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Davington, Faversham
2016 - 2017
It's believed that an explosion at the neighbouring gunpowder works demolished one third of this row of three workers' cottages in Davington, Faversham, some time in the mid-late 1800s. The brief was to extend the (former) middle, Grade II-Listed cottage into the volume of the lost house to provide good quality contemporary living spaces to complement the small 1830s rooms of the original cottage.
Reconstructing lost buildings poses an interesting conservation problem: Should the new volume take on the form of the old for the sake of the original symmetrical Georgian villa form? Indeed, does the memory of the previous volume provide planning justification for an extension larger than that usually permitted? Should the materials and details replicate those that were lost? If so, how can this be done if the evidence is simply not there? Should we guess? Or is it wrong to create a false history, pretending that the explosion never happened? Should the materials and form therefore have no relation to the earlier supposed volume? And if that's the case, what of the justification to build such a large volume?
We received Planning Permission and Listed Building Consent for the proposal shown in the plans below in 2017 after extended negotiations with Swale Conservation team and Historic England.