations-165-great-dover-street-southwark.

Amongst the subject matter we’ve been sifting through, the exponential expansion of the London Suburbs in the later 19th century has become clear, reflecting the desire of the wealthier to move away from the centre of the city and out into the leafier areas of Lewisham and other parts of what was then still Kent. Of interest also has been the changing face of the streetscape, both in the centre of the city with some iconic buildings being constructed in recent years (the Gherkin, the Shard etc), and the changes in the Georgian and Victorian terraces of the suburbs, often the result of bomb damage during the Blitz – Bombsight.org offers a good insight into this, particularly in conjunction with comparisons between pre-War and 1950s OS maps.

From the very beginnings of each new project at AH, and the journey it takes us on, we increasingly recognise the wealth of knowledge out there and the importance of maintaining all of our heritage resources, and good easy access to them.  They, like the whole of the heritage industry, rely on the support of both professionals and the public at large.

Half Time 2016

As we rapidly approach the halfway point of another year, we thought this would be a good time to reflect on the past 6 months – please excuse the football related title, but it’s the Euros so we had no choice!

The start of the year saw Armour Heritage become a Registered Organisation with the CIfA, which was an excellent outcome following a considerable amount of form-filling and a very helpful meeting with the CIfA’s representatives just before Christmas. The feedback from our clients has been positive too, and has confirmed that our continued commitment to delivering independent, professional, and pragmatic advice on all heritage related projects is good for client and heritage alike.

Since receiving the CIfA kitemark, it’s proven to be a very busy time, with multiple projects across the UK, ranging geographically from the western tip of Cornwall to Rainham in Essex in the south, and occasional trips ‘up country’ to the East Midlands and beyond for fieldwork and desk-based heritage projects. The end of May also saw the winding-up of our extensive excavations at Winnersh in Berkshire – see the galleries section for a bit more on this. The dig was AH’s biggest project to date, and provided a number of logistical challenges, interesting archaeology and welcome outreach opportunities, including a well-attended open day. 

Of course, every half-year has its hitches and we, like the rest of our profession, remain concerned over the contents of the Queen’s Speech, in particular elements of the Neighbourhood Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which in its current form, jeopardises over 25 years of improved heritage protection within the planning system, putting future construction projects at greater financial risk, and our valued clients with the threat of potential lengthy delays on site.  AH has joined in our industry’s robust opposition to aspects of the proposed changes in their current form, and we await the outcome of consultations triggered by the well-supported online petition in this regard.

It’s less than a couple of weeks until the in/out EU vote, another cause of concern here and elsewhere across the profession. Although we can’t be clear on how the outcome will affect our profession and the wider economy in the longer term, we are under no illusion that much of our heritage and environmental protection stems from European policy – though not all strictly EU based - and continued membership of the EU would support these conventions in a positive manner.

All-in-all a positive first half to the year, may the second half bring continued success!

Open Day at the Winnersh excavations - a follow up

The open day at Hatch Farm attracted over 260 visitors on what turned out to be a bright though very chilly Sunday afternoon. Visitors were taken on site tours and had the opportunity to see the ongoing excavation of features, chat to the teams from AH and TVAS, and to view and handle some of the many finds excavated over the past few weeks.

A gallery showcasing elements of the event is available here.

Chartered Institute for Archaeologists

After some considerable form filling and a morning entertaining CIfA folk at our Trudoxhill offices, Armour Heritage is very pleased to announce that we are now an approved Registered Organisation. 

With the recent exponential growth of the company’s workload and turnover, both in Heritage Consultancy and archaeological fieldwork management, this for us is an important and very welcome addition to our CV.

We applied for the RO scheme at the back end of last autumn, although our work commitments then meant that the initial application forms were filled out in rather piecemeal fashion. However, the important thing for us is that we got there…and not just for us. The RO membership represents a ‘kite mark’ through which our valued clients, existing and future, can feel assured that AH will continue to offer them an excellent professional service, undertaken to the highest standard and in line with the CIfA’s guidance.

As AH continues to advance as a heritage practice, we welcome the support of the CIfA - not just for us, and our clients, but for the profession as a whole.

2016 So Far

So, a new year with new challenges. At AH the year has started brightly with some interesting new projects on our books already, including heritage work in Bridgwater, Swindon and the Liskeard area of Cornwall. Further management of large scale archaeological excavations in Berkshire looks likely, alongside a number of continuing projects across the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Worcestershire and Devon. Still awaiting our ‘Must Farm buried Bronze Age houses’ moment, but we live in hope! 

