The social significance of a church : the heritage cluster of St. Teresa's Church, Kowloon Tong

Abstract

According to The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance (2013):

Conservation is based on a respect for the existing fabric, use, associations and meanings. It requires a cautious approach of changing as much as necessary but as little as possible.

Conservation of a place should identify and take into consideration all aspects of cultural and natural significance without unwarranted emphasis on any one value at the expense of others.

The current heritage-building assessment method used by the Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO) and the Antiquities Advisory Board (AAB) is originally developed to assess individual buildings. By 2009, AAB, under the chairmanship of Bernard Chan, the same method was extended to cover heritage sites containing clusters of buildings and associated artefacts. This was when the problem began, as the method is entirely inadequate in establishing the social significance of a heritage place in accordance with the notion of place explained in the universally accepted methodology espoused in the Burra Charter (2013).

This heritage assessment methodological problem became the premise of this research. Based on the quotation from the Burra Charter above, if the conservation of a place encompasses the entire existing “fabric, use, associations and meanings”, it is hypothesized here that the assessment methodology which focuses only on built heritage could not possibly capture the social significance of a place in full. It also raises a more alarming question as to whether there are historic buildings within the current list of Graded Buildings which should have been assessed as a heritage cluster.

In this dissertation, the author shall use the case of the Grade 1 St. Teresa’s Church in Kowloon Tong, to critique the current AMO/AAB assessment methodology, and proposed way forward to address the inadequacy.