The Art of Significance: Painting a Place with Words

1. INTRODUCTION • Definitions • Ideas behind Significance • Significance as art • Painting a place with words

2. SIGNIFICANCE • The value of a heritage asset to this and future generations because of its heritage interest. • Significance derives not only from a heritage asset’s physical presence, but also from its setting.

3. SIGNIFICANCE VS. IMPORTANCE • Significance is the term for all the heritage values of a place. • Importance is the weight that should be given to those heritage values.

4. evidential historical aesthetic illustrative communal design • from the potential of a place to yield evidence about past human activity. • 36 Physical remains of past human activity are the primary source of evidence about the substance and evolution of places, and of the people and cultures that made them. These remains are part of a record of the past that begins with traces of early humans and continues to be created and destroyed. Their evidential value is proportionate to their potential to contribute to people’s understanding of the past. • 37 In the absence of written records, the material record, particularly archaeological deposits, provides the only source of evidence about the distant past. Age is therefore a strong indicator of relative evidential value, but is not paramount, since the material record is the primary source of evidence about poorly-documented aspects of any period. Geology, landforms, species and habitats similarly have value as sources of information about the evolution of the planet and life upon it.

5. simple concepts behind the words Research Narrative Emotion Togetherness

6. Research the process of discovering things that we didn’t know before. where in this place might there be evidence yet to be discovered or recorded that is of research value?

8. Narrative using places to tell the national story ‘x is a good example of y’ ‘x shows particularly well how people lived’

9. Marine Court, St Leonard’s on Sea Carlton House Terrace

10. Aylesham, Kent

11. Emotion the power of places to evoke emotional response in people enriches human experience emotional responses fall into two broad categories – the beautiful and the sublime

12. Beauty in symmetry

13. Fortuitous beauty

14. Anything that has a sense of infinity, of going on forever, of being bigger than humanly possible or more powerful than can be imagined would be considered to be part of the sublime

15. a reaction of awe and pleasurable fear – a shiver up your spine perhaps.

16. Above all, what exactly is it that causes your emotional reaction? The colours? The scale? The rhythm? The juxtaposition? Stowe

17. Togetherness Communal value is not the same as community value

18. places where the events of the past have brought people together to create or reinforce community Tolpuddle Culloden Battlefield

19. simple concepts behind the words Research Narrative Emotion Togetherness

20. Assessing significance is an art, not a science, but if we use the heritage values correctly we are going to create robust assessments of significance

21. La Grenouillère Monet Renoir

22. La Grenouillère Van Gogh

23. Palette

24. Phrases about research Phrases about narrative Phrases about emotion Phrases about togetherness STEP 1

25. STEP 1 Evidential Historical The significance of … lies chiefly in … Communal Aesthetic

26. STEP 2 Phrases about research Phrases about narrative Choosing the right words Phrases about emotion Phrases about togetherness

27. STEP 2 what weight to give any of the phrases we’ve put onto our palette?

29. We can now draw these phrases into a coherent whole: ‘The significance of the Dockyard Church lies chiefly in its internal completeness, which gives a good impression of what a Dockyard Church was like around the time of Trafalgar (arguably the Navy’s finest hour), and in its external design, specifically the strict symmetry and the contrasting colours of the brickwork, decorative stonework and the windows. In addition, its significance comes from its association with Edward Holl, at the time newly appointed Architect to the Navy Board, who designed the building to incorporate structural cast iron for the first time in a Dockyard building to support the gallery. The church is an early example of his use of structural iron in naval buildings.

30. STEP 3 Phrases about research Phrases about narrative Phrases about emotion Phrases about togetherness

31. RECAP • Definitions • Ideas behind Significance • Significance as art • Painting a place with words

32. ? Questions