Category Archives: Heritage

What Next for the Stonehenge Tunnel Scheme?

Posted on: March 11, 2024 by Rebecca Hawkes-Reynolds

Stonehenge has been a permanent feature and place-marker on the landscape in Wiltshire for thousands of years. It has also a been a semi-permanent feature of headlines and as a topic on this blog. However this may soon no longer be the case, as  Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site (SSWHS) have had their application for […]

Sutton Hoo Steamship Hulk Given Scheduled Monument Status

Posted on: August 31, 2023 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, on the advice of Historic England, announced recently that the hulk of the nineteenth-century iron steamship, Lady Alice Kenlis, located at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk has been granted protection as a Scheduled Monument. The hulk (the term is used to describe an old ship which has been permanently […]

The Heritage Decision Lottery: Stonehenge and the M&S building

Posted on: August 14, 2023 by Rebecca Hawkes-Reynolds

The month of July saw two opposing planning decisions being made with one thing in common: their subject and focus being designated heritage assets; Stonehenge and the proposed tunnel within its vicinity and the Marks and Spencer building on Oxford Street, London. Both of them highlight the complexity of dealing with heritage assets within the […]

Implementing UNDRIP into Canadian Law

Posted on: August 7, 2023 by Olivia Shaw

A Question of Restitution Is a new wind of cultural migration blowing? Around the world, cultural artefacts are being returned from museum collections to their homelands. In particular, a growing socio-political awareness of historic wrongs has focused critical attention on the relationship anthropology and museology share with Indigenous peoples worldwide. As policies and practices on […]

Tensions Between Economic Development, Planning Controls and Protection of Archaeological Heritage: Destruction of the Megaliths at Carnac

Posted on: August 3, 2023 by Marie Cornu

Carnac is one of the most important sites for megalithic architecture, protected in large part from the end of the nineteenth century as a historic monument under the Law of 30 March 1887, the first ever legislative text to introduce a binding legal regime in the area of heritage protection. Carnac appeared on the list […]

21st Century “Scholar Warriors” Carry Legacy of Monuments Men & Women into Ukraine

Posted on: July 17, 2023 by Stephanie Drawdy

In the last several years, the U.S. Army has been raising up a generation of modern-day “scholar warriors” to follow in the pioneering steps of WWII-era Monuments Officers. These warriors are Army Reserve Civil Affairs Soldiers who, like their predecessors, have a range of specialties that they can utilise to advance the mission of defending cultural […]

The Everyday Deserves Protecting

Posted on: May 9, 2023 by Rebecca Hawkes-Reynolds

Any mention of a shipwreck being found immediately conjures up the wildest possible imaginings in most people’s minds – treasure chests full of gold, pearl necklaces, stone studded jewels and other magnificent objects. Alongside the treasure, our imaginations are also filled with scenes of uninhabited islands in the Caribbean with white sand, turquoise water and […]

The Treasures of Crimea: new documentary launching this Friday

Posted on: October 12, 2022 by Julia Rodrigues Casella Hommes

There is a fine balance between unbiased, objective reporting and the dissection of the emotional layers in a subject that is the mark of a great documentary. A new documentary on the epic tale of the Crimean Treasures in a Dutch museum and the ensuing legal disputes managed to strike this fine balance with perfect […]

Report on IAL seminar on heritage and sustainability, 29 March 2022

Posted on: April 4, 2022 by Emily Gould

How do we balance the need to protect our inherited past with the demands of contemporary life and the interests of future generations? Can economic imperatives align with sustainability objectives or are they destined always to conflict? These were two of the key questions addressed in the IAL’s first seminar on the theme of sustainability, […]

Church court refuses to allow Jesus College, Cambridge to remove memorial

Posted on: March 28, 2022 by Richard Harwood QC

In The Rustat Memorial, Jesus College, Cambridge [2022] ECC Ely, the college authorities proposed to remove a memorial to a seventeenth century benefactor, Tobias Rustat, from the grade I listed chapel. The concern was Rustat’s involvement in the slave trade, as an investor in two companies, and the effect which retaining his memorial in the […]