Hits on the web site have increased exponentially over the past few months, and we’re adding new sections all the time so please keep checking it out when you’ve a spare moment. 
Domestically we’re still mulling over the financial benefits (or otherwise) of having new offices built from scratch, although looking out of our Foghamshire Lane office window at the frost covered fields, I think we may just prefer to stay where we are. It is a truly stunning morning in Somerset.

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Christmas time, mostly definitely wine...

It’s Christmas, and here at AH we’ve been looking into the origins of the festive period.

The concept of a celebration around the winter solstice, as with so many other ‘traditions’, predates the Christian era, probably by millennia. In pre-Christian Northern Europe, the period was known as Jul, still preserved in the English language as Yule, and the custom of burning the Yule Log goes back to at least the Vikings, who traditionally brought in the Yule Log and drank mead whilst it burned, celebrating the return of light after the prolonged darkness of the Scandinavian winter. During the medieval period, an entire tree was sometimes brought into the house with great ceremony. The tree/alcohol traditional is of course still prevalent today!

In the UK, many of our earliest monuments are aligned to the rising midwinter sun, including Stonehenge, pointing to traditions going back many thousands of years to the earliest farmers and settlements in this country.

The Romans knew the season as Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, which translates roughly as ‘the (re)birth of the unconquered Sun’, and through a period of sacrifice and feasting, the people celebrated the prospect of the lengthening of the days and the return of summer. The Roman Pope Julius I chose December 25th to celebrate the birth of Jesus primarily because that date already hosted two related festivals of birth: the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, and the celebration of the birth of the god Mithras, known as the ‘Sun of Righteousness’.

Christmas decorations too have their roots in earlier pre-Christian traditions. The Romans were said to have decorated living trees with fragments of metal and images of Bacchus, god of wine and revelry, whilst twelve candles on a tree honoured the sun god Mithras. The writings of Tertullian (c. AD155-240) suggest early Christians imitated their pagan neighbours by decorating their homes with candles and laurel at the turn of the year.

Many more historical analogies are available and well worth a bit of online, or perish the thought, library research! 

We at Armour Heritage wish you all a peaceful and happy season, whatever your belief system (or lack thereof), and a prosperous and successful 2016.

Heritage Funding and Support

It has recently been reported that, as part of a wide range of cuts to services, Lancashire County Council have tabled plans to cut their heritage services, including provision of an historic environment record (HER), and curatorial input into planning applications.

The requirement for archaeological assessment, survey, excavation and protection is a statutory requirement, set out clearly in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which follows broadly the principles set out in the European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (The Valetta Treaty), and to which the UK is a signatory. The need for a Local Planning Authority to maintain and have access to a functioning HER as part of this process is clearly set out in the NPPF (para. 169). LCC’s current proposals effectively indicate that they intend to proceed with a planning system which employs the selective and subjective imposition of national principles and policies. This would leave the authority open to numerous challenges, ranging from grounds of non-compliance with national policy, to having the validity of individual application decisions queried and overturned. 

This could also affect later stages of the development process. The NPPF and its predecessors have been relatively effective at identifying archaeological risk at an early stage, allowing effective mitigation through fieldwork or design iteration. The removal of archaeological input from the early stages of the planning process leaves developers open to the potential to discover extensive and important archaeological remains at a much later stage, i.e. during construction, leading to costly delays. 

Strong letters of objection have been lodged from a number of organisations including the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) and RESCUE (The British Archaeological Trust), and we at Armour Heritage would like to add our protest and would urge our colleagues in the profession to do the same.

On a related subject, Armour Heritage’s offices were recently visited by our local representative, David Warburton MP, at our invitation. We discussed a number of matters, foremost amongst them the changes to the Feed-In Tariff Scheme (FITS) for the renewable energy sector and support for heritage and archaeology in parliament. Whilst we felt the meeting ended on a positive note, issues like that currently emerging in Lancashire emphasise the point that archaeology and heritage are considered of relatively low importance, at least at local government level, and we fear that cuts to services in other authorities may follow a similar path.

The role of companies like AH in the planning system is an important one, both in terms of the appropriate assessment, recording and protection of our nation’s heritage, and in the contribution small businesses make to the UK economy. On either front, a watering down of the value and significance of heritage and archaeology at local government level can only ultimately be detrimental to us all. 

