Heritage Railway Buildings: Using Taxonomy Surveying to Develop a Narrative for Making Conservation Decisions

One difficult issue regarding adaptation and adaptive reuse of existing buildings is assessing the heritage significance of functional industrial-oriented heritage buildings, such as railway buildings, that have outlived their original purpose. There is a significant tension in developing strategies for the long-term viability of a sustainable, adaptive reuse of this type of heritage infrastructure. Complicating an assessment is that these buildings may be in constrained locations, or the location has changed beyond all recognition, such that the building inhabits a sterile space. Accepted practice for conserving heritage buildings is to discourage relocating these buildings, with a scholarly concern that presentation of relocated buildings for public engagement will undermine interpretive thinking. In all cases, functional heritage buildings complicate conservation decisions in comparison with mainstream heritage buildings. Existing conservation frameworks remain insufficiently equipped to evaluate industrial and utilitarian heritage buildings whose significance derives as much from operational function, social memory, and technological context as from architectural fabric or fixed location. In response, taxonomy surveying is advanced as a novel stakeholder-centred conservation methodology capable of reconciling tensions between authenticity, adaptive reuse, relocation, and public interpretation. The aim, using case study railway buildings in a museum of industrial heritage, is to test if this methodology is transferable to other functional building types. The findings suggest that taxonomy surveying, as tested on the case study buildings, offers a scalable and internationally transferable framework for evaluating complex industrial heritage assets across differing regulatory, cultural, and spatial contexts.