Is Our Obsession With Preserving Heritage Architecture Suffocating the Future of Our Cities?
Climate emergency, housing crisis, cultural memory, these are just some of the competing demands pulling architectural conservation practice in different directions. It’s an existential reckoning for the field: what are we trying to protect? Whose history is it anyway?
One weekday morning in the London Borough of Southwark, a municipal employee peers through the chain-link fence at a former 1960s community centre, derelict for the last five years and now home only to pigeons and the odd illicit rave. He’s a housing developer, and he’s on site to discuss with Historic England officials what can and can’t be done with the building. He gestures to the brutalist concrete structure opposite. “Look at that, right? This amazing building.” He smiles.
Historic England is excited about it too, as he’s here to find out. Last year they awarded it Grade II listing, which means it’s of special interest architecturally, and any changes to its exterior require consent. The local council wants to retrofit the building to reduce its carbon footprint (wrap it in insulation, install ground-source heat pumps and solar arrays on the flat roof) and convert it into affordable housing, with community rooms on the ground floor and private homes above. But Historic England has rebuffed the council on almost every proposal. They can’t wrap the building in insulation because it would obscure the “honest expression” of the concrete frame. They can’t double-glaze the single-pane windows because that would damage the “architectural integrity” of the original design. They can’t put solar panels on the roof because that would “damage the roofline’s purity.” And so on. While the council sweats to meet net-zero targets, and three streets away there are families living in temporary housing with mouldy walls and rats in the ceiling voids, this building stands empty and locked up for no one in particular but protected in the name of cultural memory. Monument to a philosophy that seems increasingly about protecting the past at all costs.
It’s a scenario that’s repeated all over Britain and beyond: at the junction of the three horsemen of the apocalypse—heritage conservation, climate emergency, and social equity—something is breaking. Heritage policy has for decades privileged buildings over people; it’s time to fix that imbalance. The question is no longer whether we should preserve our architectural heritage (hardly anyone will argue that we shouldn’t protect genuinely significant buildings), but rather how, what, and for whom. Are we preserving history or the system that protects it? Is heritage the patrimony of all, or has our approach created a system that in practice privileges the few? Is it possible that our cities have become open-air museums?
Part 1: The Pillars of the Temple: How We Got Here
To understand the dilemmas that we now face, we need to understand the assumptions upon which conservation practice is based. The 1964 Venice Charter, formally the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, remains the single most influential document on conservation policy and practice the world over. Created by architects, archaeologists, and government officials in post-war Europe, when many nations had just suffered the catastrophic loss of their architectural heritage, the Charter formalised a philosophy designed to prevent further loss and safeguard what was left.
The core principles of the Charter, material authenticity above all else, with the original fabric of buildings considered irreplaceable and sacrosanct; the principle of distinguishability, any new interventions must be clearly identifiable as modern and not historic forgeries; and comprehensive documentation and research, with buildings to be treated as historical documents to be read and preserved in their “authentic” state—these principles were revolutionary for their time. They were, in the immediate post-war context, absolutely necessary. They set about rebuilding cultural identity in nations that had been traumatised by conflict and loss, they helped stop the wholesale destruction of historic city centres that had characterised both wartime bombing and the subsequent zeal for modernist urban renewal, and they established conservation as a serious, scholarly discipline rather than a hobby for eccentrics.
But there’s a tension at the heart of the system that would eventually tear it all apart. Principles that were developed for ancient monuments—medieval cathedrals, Renaissance palaces, archaeological sites—have been applied ever more widely over the decades to an ever-expanding range of buildings. Victorian warehouses were listed in the late 20th century. Post-war brutalist estates and 1960s office blocks in the early 21st. The heritage architects who founded conservation practice in the 1960s could hardly have imagined that their guiding principles, developed specifically to protect buildings centuries and often centuries old, would one day be applied to buildings barely fifty years old, built in many cases as part of a radical urban transformation and thus themselves the products of that transformation.
The Venice Charter had been written for a world of relative stasis, where the big threat to heritage was either demolition or insensitive modernisation, not a climate emergency, a worldwide housing crisis, or exponential technological and social change. It assumed a “freeze-frame” approach to history, where buildings were fixed objects rather than evolving, living things. And it’s this core assumption that now finds itself in direct conflict with the demands of the 21st century.
Part 2: The Three Modern Clashes: Where Conservation Fails
The first of three modern clashes with the current state of the world where conservation policy and practice falls down:
The Climate Clash: Heritage vs. the Green Transition
Britain’s building stock is some of the oldest and least energy efficient in Europe. Historic buildings (which make up c.20% of the UK’s building stock) are responsible for a higher than average share of our carbon emissions. But the very laws and regulations put in place to protect these buildings often serve as the barrier to the kinds of intervention that are urgently needed to decarbonise the built environment.
