The conservation movement : a history of architectural preservation : antiquity to modernity / Miles Glendinning.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 494-509) and index.

Introduction : The conservation movement: stepchild of progress -- Part I. Pre-1789: Foundations of the movement: care for old buildings in the pre-modern age : Harbingers of heritage: antiquity, Christendom, Renaissance -- Antiquarian antecedents: 17th and 18th centuries -- Part II. 1789-1914: Growth of the movement: first modern ideologies of conservation : International revolutions and national heritages, 1789-1850 -- The life-force of age : restoration and anti-scrape, 1850-1890 -- Militant monuments: nationalist conservation rivalries, 1890-1914 -- Part III. 1914-1945: Crisis of the movement: mass heritage, mass destruction : Monument wars: devastation and rebuilding, 1914-39 -- Total war and cultural bombing, 1939-45 -- Part IV. 1945-1989: Heyday of the movement: parallel narratives of post-war preservation : Parallel lives: new and old in the west, 1945-1968 -- From counter-culture to control: western triumphs of conservation, 1968-89 -- Heritage complexities in the socialist bloc, 1945-1989 -- Charters and conventions : the internationalisation of heritage, 1945-1989 -- Part V. Post-1989: The contemporary story : Heritage in the age of globalisation: post-1989 -- Epilogue.

In many cities across the world, particularly in Europe, old buildings form a prominent part of the built environment, and we often take it for granted that their contribution is intrinsically positive. How has that widely-shared belief come about, and is its continued general acceptance inevitable? Certainly, ancient structures have long been treated with care and reverence in many societies, including classical Rome and Greece. But only in modern Europe and America, in the last two centuries, has this care been elaborated and energised into a forceful, dynamic ideology: a 'Conservation Movement', infused with a sense of historical destiny and loss, that paradoxically shared many of the characteristics of Enlightenment modernity. The close inter-relationship between conservation and modern civilisation was most dramatically heightened in periods of war or social upheaval, beginning with the French Revolution, and rising to a tragic climax in the 20th-century age of totalitarian extremism; more recently the troubled relationship of 'heritage' and global commercialism has become dominant. Miles Glendinning's new book authoritatively presents, for the first time, the entire history of this architectural Conservation Movement, and traces its dramatic fluctuations in ideas and popularity, ending by questioning whether its recent international ascendancy can last indefinitely.