AIA Awards : Recent Prizewinners

Some of the AIA award winners at the Lincoln 2009 conference. L to R: Professor Angus Buchanan (President), David Lyne (Newletter Award), Pete Joseph (Journal Award) and Kim Jurecki (Student Fieldwork Award). Photo: Mark Sissons

THE DOROTHEA AWARD FOR CONSERVATION 2009

The Dorothea Award for 2009 went to the Pump House Steam & Transport Museum Trust, home of the Lea Valley Experience, on the strength of the progress made on the completed and ongoing projects, and the records of volunteer participation, financial control and future planning.

The museum is not only concerned with the preservation of the two unique Marshall pumping engines, which with their building are classified as Grade II, but are amassing, displaying and explaining a collection of equipment and artefacts covering the whole of the extremely varied trades of the Lea Valley, including sparsely represented electrical manufacturing and also the history of the day to day requirements of the local inhabitants. The section on fire fighting equipment alone is excellent. More details can be seen on the website: www.leavalleyexperince.co.uk.

FIELDWORK AND RECORDING AWARDS 2009

The winner of the Student Award this year was Kim Jurecki for her MA thesis Derwent Valley Mill World Heritage Site Landscape project: Cromford and Belper Survey Transects. Kim attended the Lincoln conference to collect her prize and gave an excellent presentation about her work. She showed how with modern technology, a handheld PDA, landscape surveys could be carried out and recorded. Walking two 5 x 1km transects across the Derwent Valley in the areas around Belper and Cromford, Kim recorded all sites predating Arkwright’s arrival in the area. She recorded the data on digital maps and in her thesis discusses the evidence for each transect in a number of themes including farming, mining, and quarrying.

Following her research she makes a number of recommendations for further study which includes work looking at the mining heritage of the area, survey of the quarry works and the Hazelwood and Lumb grange kilns, Hazelwood Moated grange and Willersley Castle. She also highlights there is further work to be done on the Belper Nailers Cottages, Bonsall Barns and the model farms established by Strutt. Her work shows how the landscape itself can be used as an artefact and how we can use the larger picture to try and ascertain the impact on existing farming and industries that people such as Arkwright and Strutt may have had when they arrived in the eighteenth-century Derwent Valley.

RESTORATION GRANTS 2009

Following a very generous donation to the Association of a sum of money to fund the restoration of significant historic industrial buildings and artefacts and the advertising of the AIA Restoration Grants earlier this year, Council is pleased to announce that the following grants have been awarded:

• Scottish Maritime Museum has been awarded a grant of £2,750 towards the restoration of the original vertical cross-tube boiler from the Clyde puffer VIC 32.
• South Yorkshire Trades Historical Trust has been awarded a grant of £5,000 towards the restoration of the stone slate roof of the Hoylandswaine Nail Forge.
• Beamish North of England Open Air Museum has been awarded a grant of £14,000 towards the restoration of two Londonderry Chaldron Waggons.
• Boat Museum, Ellesmere Port has been awarded a grant of £15,000 towards the restoration of Box Boat No 337 and boxes.

We will be reporting on the progress of all these projects in future editions of IA News.

PUBLICATIONS AWARDS 2009

Newsletter Award: Leicestershire Industrial History Society Newsletter, Spring 2009, with runner up Focus on Industrial Archaeology, No.71, December 2008 (Hampshire IA Society).

Journal Award: Journal of the Trevithick Society, No.35, 2008. Other entries were the Hampshire IA Society Journal, No.16, 2008, and the Norfolk IA Society Journal, Vol. 8 No.2, 2007.

Occasional Publications Award: Derek Brumhead et al, The Kinder Reservoir and its Railways, New Mills Heritage Centre, 2008. Other entries were Alan & Glenys Crocker, eds. Surrey Industrial History Society Group Awards, SIHG, 2008, and Peter Billson, Thomas Bridgett and Company, Derbyshire Archaeological Society,2007.

