Historic Buildings
Our historic buildings service includes
recording, scanning, analysing and
interpreting historical building fabric to
support planning and development
projects.
Our specialists record, analyse, describe and interpret historic buildings, whether currently in use or ruined. We can provide advice on how to incorporate assets in development projects, advice on conservation in future work on the building, and reports for planning submissions. Using our data as a basis for 3D modelling we can aid project visualisation and community engagement. We can also assist you with acquiring listed building consent and negotiate with conservation officers to achieve pragmatic solutions to any issues. Our specialists have a wide range of capability in specialized metric survey, ranging from detailed hand drawing to total station and GPS survey and laser scanning.
Historic Buildings Case Study
We were commissioned by York Conservation Trust to record the premises of Robson & Cooper of 14 Lendal, York. The building dates to c.1714, but incorporates a 15th-century stone doorway of an Augustinian Friary in the basement. The building has had a variety of important and well-known occupants, such as Alderman Henry Baines (Lord Mayor of York in 1717 and 1732) and John Goodricke, a talented astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Society who died in 1786.
From 1911 the famous York firm Robson & Cooper occupied no.14. They evolved from a saddle and harness manufacturer to specialising in both luggage retail and repair.
Our survey refined the broad phasing of the building identified by the Conservation Trust: the building developed from separate houses to commercial premises. Surviving features of the houses include original staircases, fireplaces and chimney stacks, architectural mouldings and other decorative details.
A pair of strongboxes relates to the later commercial life of the building, and in the basement, there is a range manufactured by the renowned Walker Ironworks Foundry that we excavated in 2005. Other important features include a collection of WWII era graffiti and discarded 1970s newspaper cuttings of 1970’s popstars. These details add to our appreciation of the building as a living and working space as well as an architectural asset, and through buildings archaeology we were able to record this as it entered a new phase of its history.