Toxic Heritage

The annual ACAHUCH symposium for 2025 will explore ‘Toxic Heritage’. Join us for a day of expert talks and panel discussions, where speakers from practice, policy and research domains will debate ideas and share current preoccupations with ‘difficult’ heritage and conservation.

In forming this theme of toxicity, we draw on the provocation that heritage and nuclear waste share important concerns and challenges around managing risk and instability for future generations.[1] Questions will be debated around how to conserve and contain problematic and unstable building and artefact materials; how heritage values and practices collide with the machinations of regulation and commercial imperatives; and how future heritage management must contribute to the remembering and repairing of toxic historic environments.

Keynotes and panelists will explore ‘toxic materials’ in historic contexts, ‘toxic policies’ and planning regimes, and the remediation of ‘toxic environments’. Case studies will range from the conservation of the very local to international heritage sites that have been catalysts for destruction

^{[1] Gustav Wollentz et al, “Toxic heritage: Uncertain and unsafe” in Heritage Futures, 2020.}