Conservation in the United Kingdom

British conservation is respected around the world for its excellence, based on a tradition of caring for heritage material, backed up by high‐quality training and research. This paper charts the origins and development of the conservation profession in the United Kingdom and provides a comprehensive overview of the number, location and variety of conservation specialists currently working in the UK. It looks at those working in both the public and private sectors. The findings are based on a number of surveys conducted by the professional bodies and by government agencies such as the Museums & Galleries Commission (MGC). Most of the information relates only to museums, but the most recent survey of conservators by the MGC also looked at provision in libraries and archives.     

A Geohistorical Study of ‘The Rise of Modern Science’: Mapping Scientific Practice Through Urban Networks, 1500–1900

Using data on the ‘career’ paths of one thousand ‘leading scientists’ from 1450 to 1900, what is conventionally called the ‘rise of modern science’ is mapped as a changing geography of scientific practice in urban networks. Four distinctive networks of scientific practice are identified. A primate network centred on Padua and central and northern Italy in the sixteenth century expands across the Alps to become a polycentric network in the seventeenth century, which in turn dissipates into a weak polycentric network in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century marks a huge change of scale as a primate network centred on Berlin and dominated by German-speaking universities. These geographies are interpreted as core-producing processes in Wallerstein’s modern world-system; the rise of modern scientific practice is central to the development of structures of knowledge that relate to, but do not mirror, material changes in the system.