Conservation & Heritage Issue 52 Summer/Autumn 2026 - Flipbook - Page 85
Preserving the Past,
Heating the Future: How
to Successfully Upgr ade
Heritage Buildings
The custodians of Britain’s historic public buildings are caught in a perfect storm. Heating
bills have climbed relentlessly as the price of gas and oil refuses to settle.
point. These are cavernous, hard-to-heat spaces that lose
energy and money in equal measure, and decarbonising them
is increasingly a matter of long-term viability. A building that
cannot be heated affordably is a building that struggles to stay
open and in use. Upgrading the heating system is no longer
simply the responsible course of action; for many estates it is
fundamental to their future.
The institutional dilemma
Institutional Net Zero commitments have hardened into
governance requirements, whether that is the Church
of England’s target of net zero carbon by 2030, a local
authority’s declared climate emergency, or the sustainability
obligations now written into the funding of public estates.
And running through all of it is the absolute, non-negotiable
duty to protect the historic fabric that makes these buildings
worth saving.
Moving beyond ‘off-the-shelf’ commercial heating
The instinct, faced with a large building and a fixed budget,
is to take a standard commercial heating package and scale it
up. In a heritage setting that is a costly mistake. A museum
or gallery that must hold a stable temperature and humidity
to protect its collection has little in common with a guildhall
and its acres of single-glazed glass, which in turn behaves quite
differently from a parish church used intensively on a Sunday
The challenge is not confined to one kind of building. A
medieval church, a Victorian museum, a civic guildhall, a
college library and a country house held in trust all share
the same predicament in different forms. It is tempting to
treat the move away from fossil fuels as a carbon-reduction
exercise, a box to be ticked for a mandate. That misses the
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