THE DOROTHEA AWARD FOR CONSERVATION 2008

The 2008 Dorothea prize was awarded to The Kew Bridge Steam Museum volunteers for the conservation and restoration of the 70-inch Bull Type Cornish engine, still on its original site. One of five original steam pumping engines situated at Kew Bridge Steam Museum, West London, the former Brentford pumping station, The engine was built by Harvey & Co. of Hayle between 1857 and 1859 and ran until the station was decommissioned in 1944.This type of engine was developed in Cornwall in the late 18th century by Edward Bull in direct competition with the conventional beam engines being produced by Boulton & Watt. Bull's design dispensed with the need for the massive cast iron beam and large engine house which were typical of the conventional Watt beam engine. One of the major advantages of this configuration was that the Bull engines were cheaper to buy than beam engines as they were much more compact and easier to erect, needing considerably smaller engine houses and requiring fewer metal castings. Bull's design, however, fell foul of the James Watt patent and he was forced to stop selling them, manufacture only recommencing after the patent had expired. It took off again by the using the Cornish cycle of steam expansion in the 1830s.

The picture shows the TV presenter Anna Ford performing the operation initiation ceremony on 12 May 2008. The award was accepted at the AIA conference by Nick Morgan, secretary of the Bull Engine Restoration Committee.

THE PETER NEAVERSON AWARD

This is a new award to honour the memory of Peter Neaverson, a long-standing Council member and joint Editor of Industrial Archaeology Review for nearly twenty years. It is given for outstanding scholarship in industrial archaeology. The first of these awards was made to last year’s Rolt Memorial Lecturer, Dr Colin Rynne of the University of Cork, for his magnificent Industrial Ireland 1750 – 1930: an Archaeology. This well illustrated book strikes a nice balance between the two sides in the current debates about the future directions of industrial archaeology, setting the scene in the first chapter but then covering familiar topics such Animal, Wind and Water Power, Roads and Bridges, Textiles and so on.

Winner 2008
Tone Works, Wellington Somerset (NBR 76469 ISSN 1749 8775)
Survey and analysis of buildings, power systems and machinery by Mike Williams and Lucy Jessop.
A detailed piece of recording work by English Heritage. The report combines detailed recording of the buildings and machinery of this textile finishing works owned by Fox Brothers with surviving documentary evidence painting a detailed picture of the site and how it functioned and evolved over time.

Initiative Award 2008
Barlavington, West Sussex, Duncton Water Mill Report by Ron Martin, Sussex Industrial Archaeology Society.
An excellent example of the recording of a complex site. The detailed drawings reveal the development of the site and give some insight into how it functioned. This entry highlights the important work local societies do by recording local sites thus adding to the national data of our industrial heritage.

Student Award 2008
Under Slate Grey Victorian Sky (University of Manchester MA Archaeological Field Practice) by Lee Gregory.
An excellent piece of research which married excavation evidence with census data to create a picture of the the Victorian Slums of Ancoats. Not only were the buildings examined but also the community that inhabited them, a mixture of Irish and Italian immigrants, distributed amongst local people who were predominately employed in the textile trades. To these people the area was not a slum but their home.

PUBLICATION AWARDS

These received a lot of entries this year as a result of our new leaflet but please keep them coming.
The Occasional Publications Award went to Ken Redmore, Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, for his Ploughs, Chaff Cutters and Steam Engines, a well illustrated account of various agricultural implement makers in Lincolnshire.
The Journals Award was presented to Alan Brittan of the Leicester Industrial History Society for a memorial issue of their journal which commemorated two of their former members, Dick Thomson and Peter Neaverson. Peter had been the Editor of this journal for twenty years and Alan republished – with much better maps – some of the articles with which Peter had been involved over the years.
The Newsletters Award - a category for which we had the largest number of entries – went once again to the Waterworks Museum, Hereford, for their Waterworlds, Autumn, 2007. This is produced on glossy paper which resulted in excellent reproduction of the many photographs it contained. This award was received by Derek Duffett on behalf of the Museum.

ESSAY AWARD

The aim of this award particularly is to encourage younger people to send in essays often written as part of their courses on industrial or post-medieval archaeology. This year’s winner was Hilary Orange of University College, London, for her essay based on her PhD research on public perceptions and experiences of Cornish tin and copper mining landscape, entitled’ Industrial Archaeology: its place within the academic discipline, the public realm and the heritage industry’. We wish her every success in her future.