Director's Notes May 2009

Our regular cycle of newsletters has been on pause while this year’s theme, House Histories, has been getting underway, helping open out architectural history to the wider community and encouraging people to make use of the excellent facilities available to them – free – across Edinburgh to explore the history of their places and buildings. It is an opportunity to explore both the familiar and the new, and we’ve had an interesting time rootling around the archives – more on our results here.

We’ve also been gearing up the printing presses, with the publication of our first two Historic Home guides, guiding owners through best practice in relation to their properties in the World Heritage Site, in this instance attempting to demystify the realms of ironmongery and historic paintwork. There are a number of other areas we will be tackling over the coming months, and we would be interested to hear from owners as to the sorts of guidance they could do with. These build on the excellent work in Historic Scotland’s Technical Advice Notes, focusing down on the World Heritage Site.

Also hot off the press is the first edition of our new Journal – an opportunity to explore the architecture and history of the World Heritage Site through the eyes of the EWH team and others with an interest in it, such as architect Neil Gillespie and artist Hugh Buchanan. The printed version is for subscribing Friends of EWH, but you can download a PDF here. As ever we’re interested to hear what you think about it.

As ever, all of this information is available on our website, which is fast growing into a major resource on the World Heritage Site. For those seeking more specialised information, our reference library at 5 Charlotte Square is open by appointment with the office. It is a resource that we will seek to grow, although we could really do with a little assistance from somebody with specialised libraral skills to pull it into shape. Please contact the office if you would like to help - info@ewht.org.uk

On World Heritage day we explored the themes of context and confidence in relation to World Heritage Sites. We were delighted with the strong support we received for this event, with every available space taken (including one by the Leader of the Council, Jenny Dawe, who also contributed to the discussion) to hear our speakers – John Bury, the new Head of Planning at the City of Edinburgh, Malcolm Cooper from Historic Scotland and John Rodger from the Blaenavon World Heritage Site.