The problem is systemic and widespread. Listed building consent procedures routinely obstruct or at least delay the installation of external wall insulation which, by its very nature, obscures original brickwork or render. Double-glazing is frequently refused on the grounds that it would “alter the appearance” of windows, even where the original single-pane glass is letting out all the heat and driving up energy bills. Solar panels are a “non-starter” on “sensitive” rooflines. Ground-source heat pumps require excavation that could disturb archaeological deposits. Air-source heat pumps are too ugly to look at. Secondary glazing, which at least allows the building fabric to remain unaltered, has only marginal improvements in thermal performance, and the list goes on.
Take the example of a Victorian primary school in Bristol. Built in 1887, listed in 1995, with coved ceilings, single-glazed windows, and solid brick walls, the building was costing the local authority over £40k per year in heating bills. Worse still, the kids were freezing in winter and the carbon footprint of the school was simply unconscionable. The council proposed retrofitting the building with external insulation, replacing the original windows with slim-profile double-glazed versions that closely resembled the originals, and installing solar panels on the rear roof slope, away from the street.
EH objected to all three. The external insulation would “damage the significance of the building by obscuring the original brickwork and altering the proportions of the building.” The replacement windows, despite being designed to exactly match the originals, would “introduce inappropriate modern materials to the building.” The solar panels, even on the rear slope, would be visible from some vantage points and thus would “damage the setting of the building.”
Dr. Sarah Pemberton, a building physicist who has worked on a large number of heritage retrofit projects, calls the situation “a carbon catastrophe dressed up as cultural protection.” She explains, “We have the technology now to retrofit almost any building to modern energy standards whilst still retaining its character and significance. But we’re prevented from doing so by a conservation philosophy that considers any change to be damage. The irony is that, without retrofitting, these buildings will die anyway. Insulation will keep them warm and dry and protected from vandalism, but it won’t protect them from climate change—extreme weather events, flooding, heat, you name it. They won’t survive long-term unless we make the necessary changes.”
The contradiction is obvious: the most sustainable building in theory is the one that already exists, embodied carbon has already been spent, materials already extracted and processed. If that existing building cannot be adapted, with changes made to how it functions to make it efficient and viable in the 21st century, it becomes a liability rather than an asset. We’re effectively preserving buildings to death.
The Social Clash: Preservation vs. Progress & Equity
Beyond the environmental crisis there’s a more subtle but no less serious social challenge. Heritage designation, in many contexts, has become a tool of exclusion, a way of protecting not just buildings but social homogeneity, property values, and the status quo.
Conservation area designation in particular has been weaponised against density, affordable housing, and architectural innovation, the kinds of changes that have always characterised healthy cities. In places like Kensington & Chelsea, Islington, or Edinburgh’s New Town, conservation area status has, in effect, become an obstacle to significant new development. Extensions are scrutinised to the point of absurdity. Dormer windows are not allowed. Rear additions must be “subsidiary” in character and design. The effect is to render such areas de facto frozen in time, accessible only to the already wealthy, while housing need elsewhere spirals.
The controversy over the Robin Hood Gardens estate in East London is a classic example of this clash. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, completed in 1972, the brutalist social housing estate was both championed and hated by architects and critics in equal measure. When demolition was proposed in 2009, an active campaign emerged to have it listed. They failed, and the estate was demolished between 2017 and 2019, to be replaced by a higher-density mixed-tenure development.
The debate around it was polarised. Preservationists argued that Robin Hood Gardens was an important example of post-war social housing architecture, that the innovative “streets in the sky” approach deserved to be preserved. Residents told a very different story. The estate, they said, was poorly maintained, isolating, and not fit for modern life. Damp and cold due to the concrete construction, the deck-access design meant dark, threatening corridors where once there were traditional front doors. For them, the estate was no architectural treasure but a symbol of failed social policy.
Dr. Aisha Malik, a sociologist who specialises in housing and urban inequality, argues that the Robin Hood Gardens debate really only asked one question, one that conservation practice almost never asks: “Whose heritage are we protecting, and who benefits from that protection? The architects and critics who were writing about Robin Hood Gardens didn’t have to live there. For them it was an aesthetic object, a design concept made real. For the residents it was their daily reality, which for many of them was a difficult one. Conservation can be a form of violence if you prioritise the architectural significance of a building over the lived experience of the people who use it.”
The same tension between buildings and people applies at the neighbourhood level. Conservation area status, in its protection of “character”, often acts as a brake on the kind of densification that cities desperately need to address housing need. It’s a tool that stops the construction of additional storeys, the subdivision of large houses into flats, the development of backland sites. It enshrines low density as a value even as homelessness rises and young people are priced out of the cities they work in.
