Gibbs, Clemency Columba Alice; (2024) Facadism in London: How Significance and Value are Assigned in the Management of the Historic Built Environment. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Facadism is a wide-reaching term that is used to describe a variety of urban development projects that privilege the façade of a building above other elements. Though facadism practices have been prevalent in England 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’. Focusing on one category of facadism practices–the façade retention of historic buildings–this thesis looks beyond the existing literature to suggest that facadism practices reveal more urgent concerns. These concerns relate to how heritage is understood within the management framework of England’s planning system 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. Facadism 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 and local 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. Conceptualising façade retention as a physical manifestation of the gap that exists between how heritage is understood within critical heritage theory and how it is assessed in practice, this thesis explores how the former can productively inform England’s heritage management framework. This research was funded by The London Arts and Humanities Partnership.

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