Conservation Area Review Project - TrustNews Mar 19
Volunteers from CWT have been working with Winchester City Council on their Winchester Future 50 Project which was funded for two years by a grant from Historic England. The project is to pilot a new way of obtaining and storing information on the Conservation Area. Many other groups have also been involved covering different aspects of the project. It is hoped that the information will be stored on a GIS mapping system that will allow planners and others to click on an address on a map and pull up the information and pictures that they require.
We are very grateful to all those from the Trust who volunteered their time to take part in the first phase of this effort which covered listed buildings in St Giles Hill and in roughly a quarter of the walled town. In all we covered 105 listed buildings. The photos resulting from this can be found on the Trust website at www.cityofwinchestertrust.co.uk/archive/core/buildings.shtml where Barrie Brinkman kindly created an extra column (far right) and processed all the photos submitted to him. Besides taking photos of buildings our volunteers also filled out a survey form with questions about the condition of the building. One of the primary objects of the trial was to detect snags with this survey form. As you might expect we found quite a few. As with all surveys which try to make it easy to complete much of this was a tick box exercise. But then sometimes you need to be able to tick more than one box. For example “Are the gutters and downpipes UPVC or metal?” Sometimes they might be one or the other but they might be a mixture of both. The same kind of ambiguity might arise over window frames or doors. Some questions were marked as mandatory, and one can understand why, but then you cannot proceed with the survey entry unless some answer has been given to the mandatory question. Our volunteers used paper copies of the survey form so they were able to indicate where there were issues, but the survey is designed to be one which can be completed on line, using an app on a mobile phone. Some of the information required was not anything that volunteers could be expected to know, such as the Unique Property Reference Number for the building (something that planners use).
All of these issues have been reported back to WCC and some have been taken on board for the next phase of the trial in which we are participating. This is looking at Buildings of Faith and their surroundings. We have been given the relevant UPRN numbers for all the buildings to be covered and there is greater flexibility regarding the data required for this part of the project in part because there is no real uniformity in the buildings or their surroundings. It remains to be seen how this bit proceeds. We have ten or eleven volunteers involved in this phase and thank them in advance for giving over some of their time to it. It is hoped that research and picture taking for this part might go beyond what is required by WCC and form the basis for an exhibition the Trust could host at the Heritage Centre as part of Heritage Open Days in September 2019.
So if any Trust member has information on interesting buildings of faith that we might not know about and should be added to our list please let us know. We already have the C of E churches for central Winchester. In addition, even for the C of E churches, if you know interesting stories about their history such as “Who built them and why?” - “Are any notable (interesting) people buried there or been associated with the place?" - “Do you have any old photos?” - “Are there any notable/unusual architectural features?” - please also get in touch.