Reading and Writing Historic Buildings

Chaired by Matthew Bristow of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Communities with Rebecca Lane, senior architectural investigator for Historic England, with David Clark, secretary of the Oxfordshire Buildings Record and formerly president of the Vernacular Architecture Group.

This session will discuss how buildings and the built environment can be used as evidence for changes in settlement and population, social and economic history. It will look at evaluating and describing buildings and what they can show the local historian and any historian interested in place. Moreover, our experts will discuss how volunteer building recording groups work and hopefully how they can contribute to writing local histories such as those published by the Victoria County History.

The aim is to understand how to write about buildings in a way that is useful to those interested in both their architecture and their historical significance.