The Rocking Horse

As soon as I saw the scaffold go up around our beloved Queen Victoria (Gawd bless 'er) on saturday, I knew that we would be subjected to the sight of a bunch of conservators fiddling about with toothbrushes and scalpels for months - probably until Christmas.

Conservators just don't look like hairy-arsed masons - you can tell the difference about 5 miles away, whether they are male or female. There are more female stone conservators than Masons, that is true, but there are quite a few female masons, and they look just as hairy-arsed as their male counterparts.

Stone conservators look as though they have come straight out of university equipped with a degree in Art History because - up until fairly recently - most of them had. These days there are degrees to be had in Stone Conservation, so a history one is no longer mandatory - but it helps.

Roughly speaking, the practice of stone conservation can be traced back to a certain Professor Baker who pioneered techniques which centered on the use of slaked (as opposed to hydrated) lime, and most of the people who worked with him on the west front of Wells Cathedral went on to form their own stone conservation companies, one of which I did a lot of work for about 25 years ago, when the practice - dragged back from the pre-Victorian days of Portland Cement - was in it's second infancy.

Even now, it is next to impossible to stop a hairy-arsed mason from secretly sprinkling a bit of white Portland Cement into the mix of pure lime and carefully selected sand and stone dusts that you have so laboriously mixed for him, because as far as he is concerned, it's still witchcraft.

When Professor Baker told the Diocese of Wells that he planned to coat the 13th century figures of the west front with a fine, protective layer of lime-based washes, he described the wash as a 'sacrificial coat', meaning that it would be sacrificed to the elements to protect the stonework beneath it, but the clerics recoiled with horror at the pagan connotations of the word 'sacrifice', so he was compelled to change the name to 'shelter coat'. Idiots.

It so happens that I have done work (as an independent) for the company which is now starting work on Victoria, and I have known it's founder for many years. He is a good businessman, and as such, has placed himself in a position of indispensable authority with local authorities by writing the rule-book about stone conservation, all those years ago when the U.K.I.C. (United Kingdom Institute of Conservation) was founded in it's office at central London. It was probably the first quango to be set up in the area of stonework, and these days, no local authorities may carry out work on the historical architecture in their care without adhering to it's principals. This is - in general - a Good Thing, especially when you remember the vandalism that took place in 1960s Bath, when so many fine, 18th century buildings were destroyed by greedy planners, builders and architects in order to scratch each other's backs and line their own pockets.

In order to encapsulate the essential difference between restoration and conservation for simple-minded town planners, the U.K.I.C. came up with the following analogy:

Say that you have an old, child's, wooden rocking-horse which is on it's last legs and about to collapse under it's own weight. If you repair it to the extent that a child may safely use it as a rocking-horse again, then that is restoration. If you simply stabilise the decay so that it gets no worse and the appearance that it has acquired over the years it has existed stays the same, then that is conservation.

As I write, the conservator outside in the red shirt - now left on his own to get on with it - is actually whistling Baroque, classical music to himself. You wouldn't get a hairy-arsed mason doing that!