In practice the effect is to create a system that, albeit inadvertently, serves the interests of existing property owners (older, richer, whiter on average than the population as a whole) over and above those of those in need of housing. Heritage, in this way, can become a form of exclusion, a way of saying no more people here dressed up as the language of cultural protection.
A Practical Problem with a Philosophical Cause
The root cause of this practical problem is philosophical. The Venice Charter’s principle of “authenticity” is conceptually at odds with how buildings exist in time and space.
The Charter treats buildings as inert historical objects, frozen in time. Conservation is about preserving a particular state of a building, often the moment of original construction or some other arbitrarily-chosen “significant” date. Any subsequent intervention is suspect, a corruption of the true “original”.
But this idea is an illusion. It is a legal fiction, like the corporate body of the Nationstate. It ignores the fact that most buildings are palimpsests, layered histories of change and adaptation, responding to new needs and technologies over time. The building is not a frozen object but an accumulation of events.
Take a classic Georgian townhouse in Bath. Conservation purists would want to strip it back to “original” Georgian features: sash windows with crown glass, lime plaster walls, open fireplaces, no bathroom, no kitchen as we would recognise it. This was never the “original” house, at least not in the way the Venice Charter implies. The building was owned and inhabited by real people, who would have updated and adapted it throughout its life. Bath was a spa town, so by the mid-19th century many buildings were being “modernised” with Victorian bathrooms and kitchen fittings. Edwardian owners would have added electric lights. Mid-century tenants added central heating. Each generation adapted and modified, whilst still recognising the building as essentially Georgian.
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), founded by William Morris in 1877, knew this intuitively. Morris’s maxim “Repair, don’t Restore” was aimed at Victorian medieval restoration, which showed buildings as they might have looked in the 12th century when in reality they were much later (13th, 14th, or even 15th century). SPAB fought for honest repair and maintenance, not false restoration, accepting the right of buildings to show their age and history, to be adapted for new needs.
This philosophy has some contemporary expressions. In 2018 OMA’s BLOX building in Copenhagen incorporates the retained facade of an older brewery as part of a strikingly modern new complex, rather than a pastiche or a jarring juxtaposition. London’s Coal Drops Yard by Heatherwick Studio does something similar, with an imaginative set of interventions that retain the 19th-century coal storage buildings and their beautiful cast-iron architecture, whilst audaciously inserting a contemporary element: the “kissing” roofs that join two separate structures at a point.
These projects show an alternative to the Venice Charter: an approach that privileges continuity over stasis, heritage as an evolving process not a frozen object, an approach that allows buildings to accumulate histories rather than remaining fixed in an imagined moment.
Part 3: Beyond the Freeze-Frame: Models for a New Heritage
If the heritage sector continues to embrace this failing, 20th-century model of conservation, how should it approach buildings in the 21st century? We don’t have all the answers, but we see several lines of potential development emerging, which could together form the basis of a new, more dynamic, and ethically robust approach to conservation.
The “Living Heritage” Model is one which looks at heritage not as an object but as a process, and at buildings not as static museum pieces but as evolving entities. Rather than asking “how do we preserve this building in its current state?” it asks “how do we enable this building to continue serving its community whilst retaining what makes it significant?” Organisations like ICOMOS Australia are leading the way in this approach, which recognises that significance is often located not in the material fabric of a building but in its use, meaning, and social value. It might be that a church building’s significance lies primarily in its continued use as a place of worship and community gathering, not in the preservation of every Victorian pew or 1960s lighting fixture. This approach empowers adaptation in the service of continuity.
Carbon as Cultural Value is a related reframing, which suggests we should recognise enabling a building to function as a low-carbon asset as a form of cultural value in its own right. At the moment, when we consider the significance of a building, we look at its historical, architectural, artistic, and social value. We may recognise that enabling it to perform well in environmental terms would be nice, but we don’t think of it as a factor that in itself directly impacts on significance. But what if we flipped this around, and recognised that enabling a building to perform well in environmental terms is itself a form of cultural value, a way of ensuring that the building can continue to serve future generations rather than becoming an obsolete liability? This would involve integrating whole-life carbon assessment into our heritage significance evaluations, and might lead us to conclude that some interventions currently treated as “harmful” to significance are actually essential to a building’s long-term survival and relevance.
The “Civic Scaffolding” Approach is a term coined by architect and theorist Sam Jacob to describe the idea of protecting those elements of a building that contribute to the public realm – facades, rooflines, spatial relationships – whilst liberating interiors for more radical adaptation. This approach recognises that a building’s contribution to urban character often lies in its external presence and its relationship to the street, rather than in the preservation of every internal partition and service installation. A Victorian warehouse might retain its brick facade and industrial windows whilst its interior is completely reconfigured for modern use, including the installation of contemporary environmental systems.
