Aerial survey of the Skarne Housing Development in Whitfield, Dundee, in 1989.
Photograph reproduced by permission of the RCAHMS

Cumbernauld Town Centre, during partial demolition in 2000.
Photograph reproduced by permission of the RCAHMS

Smithycroft Secondary School, Glasgow, prior to demolition in 2001.
Photograph reproduced by permission of the RCAHMS

David Bryce (1803–76), Drum Castle in Aberdeenshire, watercolour on paper (c. 1875).
Photograph reproduced by permission of the RCAHMS

Basil Spence (1907–76), perspective drawing of Hutchesontown-Gorbals comprehensive development area, Area C (1958; the buildings were demolished in 1993).
Photograph reproduced by permission of the RCAHMS
(Spence, Glover and Ferguson Collection)

Canmore database at the website of the RCAHMS.
Screenshot: EAHN

‘Skills for the Future’: trainees consulting archive material, 2011.
Photograph reproduced by permission of the RCAHMS

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland

Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland
John Sinclair House
16 Bernard Terrace
Edinburgh EH8 9NX
+44 (0)131 662 1456

info@rcahms.gov.uk
www.rcahms.gov.uk
www.rcahms.gov.uk/facebook
www.twitter.com/rcahms

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EAHN colleagues visited the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), the state-funded body responsible for recording and disseminating information on Scotland’s historical built environment, on 7 September 2011. As a follow on from that visit, this article has a three-fold purpose. Firstly, it will provide an historical introduction to the architectural survey, recording, and archive collecting activities of RCAHMS. A key focus of the EAHN visit was to examine the role of recording, inventorying, and preserving post-war social housing within its European context. As a backdrop to that, the second section of this paper will briefly examine how the pioneering RCAHMS building survey work, begun in the mid-1980s, and architectural archive collecting in the 1990s, paved the way for a re-evaluation of this era in Scotland. Finally, the story will be brought up-to-date: today RCAHMS is Scotland’s national collection for the historic environment, and at its core is an online catalogue to more than fifteen million collection items and 290,000 monuments and sites throughout Scotland.

FOUNDATION
RCAHMS began as the first attempt at systematic nationwide heritage inventorying in 1908. A wide definition for this was adopted: ‘ancient and historical monuments connected with, or illustrative of, the contemporary culture, civilisation and conditions of life of the people of Scotland,’ and the terminal date of 1707 was also late for its time. Similar commissions were set up shortly later in England and Wales. From 1913, the government’s building preservation efforts took a different route. From that date, Scotland, unlike almost all other western European countries, developed a system sharply divided between RCAHMS, undertaking survey and dissemination, and Historic Scotland, responsible for listing and, in partnership with local authorities, historic building control. RCAHMS county-by-county inventories continued until 1992, independent from growing preservation responsibilities, but it entered a new era with the all-important incorporation of the Scottish National Buildings Record in 1966. Founded as a private initiative in 1941, SNBR carried out precautionary recording against threat of aerial attack, and crucially, it began collecting architectural drawings and archive.

RECORDING OUR RECENT PAST
Although almost unrecognisable from its original early-twentieth century form, the continuation of three original guiding principles—autonomy from preservation, breadth of survey and archive-gathering, and a threat-based remit—have enabled RCAHMS to provide an extensive and broad overview of Scotland’s post-war built environment through its collections and strategic surveys. These guiding principles are particularly relevant to the complexities often surrounding our large-scale post-war built environments, which have from the early 1990s been under considerable attack from the media and the general public alike, and are increasingly under threat of demolition. Since the mid-1980s, RCAHMS began making new records and from the 1990s actively collecting archive of Scotland’s post-war built environment in response to the increasing academic and heritage interest in that period.

RCAHMS autonomy from building preservation has enabled a dispassionate analysis of this, often controversial, Modern Movement period. Preserving or ‘listing’ large post-war ensembles such as peripheral housing schemes and new towns is a difficult process: surveying for posterity and archive gathering has proven less so. The very wide definition adopted in 1908, and still retained today, has allowed a broad-based approach to surveying and collecting. This is particularly well suited to the large collective post-war planning of entire new areas or redevelopment of nineteenth-century city slums.

How did RCAHMS set the pace for post-war building recording? It was the three-pronged late-1960s and 70s initiatives of threat-based survey, building archive gathering, and expanded building recording programmes out with the traditional inventories that enabled RCAHMS to shift its focus on to our more recent past, and fully exploit its broad remit. For the first time, a special niche for threat-based recording was established for RCAHMS under the 1969 Act: recording ‘listed’ buildings prior to demolition, and making that record available to the general public, was seen as the ‘last resort’ in the new conservation development control system. Up until the 1990s only a comparatively small number of post-war buildings were listed in Scotland, so this statutory remit had no real initial impact, but by the late 1990s it has proved extremely useful. Alongside this new threat-based role, a programme of recording building types under long-term threat was expanded to include further non-elite building types, including industrial ones. RCAHMS activity was hugely boosted in 1985 when the Scottish Industrial Archaeology Survey was transferred from Strathclyde University. It led the way with its systematic coverage of the vanishing traditional heavy industry in the 1980s and early 1990s.

