Hilary Grant
Hilary Grant (Carleton University), “Progressive Preservation: Local Heritage Conservation Efforts in 1960s Lunenburg, Nova Scotia”
Critical heritage scholarship positions the 1960s as a heritage boom, a flourishing of heritage practice as a regressive, nostalgic response to rapid urban change. Within the history of the Canadian heritage movement, this period is normally positioned as a moment of institutionalization, studies focusing on regulatory measures and large-scale projects undertaken by the federal government. The impetus and motivation behind grassroots efforts to conserve personal or locally significant sites during this period remains largely overlooked. This paper focuses on the efforts of Lunenburg residents in rural Nova Scotia to conserve their architectural heritage thirty years prior to their town being recognized as a national historic site and World Heritage property. Drawing from oral histories with founders of the Lunenburg Heritage Society, this paper argues that heritage conservation was not a regressive, reactive exercise on the part of residents, but a forward-looking, alternate vision of progress, both divergent and indebted to modernization. This paper seeks to position heritage conservation as an important current within postwar Canadian architectural thought and production.