Context 181

8 CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 visited the building, and perhaps even those who have. Rachel Stoplar emphasises the ongoing importance of windmills, following the opening of the renovated Kibworth Harcourt Post Mill in Leicestershire. She highlights how crucial a role a new generation of millwrights will have to play in their conservation, and the necessarily multi-faceted skills of engineering, surveying, carpentry, bricklaying, blacksmithing, millstone dressing, machining and steeple-jacking. Stoplar highlights that there are only 11 full-time professional millwrights in the UK (nine short of the minimum considered necessary), and that millwrighting has been on the Heritage Crafts Association’s red list of endangered crafts since 2019. In a separate, related, wellillustrated article, Tessa Wild explains the importance to the historical record of apotropaic (ritual protection) and other graffiti within windmills, using the Kibworth Harcourt Post Mill as an informative example. Construction History Several papers in Construction History: the international journal of the Construction History Society (Vol 39, No 1, 2024) may prompt some interest. They discuss the novel use of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel’s Thames Tunnel as a proving ground for Roman cement in 1824–1843; the revisiting of 19th-century principles of fire protection at the Palace of Westminster in 1835–1942; and (for those particularly interested in medieval construction, measurements and drawings, and masons’ techniques) an investigation of the unusual number of lines and full-scale architectural drawings incised into the fabric of the cathedral of Narbonne (commenced 1272). Journal of Architectural Conservation Similarly worth highlighting in the Journal of Architectural Conservation (Vol 30, No 1, March 2024) is a sociological enquiry by Lynsey Hogarth and Stephen Emmitt of the University of Bath into the museum preservation of (part of) Robin Hood Gardens by the Victoria and Albert Museum. The estate, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1960s and competed in 1972, was demolished in 2017, despite a concerted and controversial campaign to save it, and repeated refusals to list it. The notoriety was followed by two equal controversies: first, CONSTRUCTION ____ Volume 39, No. 1 2024 HISTORY____ International Journal of the Construction History Society CONSTRUCTION HISTORY Volume 39, No. 1 2024 mans i ce (5th- 1 St. Just, 21 45 79 r, 1835- 99 ncept in ndition 127 Grazia ence by , James Frames, 155 157 159 161 165 the V&A’s decision to salvage a fragment from the destruction; second, criticism in the press of the decision to display the fragment at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 in an exhibit entitled ‘Robin Hood Gardens: a ruin in reverse’. Critics argued that the museum had no right to exhibit an ugly piece of brutalist housing that had been part of a failed social experiment, and should not be protected by public funds. Bob Kindred MBE

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