We are all very excited in our lab to have had two posters and a presentation accepted for the 15th International Congress on the Deterioration and Conservation of Stone. We will be presenting on our bioreceptivity work and asking people to join our efforts to produce an international database of stone bioreceptivity. We will also be showing how bioreceptivity testing can be used to help characterise the effects biocides and conservation treatments on stone.
Chimera of at Notre Dame de Paris by Jawed Karim, Wikimedia Commons
If you are coming to Stone 2025 please come and say hello to save us from standing by our poster like this!
Exciting news, following the changes requested by the reviewers Heritage Journal has accepted our paper ‘Measuring primary and secondary bioreceptivity of stone and implications for heritage conservation’. We have made sure that it will be open access so will post again when it is published!
As well as researching bioreceptivity and biodeterioration I also have an interest in conservation (and restoration) of heritage metals and have been involved in work with the heritage motorsports field for around 6 years now.
I was very excited to get to attend a CPD course on the conservation of architectural metals last weekend with Birmingham City University. On the first day of the course they had arranged a visit to Barr & Grosvenor Limited, a Wolverhampton based family run foundry who carry out a lot of heritage work. The second day was hosted by The Black Country Living Museum which provided a plethora of examples and also provided a hands on blacksmithing experience for the delegates.
A cast iron street lamp at the museum with working gas filamentsNail and S hook from the blacksmithing experience
I also took the opportunity to visit the award winning Victorian fountain in Dudley marketplace on the Friday evening, well worth a visit and a some nice examples of bioreceptivity towards the top.
Following lab testing on the alternate biocides we are moving on to field trials. We have 3 paving stone sized slabs which will be used to test how well the biocides work in the real world, but before that they need cleaning so the lab is full of large stone slabs are we carefully remove as much biological growth from the surfaces with purified water.
or Bacterial colonisation of built cultural heritage.
When I first came to Lincoln, having worked in healthcare research for close to 10 years I looked into doing a PhD. Naturally I went with what was familiar and was looking at transfer of antimicrobial resistance genes. This was not to be however, during my first year I was paid to do a little bit of research into biodeterioration of stone and everything changed after that!
Built heritage is at risk from the effects of bacterial species within biofilms (a microbial community encapsulated in a matrix of complex sugars, protein and DNA). Some microbes in biofilms damage stone surfaces and cause discolouration. Although biofilm research has been carried out in Mediterranean regions, few studies cover temperate Northern Europe climates, or the UK oceanic climate.
At the University of Lincoln, in the Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage we working on learning more about the bioreceptivity and biodeterioration of stones. This has led to collaborations with the Diocese of Lincoln and Lincoln Cathedral to characterize the microbiomes of damaged and undamaged limestone and more recently a 3 year funded project with Historic England trying to standardise the way people measure bioreceptivity, as well as looking at some alternatives to the chemical biocides currently used on stone.
