Abstract/Summary

The plea to ‘stave off decay by daily care’ promoted by major arts and crafts influencer William Morris (1834 –1896), in the seminal Manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) referred to regular and preventative maintenance of buildings of all ages. In response, strategies were developed to manage the scarce resources available for the conservation repair and maintenance (CRM) of the UK’s built historic environment. However, in practice, such strategies are failing. Focusing particularly on identified issues in information management, data fragmentation, and the analogue nature of the heritage sector, over 100 years after the publication of Morris’ plea, this research finds the principle of ‘daily care’ to equally apply to the neglect of digital assets. Digitisation trends such as building information modelling (BIM), could offer huge benefits. Moreover, they are critical to prevent the decay of the historic building information that is vital to the protection of our historic assets. Despite this, within existing academic literature definitions of Heritage BIM vary considerably, and practical examples of the use of BIM for operation and maintenance (O&M) in a heritage context are limited. Additionally, a careful review of literature shows that current applications of BIM in a heritage context labour the use of 3D parametric modelling with little consideration of the nature of heritage stakeholders, and the lack of funding and digital skills within the sector. A study of 3 key organisations and their asset management processes, across both heritage and non-heritage contexts, using a mixed-methods research approach offers a broad range of data presented and analysed in this thesis. Participant observation, active participation, interviews and document analysis is combined with a ‘follow the action’ approach adopted from an Actor Network Theory methodology to understand the challenges faced, and the opportunities presented by introducing digital, formalised processes. Key research findings identify that developing a framework of conservation data parameters to support digitisation is a relatively simple task. However, it is the retrospective compilation of historic building information for the development of a structured Asset Information Model (AIM) to support CRM planning that presents more of a challenge. Furthermore, adoption of the information management process is shown to be critically affected by socio-technical dimensions, and that well-defined roles and responsibilities, such as the Information Manager, are critical in successful implementation. While offering a significant academic contribution to the existing body of knowledge, this research also provides an important practitioner contribution. The relationship between BIM and the heritage sector is reconfigured, switching the focus from 3D parametric modelling used most often in relation to conservation intervention. Instead, a new approach is suggested relying on simple and effective information management (using BIM methods) to support longer-term asset management and CRM planning. This makes the asset management process more accessible to the full range of heritage stakeholders and aligns with the BIM Alliance ‘Back to BIM basics’ approach. A new ‘Heritage Information Management’ (H-IM) workflow is presented, which has been developed with the key challenges and findings of this research in mind. It is offered as a proposal to support digitisation for CRM planning, offering an opportunity to see improved adoption and efficiencies in conservation maintenance strategies for the UK’s historic buildings.