Historic Churches 2018

18 BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON HISTORIC CHURCHES 25 TH ANNUAL EDITION there is an evident importance placed on working in very close proximity to the cathedral itself, as craftspeople stretching back over 100 years have done. Furthermore, the remit of the yard enables its craftspeople to work on a single building across a significant period of time, as well as creating a very specific multidisciplinary trade network with one common goal. This way of doing things has an evident practical purpose, logistics, but it also facilitates the development of a very specific affinity between craftsperson and building and creates a profound place-based knowledge that is vital for the effective continual renewal of the building. This relies not just on being a skilled craftsperson, but is enhanced by developing an intellectual connection with the building over a long period of time. This allows the growth of a very specific type of intelligence, one centred on a unique place-based artisanal understanding. There is also a much broader social value associated with work at the site and with traditional trades and craft skills in general, although it can be difficult to pin down why people attribute value to them. Specifically, the premium placed on craft skills draws on broader concepts of the importance of culture and art for social wellbeing. This social value rests, quite rightly, on a belief that skills and techniques that rely on human skill and allow the practitioner to retain control over the production and creation process should be perpetuated. While not necessarily unique to this type of site, there is a real sense that the works yard is a centre of human creativity that is rooted in a deeply historic and identifiable linear progression of techniques and communities. A tour of the cathedral exterior highlights several recent and modern sculptures which, while responding to the contexts of the cathedral and its message, are not simply reproductions. These include sculptures warning of modern greed (see above), commemorating the fox-hunting ban, and one which immortalises the face of a long-serving employee of the works yard, all carved and placed on the south transept in 2011. The important consideration here is that the work is not just a process of re-creation (though that in itself may have profound value) but also one of creation, and this has a more ephemeral value closely associated with satisfying what art historian Alois Riegl called the innate human ‘will to art’. This importance extends far beyond the purely practical and has connotations beyond the management of one building. PROTECTING THE INTANGIBLE So, in cathedral works yards such as Lincoln we have both significant tangible and intangible remains. That leaves the question of management and how we can protect these sites into the future. There are two key problems to consider. Firstly, there is the problem of museumification. It is important to avoid thinking of the body of craftspeople and the infrastructure as static monuments. The works yard is not simply a crumbling set of stone walls that must be propped up, but the work space of a body of professional people which needs to adapt, grow and respond to innovations in techniques, processes and working practices. Managing the site as something which is dynamic rather than static, and focusing understanding of its significance more on the people and their methods highlights a very distinct and unique historic value. It was, after all, the medieval cathedral building sites, usually only a physical location for the duration of construction, that provided the most significant chance for multiple trades to come together and innovate. In this environment they were able to develop the new methods, theories and techniques necessary to plan and build increasingly innovative feats of architecture, art and engineering. It is important to consider the works yard not as a simple representation of traditional craft skills, but in fact as the next generation in a historically valuable but technically progressive lineage. It is a body that has important historic roots but in fact has always been the focal point around which action, innovation and architectural development are wrought. There is, in fostering innovation, an inherent and very real historic meaning. In the 1990s, for example, the yard at Lincoln became a locus around which a wide range of art historians and craftspeople converged to approach the unprecedented re-creation of the north run of the romanesque frieze on the cathedral’s west end, when the original became too damaged to remain in situ. A 2011 sculpture on the south transept warning against the sin of greed (Photo: Antony Lowe) North run of the romanesque frieze on Lincoln Cathedral’s west front: these modern replica carvings replace the badly deteriorated 12th-century originals, which have been conserved and mounted as an exhibition in the Morning Chapel. (Photo: Antony Lowe)