Dates of all sorts

Citation

Hurst, L. (1998), "Dates of all sorts", Structural Survey, Vol. 16 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.1998.11016caa.001

Dates of all sorts

Dates of all sorts

An appreciation of dates is an essential attribute of a structural surveyor. Not the sort of dates that appear at Christmas time in long, round-ended boxes with a cellophane cover sheet that makes your fingers sticky and a plastic twig which breaks the first time you try to use it, but dates when something was built or altered or worked on. A structural survey, or perhaps I should now call it a building survey, is essentially an inspection of and report on a building that is not new, so you need to be able to say in your report if it was built, or perhaps altered, yesterday or last year or last century. A report that does not address this aspect is deficient.

But knowledge of dates of construction, of dates when various types of construction were used and of dates when materials were introduced or fell into disuse is more than just something to mention in a report. This knowledge will tell you something about the building and enable you to understand it from the superficial inspection that is usually all you have on which to base your report. Superficial here does of course not mean casual, but relates to an inspection of the surface, which is all you can see and use to base your deductions about the likely behaviour of the background. If you can judge the date of construction, you are able to predict what the background might be. If you do not know and are not prepared to think about the date, you have nothing on which to base your judgement or opinion.

Dates can also provide useful pegs on which to hang your inspection. As you walk up the road and approach the subject building, and as you enter a room, if you force yourself to think about the dates of the components and the fittings individually, you will then look at them and think about them, not just glance at them and pass on. Without such a peg, it is all too easy to make an inspection that is superficial in every sense of the word.

Most structural surveyors unconsciously use dates to enable them to judge the order in which works were carried out, perhaps because the back addition is obviously in a later style or the kitchen units or bathroom fittings are more recent than the hall décor, and hence deduce, also subconsciously, that they should be alert for other evidence of alteration. Conversion to conscious use of dates is a small step which will stand them in good stead.

Knowledge and appreciation of dates should be cultivated, fostered and developed by all structural surveyors, so that they can use it to improve the service they provide. Without that knowledge their advice will be lacking and their reports will be deficient.

Lawrie Hurst