This long-term threat-based approach was quickly extended to a wide range of non-industrial types under threat, ranging from Victorian lunatic asylums to Cold War defence sites, and coming forward to the mass post-war buildings now suddenly in many cases obsolete. The scale of the threat to Scotland’s post-war heritage over the last three decades is reflected in the RCAHMS collection, covering all significant post-war building types: hospitals and asylums, decommissioned post-Cold War defence facilities, factory closures, and young modernist churches burdened with technical problems. Following the decision to abandon the traditional RCAHMS inventory in 1986, a series of non-threat-based thematic and topographical surveys were set up to enhance the public archive. In particular, the Area Photographic Survey focussed mainly on urban areas, and chiefly consisted of images of post-war housing schemes, schools, hospitals, and new administrative and commercial town centres. In the late 1980s and early 90s the survey covered the post-war New Towns (East Kilbride, built from 1947; Glenrothes, from 1948; Cumbernauld, from 1957; Irvine, from 1962; and Livingston, from 1966). In the early 1990s it was greatly expanded with the introduction of low-level oblique aerial photography.

In terms of collecting post-war architects’ papers, it was the ambitious salvaging of office papers from Scottish architectural practices, threatened with closure and downsizing in the challenging financial climate of the early 1990s, that formed the core of RCAHMS holdings. The ground-breaking Scottish Survey of Architectural Practices (SSAP), set up in 1992, enabled RCAHMS, in collaboration with the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, to survey and selectively re-house just under 200,000 architectural papers. Although the majority of practices surveyed by SSAP were established prior to 1950, a large proportion of these date from the post-war period. These collections ranged from big-practice leading firms, to prolific regional practices, and to key influential designers in post-war Scotland.

RCAHMS has been making new records and actively collecting archive of Scotland’s post-war built environment for over twenty-five years; it continues to do so today. A significant addition to its expanding resource came in 2008 with the incorporation of The Aerial Reconnaissance Archive (TARA), which has greatly increased our twentieth century coverage of urban landscapes.

RCAHMS TODAY
In the mission statement, RCAHMS
identifies, surveys and analyses the historic and built environment of Scotland,
preserves, cares for, and adds to the information and items in its national collection, and
promotes understanding, education, and enjoyment through interpretation of the information it collects and the items it looks after.

Survey teams actively take photographs, create measured survey drawings, produce digital data and 3D models, and collate information on architecture, archaeology, industry, and maritime sites across the country. Programmes of work include the Threatened Buildings Survey, which has a statutory role to record A and B listed buildings which are under threat of demolition or alteration, and Thematic Surveys, which focus on types of architecture such as farm buildings or schools. The Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland provides information and images on over 2,400 properties of architectural or historic merit throughout the country that are considered to be at risk. The Aerial Survey programme enables large areas to be efficiently photographed and these images clearly demonstrate urban and rural change. RCAHMS also has an active programme of working with other national and local organisations on joint surveys, research projects, and publications.

These survey images and information are an important part of Scotland’s culture, enabling current and future generations to find out about the changing nature of Scotland’s places. An extensive education and outreach programme works with schools, universities and colleges, community groups, lifelong learners, and special interest groups to engage them with the archive.

EXTENSIVE ARCHIVES
The results of the survey programmes are added to the growing archive, which currently contains well over fifteen million items, including photographs from the 1840s, photograph albums, prints and drawings dating back to 1670, sketches, engravings, rare books, maps, and documents. A large collection of original drawings by architectural practices, engineering firms, and other companies are held for buildings in Scotland and elsewhere across the world. These include the work of renowned architects such as William Burn (1789–1870), William Playfair (1790–1857), Sir Robert Lorimer (1864–1929), and Sir Basil Spence (1907–76). RCAHMS also holds collections for other nationally important organisations such as the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, the Northern Lighthouse Board, and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

The National Collection of Aerial Photography includes 1.8 million images of Scotland and several million international images in The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives, thousands of which can be browsed online. This includes extensive coverage of European countries as well as views of military events such as the Normandy Landings in 1944 and liberation celebrations across capital cities in 1945, with the historical collection being used significantly by the European bomb disposal market.

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
The public Search Room gives extensive access to these Collections for browsing and researching, and RCAHMS has been at the forefront of making these images and information available online. The Canmore database currently gives access to over 150,000 images, and an increased digitisation programme is underway to make more images available. In addition, the online educational resource Scran contains over 366,000 images, sound clips, and movies sourced from museums, galleries, archives, and the media.

Social media has been embraced, with the use of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube to engage in dialogue with the public in a more informal way. As well as publicising the range of RCAHMS work and collections through tailored content such as online galleries, social media has enabled a wider promotion of engagement with the built heritage, reaching new audiences while sharing experiences with existing communities. RCAHMS was one of the first national collections in Scotland to enable user generated content and already over 16,000 images and over 1,200 text contributions have been uploaded to the Canmore database.

RCAHMS is working on several projects which include a major social media element. The Britain from Above project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and in partnership with English Heritage and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, is creating an interactive website using images from the Aerofilms collection from 1919–53. The public will be able to tag and comment on images, upload their own images, and create or amend wikis.

The Beyond Text project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, is consulting the public on how they would like RCAHMS online resources to develop, including image tagging, application programming interfaces, and thesaurus enhancement. Other AHRC-funded projects are enabling RCAHMS to enhance community engagement, building on previous projects such as Defending the Past and the award-winning Scotland’s Rural Past.

The Skills for the Future training programme is currently underway, supported by the HLF. Over three years, twenty-one trainees are being given the opportunity to gain practical experience and the key skills that will help them get jobs in archives, museums, and galleries in the future.

Philip Graham and Diane Watters
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland
Edinburgh