Blog

8-9 May is National Mills Weekend. Tag us in on social media to celebrate traditional wind and watermills. Repairs to our own windmill in Leicestershire will begin this summer.

SPAB member Caroline Murray explores the work of a key figure in the historic silk industry

Huddled beneath a vast sky, on the edge of a cliff, dwarfed by a hulking conical hill sits Holy Cross Church at Mwnt, Ceredigion. 

My favourite churches and chapels are the ones that sit close to the land, that look truly ancient, even to the untrained eye. Holy Cross is such a church. The humble, white-washed building with slate roof was built around in the 13th century, but it is suspected that people were worshipping on this site for much longer, since around 410-700 AD.  

Communications officer Felicity enjoys the illusions of a historically-informed 21st century theatre.

Mary, Ethel and Violet Pinwill were three extraordinary women who worked as professional woodcarvers in Ermington and then Plymouth, Devon, from about 1889. Author Helen Wilson introduces the work of this family of craft pioneers.

Just outside Halesworth in Suffolk, stands what could be mistaken for a farmhouse but which became a secret meeting house for ‘independents'. Walpole Old Chapel is a Grade II* listed building and is reputedly one of the oldest surviving nonconformist meeting houses in England.

SPAB member Patrick Stow introduces his new series of books drawing from his careeer as a conservation engineer. Here he explains why he became fascinated by this work and what has prompted him to write.

Recently, the 12th-century alabaster arch to St Mary’s, Tutbury, Staffordshire was cleaned. This church has a monumental west doorway, built in the mid-12th century and richly carved with Romanesque ornament. The doorway comprises six orders or receding arches. The innermost order is formed of thirty blocks of locally-mined alabaster. Each carved with three beak-heads and a human or animal figure. Interestingly, it is the only instance of alabaster used in an exterior arch in the country.

In anticipation of what would have been our founder William Morris' 187th birthday, Helen Elletson, curator at the William Morris Society, writes of the life at his home in Hammersmith, London.

SPAB member Chris Wood remembers well-known mason Colin Burns.