(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Façadism is a wide-reaching term that is used to describe a variety of urban development projects (though its suffix deceptively implies a coherent set of criteria) that privilege the façade of a building above other elements. Though facadism practices have ben prevalent in the UK since the 1960s, there is a lack of critical academic literature on the subject, with existing commentaries largely limited to polemics that focus on the abstract and moralistic concept of a building’s ‘integrity’. This paper looks beyond this literature to suggest that facadism practices in fact reveal more urgent concerns relating to how heritage is conceived within the management framework of the UK’s planning system, and how and whom this conception serves to benefit or overlook. Facadism practices, as applied to historic buildings, highlight the gap that continues to exist between critical heritage theory and conservation practice. Within the field of Critical Heritage Studies, heritage enjoys acceptance as denoting more than a physical monument, or a monument’s physicality, focusing on heritage as a discursive process of production rather than an entity to be consumed. Façadism practices reduce an historic building to a visual and material stimulus, suggesting that conservation practice continues to be rooted in a values-based system of assessment that privileges historical and aesthetic qualities over more transitory qualities such as use and association. Those communities whose heritage is not so readily attached to physical objects can therefore be at a disadvantage when the ‘heritage value’ of a site is assessed in the context of urban redevelopment. This paper considers two case studies from the Spitalfields area of East London that formed part of the PhD fieldwork to explore these wider concerns and hopes to offer some preliminary solutions to the problems identified.