At Risk

English Heritage has released its updated At Risk Register for 2014, and out of curiosity I looked up the results for Essex, and found that we have sixty seven heritage sites at risk, thirty three listed buildings, twenty one scheduled monuments, twelve conservation areas and a garden.

I had no idea that most of the endangered ancient monuments even existed.  A friend lived in Great Horkesley for several years without my ever discovering that it had a small multivallate hill fort. Even now I do know I had to look up the meaning of multivallate, which means having three or more concentric lines of defence.  However, the Great Horkesley hillfort is steadily being ploughed up.  Some of the more recent defences aren't faring much better.  Beacon Hill Fort at Harwich, a late nineteenth and twentieth century coastal artillery fortification, is on a declining trend, with extensive significant problems and in need of management.  Several of the Martello towers are in poor condition, essentially because they are not used for anything and are gently leaking.

The same phrases crop up repeatedly throughout the report, and I presume that in conservation circles they all carry precise weight and meaning, like the words of the shipping forecast, where 'slight', 'moderate' and 'good' all describe calibrated degrees of wave height or visibility, and aren't just chit chat like the TV weather forecaster's spits and spots of rain.  Martello towers in English Heritage speak do not gently leak, they suffer from water ingress and loss of render.

Colchester's Jumbo is on the list.  It would be, really.  The register notes that it has been sold to a new owner, a commercial company who is committed to its conversion if possible.  I wish they would do something with Jumbo.  I was slightly surprised to see Spring Valley Mill on the list, having not grasped that it was as old as it is, dating from the eighteenth century.  It sits in the bottom of a small and unexpected valley not far from Ardleigh, on a lane that's a handy rat run if you want to avoid the Ardleigh level crossing, but so narrow you hope not to meet anything by the mill, and I did notice the last time I passed that the building was now held up by scaffolding where it fronted the highway.

Several of our churches have made their way on to the register, including to my dismay the lovely St George's in Great Bromley.  Grade I listed, dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with a double hammerbeam roof with surviving medieval polychrome decoration, the south porch masonry and roof have been found to be in urgent need of repairs.  It got English Heritage and lottery grants in 2012 to sort out the clerestory windows, so let's hope it gets lucky again.  It is a beautiful building, and I should like to have a proper look at it when I'm not attending a funeral. Two churches in Colchester are also new entries, including St Peter's in North Hill which I don't remember ever noticing, but then I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've walked up North Hill.  Damp is the recurring theme, missing and slipped slates and leaking windows, while poor St Botolph's suffers from abundant vegetation in its joints.

In St Osyth the Augustinian priory continues to decay.  I always think it is a great shame that this never fell into the hands of English Heritage at some point during the past century.  It is a superb complex which ought to be saved for the nation, and would be fascinating for visitors.  As it is there is no public access, just a series of local rows about parking, and planning wrangles about whether houses should be built on part of its remaining estate to finance restoration.  Not only the priory, but the whole conservation area of St Osyth, is considered to be At Risk, in poor condition and deteriorating.  I didn't think it looked that bad, the last time I was there, though I couldn't argue with English Heritage's assessment that the condition of the whole of Clacton seafront is very bad (actually, I could.  The historic seafront gardens were restored at the millennium and are still quite nice), but at least the trend is said to be improving.

The one historic garden on the register didn't surprise me at all.  Easton Lodge at Little Easton holds the battered remnants of a major Harold Peto commission, with interesting historical associations to one of Edward VII's mistresses, Daisy Countess of Warwick, the babbling brook.  Its last owners did a valiant job of trying to resuscitate the gardens, only unfortunately they are situated within 500 metres of where the end of the new runway will be, if Stansted is ever extended.  No heritage or funding body will put money into the project.  The fact that only one of the ninety three historic gardens judged to be at risk nationally is in Essex is, I'm afraid, not a testament to our success in safeguarding our history so much as due to the fact that Essex didn't have many historic gardens in the first place.  And somebody could get a thesis out of explaining why that is.