- Historically, it was economic to promote
the on site repair of buildings through the skills of carpenters,
stonemasons, plasters, tilers, bricklayers and many other craftsmen
and women.
- Today, advantage is taken of mass
production techniques to manufacture pre-formed components for rapid
assembly in replacement rather than repair.
- The shift from on-site repair to the
fitting of pre-formed replacement components has impacted
traditional craft skills and how they are taught.
- It has been established (Traditional
Building Craft Skills Survey. National Heritage Training Group 2005)
that there are nearly five million buildings in England that were
built before 1919.
- The National Heritage training Group has
calculated that a workforce of approaching ninety thousand is needed
to maintain the stock of diverse and valuable built heritage.
- The Building Crafts and Conservation Trust
assumes that members of such a building conservation workforce would
give an average thirty years service on site. On this basis, in the
region of three thousand craftsmen must be trained to join the
ninety thousand strong work force each year in order to sustain it.
- Accordingly, the Trust is dedicated to
promote the means by which three thousand craftsmen can be trained
yearly to respond to the repair demands of buildings constructed
anything between one and eight hundred years ago.
The Trust explores this objective in its paper
“Training in Building Conservation” accessed from the Home page of this
website.
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