Home of North West Heritage Skills Academy

Location

North West Heritage Skills Academy is based in Saint Helens in Merseyside
You can also click the map above to get a more detailed route of where we are and how to find us.

Courses

The North West Heritage Skills Academy courses focus on the future delivery of the qualification for a range of building crafts including brickwork, stonework, roofwork, plasterwork and carpentry using traditional skills and techniques.
Please see our courses link above to choose a subject you are interested in and register your interest on the 'Course Interest' link

Foreword

The North West’s heritage buildings and monuments are important to us all.
Just stop for a minute and look around! These beautiful buildings and monuments give us a regional identity and some of them have worldwide recognition. The correct conservation, maintenance, repair and restoration of these buildings and monuments ........Read More>

An Introduction to Heritage Skills

A Heritage Skills Training Academy for the North West

Heritage Skills, is the name of the newly formed training academy for the North

West of England. It has been set up in order to provide appropriate training and

education in building conservation skills that focuses on a number of key areas;

1. The future delivery of Heritage Skills qualification for a range of building

crafts including brickwork, stonework, roofwork, plasterwork and carpentry.

2. The provision of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses for

heritage based professionals including architects, surveyors, planners and

conservation officers etc. The aim here is to improve the specification and

inspection of heritage works by providing them with the key knowledge.

3. Introductory courses in historic building crafts for listed building owners,

built environment students and members of the public who have an interest

in such skills and may wish to carry out minor repairs to their property

The Courses at Heritage Skills

Initially Heritage Skills will aim to develop short courses in the core craft areas of historic building conservation such as; the preparation and use of lime mortar, masonry repairs, timber repairs, lime plastering and rendering and repairs to historic roof coverings. These areas will later be developed in the future.

Later developments will include the making of and repairs to stained glass windows, the conservation and repair of historic ironwork, the conservation of historic interiors including historic paintwork, historic wallpapers and graining and marbling and finally furniture restoration.

A key benefit of building conservation is one of sustainability by the use and conservation of the existing built fabric. As such Heritage Skills also aims to develop education and training in traditional sustainable building technologies such as straw bale building, rammed earth, cob wall, thatching and dry stone walling, along with the construction of traditional timber framed buildings such as the box frame and the cruck frame.

The Area

Liverpool has a great built heritage with over 2500 listed buildings and as such it is an ideal centre for the Heritage Skills training academy. The city of Liverpool provides a good example of the challenges faced with conserving historic buildings.

The training academy has been set up as a charity with income primarily coming from the course fees and sponsorship. All the instructors are professionally trained in their own area of expertise and are fully qualified to assess such work.