44 CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 Director’s cut The ability to retrofit is important in all areas of life I am delighted to be able to remind readers that, for example, we have just added the retrofit-focused Climate Change Adaptation as a new practice area on our HESPR listing of IHBC-‘recognised’ conservation service providers. This is a huge step forward for us, one that has been long on our HESPR (Historic Environment Service Provider Recognition) register’s to-do list, but only now have we managed to push it into play. Not least as Historic England has issued its advice on Adapting Historic Buildings for Energy and Carbon Efficiency (much improved from the draft). Retrofit is both a critical and timely practice area for the IHBC’s networks, and one where we need to make sure the UK and international conservation standards our members work to are recognised and properly supported. Critically, though, retrofitting is not just about adapting old things in response to new needs. In writing history, even more than in archaeology, we retrofit the information we have to fit the context of both the narrative thread and the publication platform: cautiously and with consideration, certainly, but we retrofit nonetheless. Retrofitting what we know of history is about, first, investigating and understanding the facts, and then reflecting where adaptation and selection might be needed to secure a sensible narrative, all before we deal with the details in content and style. Unlike conservation retrofit, though, where policy, science, philosophy and practice must shape outcomes, in history there is usually more need for personal judgement. That is especially relevant as we continue to look at exploring our case for a charter with the Privy Council Office (PCO). The Memorandum we will soon submit to the PCO, in line with the agreement at our last AGM, must crystalise the issues for a nonspecialist audience. As the opening question from the PCO concerns ‘the body’s history’, we must undertake a retrofit, reinterpreting the rich and variegated complexity of the IHBC’s history as we know it into a more accessible understanding of a charter’s relevance to both IHBC and PCO interests. We must start with a summary introduction to who we are today, and our role as a body with a distinguished history of practiceled development, advocacy and support in specific practice skills in conservation: the individual’s professional competence in interdisciplinary historic-and-builtenvironment conservation. That role underpins our presence today as a credible pan-UK charity and sector-integrated professional body representing a specific discipline, as described some of my other columns. To secure our financial soundness, we hold a stand-alone, for-profit trading arm, IHBC Enterprises, which manages events, networks, services (our Jobs etc services), practice registers (HESPR) and more. Not only do we straddle the diverse disciplines that underpin interdisciplinary conservation, but we also reach across private, charity and public conservation services to maximise sustainable impact. That rich tapestry of activity is a far cry from the modest thoughts on our predecessor, the Association of Conservation Officers (ACO), voiced in the first issue of Context: ‘to constitute an Association, with the minimum necessary formality – to provide a framework within which all conservation officers might have the opportunity to help each other’. More than 40 years later, how do we make sense of our history for the PCO? To integrate that contemporary profile with the IHBC’s complex, meandering and occasionally disrupted and disruptive history, our priority is to retrofit our melange of history into a meaningful sequence that is both accessible and comprehensible to the PCO. For myself, in the context of this column, I can see five distinct stages around which our evolution might offer a sense of structure and logic. 1. Origins as a voluntary association and charity (1981–1997) The IHBC was incorporated as a charity and limited company in 1997 out of its predecessor, the ACO, originally established from 1981. The modern charity was designed to operate as the UK’s professional body for all building conservation practitioners and historic environment experts engaged in what came to be described as interdisciplinary conservation practice. It achieved this by extrapolating the holistic practice principles and public interest priorities of the conservation officer – and by extension the ACO – into the wider historic and built environment professional practice standards supported by the charity. The new charity’s ‘objects’ continue, refined, in our updated 2020 constitution. 2. Defining and establishing a unique ‘interdisciplinary’ discipline: the ‘conservation professional’
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