Research On British Railway Heritage Conservation Theory And Practice

The concept of heritage conservation was originated from 19 th Century Britain. After over 100 years of exploration, many countries have acquired abundant experience in this field. While railway heritage have already started to attract attention throughout the world, China also initiated a series of conservation related practice. However, even with a nice kick-start, the overall state of China’s railway heritage conservation is still not optimistic.The thesis aims at resolving the conflict issues between conservation and development, by researching on the following topics. The first one is the development of the British railway heritage conservation theories. Theoretical development system is constructed based on the studying of British architectural conservation theories. The second one is the relationship between railway and urban development. By analyzing the history of railway related urban development, the correlation between railway, land use and urban policies are summarized to provide background information for later. The last one is case studies. The three cases chosen will be analyzed from three aspects: function replacement in abandoned heritage sites, assessment and compromise in adaptive reuse of functioning heritage sites, and critical adoption of conservation principles in adaptive reuse of functioning heritage sites. The study of each case will be focused on analyzing how the British resolve the conflict between conservation and development, based on which, advice will be given for Chinese railway heritage practice.Though the study of railway heritage conservation theory and practice in Britain, the thesis will provide people with the following values. On one hand, by constructing atheoretical system on British railway heritage conservation, it will provide first-hand and comprehensive resources on related theories which will benefit future research on similar subject. On the other hand, by comprehensively analyzing related theories and cases, lessons learned from British railway heritage conservation are summarized and can be used as references for conservationists and practitioners in the future.