The Archaeology of Vinyl

So, what do archaeologist and heritage professionals do in their spare time? More archaeology, historical research, go to the football?

AH’s founder and director Rob Armour Chelu, has inadvertently found a way to combine a love of archaeology with a lifelong passion for music, thus filling a significant area of his house with vinyl records from the 1960s onwards. He’s also managed to cross-over archaeological techniques with record collecting. 

Written archives (online catalogues) are trawled for information and a number of ‘sites’ (record shops, charity shops, markets and EBay) are investigated for ‘finds’. Once the ‘finds’ are selected (and paid for), they are processed. This involves again a similar process, the vinyl is cleaned, catalogued and added to the archive – which will soon need additional storage space, much like the UK’s museums!

Most recently the collection has begun to be displayed in public, with ‘open events’ recently in Frome (a DJ set at the Wheatsheaf) and upcoming at AH’s home venue, the White Hart in Trudoxhill, Somerset where archive material from the 1970s and 1980s will be played.

Renewable Energy Policy and the Heritage/Archaeology Profession

Recent changes to renewable energy policy implemented by Westminster will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect, not just in the renewables sector, but in the wider raft of contractors who contribute to the industry as a whole. Latest predictions suggest around 20,000 potential job losses in the solar industry alone, but has anyone sought to calculate the effect on other industries such as manufacturing, haulage, groundworks, solar panel and wind turbine installation, ecology, planning consultancies and, closest to our hearts of course, the heritage consultancy and archaeological fieldwork sectors? All of these industries and many more contribute to both the local and national economy.

At AH we have seen a sudden and fairly alarming drop-off in desk based assessment and heritage statement work – much of our turnover has traditionally been within the wind and solar energy markets, two sectors really at the core of the company’s set-up in the first place. We assume we, as a heritage consultancy, are not alone in this – and whilst we have no figures, we assume similar reductions in turnover in the other related industries mentioned earlier.

Not only will the new policy result in substantial job losses with almost one million fewer solar schemes being installed by 2020, it will also serve to increase the UK’s annual carbon emissions by 1.6 million tonnes. It will mean it will take longer than 20 years for solar panels to pay for themselves, and only those with thousands of pounds of disposable income will be able to install them. Most private residents, schools, council tenants and community groups will be forced out of the renewable energy revolution, with only an estimated £6 per year reduction in annual household bills as a result.

This proposal will leave the UK trailing behind in the global solar revolution, and needlessly threaten jobs that will be vital to our future low-carbon economy, and the short and long-term survival of many small businesses.

We are obviously seeking to mitigate this, through further diversification into other planning-related markets but it will not be an easy transition. Whilst the reduction in the Feed-in Tariff (FiT) - the scheme which supports small scale renewables - was always on the cards, the dramatic and draconian manner in which they were introduced earlier this year was both unexpected and unprecedented.

We would urge the government to rethink this policy and consider the points raised above. We would also urge our friends and colleagues in the heritage and archaeology industry to petition their MPs, as we have done, to request a broader debate and public consultation on these issues. Surely there is a better way forward than this, for both the UK economy and the environment.

An upturn in housing development?

“Small builders will benefit from a £100 million cash boost to recognise and support their important role in keeping the country building”, Housing Minister Brandon Lewis said on 6th July this year.

The Housing Growth Partnership will act as a dedicated initiative that will invest alongside smaller builders in new developments, providing money to support their businesses, helping get workers onto sites and increasing housing supply.

At AH we’re hoping this projected boom in house building will correspond with an increase in heritage work, both pre-application and further down the planning and post-planning road. It may be that we are already seeing the beginnings of this with, last week, the news that Armour Heritage has won the first of a number of multi-site pre-planning contracts for a single developer which will keep us busy, initially with archaeological desk based assessments and heritage statements, for some considerable time! Unusually for us recently, these sites are all relatively local to our Somerset offices, all of the first batch are located in Wiltshire, so less need for arduous summer travel on holiday-clogged roads; the A303 at Stonehenge, the obvious exception of course!

Of course, from pre-planning work comes further fieldwork, be it pre-determination geophysical survey, earthwork survey or trial trenching, all of which are services provided by Armour Heritage.

Hopefully then, with an already very bright start to 2015, our success will continue in the year’s second two quarters.