All three of these approaches are based on the same underlying principles: they prioritise use over appearance, continuity over stasis, and social value over material purity. They recognise that heritage is not a fixed thing but a relationship between past, present, and future, and that change is an inherent part of that relationship. They empower change in the service of preservation, rather than treating all change as a threat.
Equally, they require new skills and new ways of thinking from those working in the conservation sector. The heritage architects of the 21st century cannot simply be a scholar of historical styles and construction techniques; they must also understand building physics, embodied carbon, social equity, and community engagement. They must be facilitators of change, not gatekeepers against it, and must ask not “how do we prevent this building from changing?” but “how do we enable this building to evolve in ways that respect its significance whilst serving contemporary needs?”
Part 4: A Manifesto for Adaptive Custodianship
This is not an argument for abandoning heritage conservation, but for transforming it – from a model of preservation to one of adaptive custodianship. Achieving this will require action on several fronts.
Policy Reform is an obvious place to start. The Listed Building Consent process should be streamlined for interventions that demonstrably improve environmental performance without significantly harming heritage significance. This might involve a “permitted development” approach for certain categories of work – internal insulation, secondary glazing, solar panels on non-principal elevations, heat pumps where not visible from the public realm – and a requirement for Historic England and its equivalents in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to demonstrate that any objection to a carbon-reduction measure is proportionate and that alternative approaches have been properly considered. The burden of proof should shift: rather than requiring applicants to prove that change is acceptable, conservation bodies should have to prove that preventing change is justified.
New Skills and Training are just as important. Conservation architecture courses must incorporate building physics, environmental design, and social equity into their curricula. UK Heritage architects must be trained not just in historical research and traditional materials but in retrofit strategies, thermal modelling, and community engagement. Professional bodies like RIBA and IHBC should develop new competency frameworks that reflect 21st-century challenges, and we need a generation of conservation professionals who see themselves as enablers of sustainable adaptation, not as guardians of material purity.
Finally, there is a need for Public Reframing – a shift in public understanding of what heritage is and why it matters. This means celebrating contemporary additions to historic buildings, not treating them as regrettable compromises, and telling stories about buildings as living entities that have always changed and adapted, not as frozen monuments. It means helping communities understand that the greatest threat to heritage is not sensitive adaptation but obsolescence – that buildings which cannot evolve to meet contemporary needs will ultimately be abandoned or demolished.
That reframing also has to confront the equity dimension – it must be honest about whose heritage is currently protected and whose is neglected, and recognise that conservation has often served the interests of the powerful and the privileged. A genuinely democratic approach to heritage would protect not just the grand and the beautiful but the ordinary and the everyday – the buildings that tell the stories of working-class communities, of immigrant populations, of marginalised groups. It would recognise that heritage value lies not just in architectural distinction but in social meaning and collective memory.
None of this will be easy, and it requires us to accept that we will sometimes get it wrong. The freeze-frame approach is reassuring in its certainty: if we change nothing, we cannot be accused of damaging significance. But that certainty is illusory. Buildings that cannot adapt will decay, become obsolete, or be demolished. The real question is not whether buildings will change but whether that change will be thoughtful, skilled, and responsive both to heritage significance and to contemporary needs.
Conclusion: The Palimpsest City
Picture again that empty community centre in Southwark. How would you solve that problem under a “living heritage” approach? This building’s heritage value isn’t in the specificity of every line of concrete: it’s in the heroic expression of the architecture, and in the building’s place in the post-war narrative of community provision. Keep the form, the tectonic honesty, the siting and relationship to the street. But free the inside: insulate from the inside, run the heating and hot water system and electrical services within the fabric, knock walls out and repurpose the interior spaces for modern community use and affordable housing. Put solar panels on the roof – not as a reluctant concession but as another chapter in the building’s biography, a clearly legible manifesto for environmental responsibility for future generations to read as part of this building’s story, just as we now read Victorian plasterwork on top of Georgian window openings.
All great cities are palimpsests. Layered texts in which each generation writes its chapter whilst the previous chapters remain visible beneath. Rome is a palimpsest. London is a palimpsest. Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol: all these are accumulations of interventions and adaptations and transformations and restorations and rebuilds stretching back centuries. 20th century conservation doctrine has in some ways been a vast success, but its legacy threatens to close the book. To declare that the story is finished, that no more chapters may be written.
But the story is not finished. Cities are not museums. They are living organisms, and if they are to survive they must be allowed to adapt and change. The most sustainable building is indeed the one that already exists: but only if we let it change. Heritage conservation must become heritage custodianship: a practice that honours the past not by freezing it in aspic but by allowing it to remain useful, relevant, and loved. Only then can our architectural heritage truly survive: not as a collection of preserved objects, but as a living part of the urban fabric, and continue to accumulate value and meaning with each passing generation.
