Jon's talk to the Preservation Trust AGM

Tonight was the Annual General Meeting of Stroud Preservation Trust of which I’m a trustee. I drove Anne M., who was a founder member and only resigned two years ago, after forty years of doing great work for the buildings of the area. Sadly her husband Ian, who is also a member, is not well so couldn’t join us. The meeting was being held in the Pavilion of Stroud’s Museum in the Park

We always have a guest speaker at the AGM to make the event more appealing and tonight it was Jon Lowe’s turn. He is also one of our trustees having joined only a few years ago. Jon is a nationally renowned Heritage Consultant and had agreed to talk on the subject of ‘Heritage Significance: informing change’, which he illustrated with images of a large selection of buildings that he had been involved with as a heritage consultant. We hadn’t realised what an astonishing variety of buildings that was. With his job he has had access to the whole of every building and its site, their histories, any pertinent records and of course original architect’s plans and drawings.

We were taken on a swift tour of some amazing projects which included:
– two different and unique County Hall buildings being separately repurposed for a more modern age, 
– the former Grimsby Ice Factory, which is described as one of the top ten industrial buildings of note and at risk in Europe,
– a huge town house in Cadogan Square, Westminster, 
– an eighteenth century town house in Dean Street, Soho, which had been totally gutted by fire 
– and a notable and very beautiful castle in Kent. 

One of his earliest projects was the wholly unique ‘Harris Lebus - the largest furniture factory in the world’, where they discovered acres and acres of 2nd World War underground air raid shelters for the workers which no-one currently knew existed under the building. 

Finally he presented one of the most staggering and difficult projects which was the former Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, site of the H Block protests during the Troubles.

I’ve added a few ‘Extras’ to show a small sample of some of the buildings. It was a wonderful talk. Thank you Jon.