SPAB Magazine Summer 2025

The Summer 2025 edition of the SPAB Magazine celebrates imaginative and respectful contemporary approaches to new designs for old buildings with three well-illustrated examples: additions to Darwin College and St John’s College, Cambridge, and the integration of new design with a ruinous single-storey stone agricultural building in North Ayrshire, with the design approach behind each case explained. It should hardly need stating that the encouragement of good contemporary contextual architecture is an important argument against easy reversion to pastiche.

It is also a timely reminder that the advice in the first version of the National Planning Policy Framework (very regrettably not replicated in subsequent iterations) was that ‘planning policies and decisions should not attempt to impose architectural styles or particular tastes and they should not stifle innovation, originality or initiative through unsubstantiated requirements to conform to certain development forms or styles’.

Periodic exhortations to create excellence in architecture in historic settings seem to be cyclical without necessarily much evidence of a general improvement. Some readers can trace these pleas in the modern era at least to the ill-fated Building in Context publication in 2001 (jointly by English Heritage and CABE). Excellence is seemingly always reliant on enlightened, well-funded clients and an absence of value-engineering.

This article originally appeared in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 184, published in September 2025.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

Related articles on Designing Buildings Conservation.

• Conservation area.
• Conservation.
• Heritage.
• Historic environment.
• IHBC articles.
• IHBC.
• SPAB Magazine Spring 2025.
• SPAB Magazine Winter 2024.
• SPAB Magazine autumn 2023.
• SPAB Magazine Spring 2023.
• SPAB Magazine Spring 2024.
• SPAB Magazine summer 2023.
• SPAB Magazine Winter 2023.