Awards ceremony

Sunday morning is the traditional announcemnts/AGM etc slot - but also has some light relief with the AIA Awards announcements and ceremony.

AIA use various Awards schemes to enhance understanding of industrial archaeology and to encourage high standards in fieldwork and publication - and some lucky awardees attend Conference and get a chance to talk about their work.

Today we had just 2 presentations - both very different, and summarising the great breadth of IA as a subject area. The first was one of the Fieldwork and Recording Award Winners - Lee Gregory, a recent graduate from Manchester University.

Lee's work had been on Angels Meadow, a 19th century cemetary site in what had been an area of slum housing in Victorian Manchester. The area has changed totally since, but the cemetray area, much 'tidied' survives as a patch of green with some gravestones. His work was multidisciplinary - looking at census records, contemporary accounts and mapping evidence to assess the population and their hosuing (all long-since cleared) and supplementing that with fieldwork - documenting surviving graves, excavations to locate the demolished church and geophysical surveys to locate graves and grave pits.

A great piece of social and industrial history research - though also very depressing - Lee had compared life expectancy and seasonality of deaths with a rural parish in north Cheshire - succeeding in emphasising just how extrem conditions were. And the contemporary accounts of the cavalier attitude of the railway company's excavation for a new line through the edge of the graveyard were stunning. (Pic shows Lee receiving his award from AIA Hon President Angus Buchanan).

Compare this to the next Award - this time the Dorothea Award for Conservation. Sponsored by Dorothea Restorations Ltd this scheme is to support and encourage voluntary conservation work on sites and artefacts of industrial, agricultural, and domestic importance. And the winner is... A Lock Restoration - much more 'mainstream' IA than Lee's work - but just as valuable too. The winning site was Creeting Lock on the River Gipping aka the Ipswich & Stowmarket Navigation - with the Award going to the Ipswich Branch of the Inland Waterways Association. Their presentation, by Colin Turner (pictured, with Angus), showed how, with careful research, and use of the right materials (even partly plundered from another derelict lock) a lock and a brick-arch locktail bridge can be very carefully restored.

A classic example of good practice and showing how things have moved on in recent years - there was a time, not so long ago, when railway and canal structural restorations were undertaken with a little less historical care - but things have largely changed - within both the volunteer and professional (yes British Waterways, I do mean you) arenas.