Historic Buildings

Mark ‘writes and draws’ to bring moribund buildings and their surroundings back to life. He is familiar with most historic types of British and Irish architecture.  Even the largest archaeological contractors benefit from the expertise he supplies.

A direct encounter with the building is all-important to this approach:
What matters? – existing surveys and resources + strategic measurement, description and photography.  The example here shows how such minimal focused recording was combined with the study of existing records (including a view by one JMW Turner) to allow a radical re-interpretation of St-Mary-at-Finchley (Greater London) for the Diocese. 

The suburb went from being a genteel dormitory town to a densely populated slum.  The church had to be greatly expanded and was later bombed. The analysis demonstrated the adventurous but unrecorded alterations carried out. The 15th-century roof structure was bodily removed and replaced (brown grid) in a new position on new walls.  This had misled researchers ever since.