Heritage significance assessments to evaluate retrofit impacts
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2015-08-03

Retrofitting buildings inevitably impacts on their heritage significance. Although only 3% of the UK’s building stock is heritage designated (through ‘listing’), about 20% of the total is older than 100 years and could therefore be considered as being of heritage significance. Many of these historic buildings are located in urban settings and contribute significantly to cultural identity and place making. Government policy to mitigate climate change aims at significantly retrofitting the building stock to improve its energy performance. This will include the retrofitting of historic buildings. The retrofitting process should therefore be done in ways which minimise or prevent any negative impacts on the buildings’ heritage significance.
To allow easy, systematic and transparent assessments of the heritage significance of historic buildings and to balance these with the impacts of retrofit solutions, an assessment system has been developed as part of EFFESUS, a European project researching energy efficiency for historic districts. The system will be one of six modules of a Decision Support System to evaluate retrofit measures at district scale. The assessment system will allow for heritage significance assessments on the basis of building and urban elements and will be flexible with regard to the detail used, making it equally usable for buildings of minor heritage significance and monuments of high significance. The presentation will outline the conceptual model developed and illustrate it using case study examples.

Carsten Hermann, Historic Scotland