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urgent call for more craftspeople and built heritage sector professionals to apply for cscs cards
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| Three decades of maintaining standards |
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by BAFRA chief executive MICHAEL BARRINGTON BAFRA was founded in 1979 by a group of students studying furniture restoration at West Dean College near Chichester, West Sussex. Their aim was to try to increase public awareness of the need for informed and sympathetic conservation and restoration of Britain’s furniture heritage.Click HERE to view selected association members’ profiles One of the motivations for the founding team was the burgeoning success and size of the then-current antique furniture trade and an accompanying increase in the number of furniture restorers taking advantage of the phenomenon, which was to last, and indeed maintain its growth, for some 27 years. A combination of the growth of the antique furniture trade, together with a depressingly low standard of ‘restorers’ across the country, took its toll on the antique furniture in circulation; large amounts of this furniture were being damaged, often irreversibly. The restorers were by no means the only culprits because a large part of the trade community was ‘promoting’ the damage by commissioning and often demanding cheap and therefore often very poor restoration, and also giving extremely poor and ignorant instructions to the ‘craftsmen restorers’. The top end of the antique trade was and still is strongly and ethically controlled by such trade organisations as the BADA and LAPADA, but their membership was small compared with the number of dealers in the market. Looking forward some 30 years to today’s antiques trade, the ‘survivors’ of the trade’s downturn tend to be the members of the above organisations and some regional organisations with very similar membership standards and demands. Over the years both the BADA and LAPADA have been very supportive of BAFRA’s development and we certainly could not have achieved our professional status today without their valuable support and encouragement. The BAFRA membership system covers a wide range of interests: • Full-time accredited members in the UK, known as the full accredited members, of which there are today 98. • Associate members in America, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Malta. • A group of associate trainees, who join while at college and progress towards full accredited membership. For those members BAFRA runs a training scheme superior to any which the few remaining colleges are in a position to offer. We also have a very strong group of ‘Friends of BAFRA’, who join to widen their interest and passion for antique furniture and related items of the moveable heritage. A strong and widely admired feature of BAFRA is the very wide range of skills practised by the full membership, which covers every aspect of furniture design and conservation, historic interior woodwork, clocks, barometers, mechanical music, keyboard instruments, organs, marble and stone, textile conservation, leather, every furniture decorative process such as carving, gilding, japanning and oriental lacquer, and many more. BAFRA accreditation is purposely difficult to attain and has been described as old fashioned, which it probably is; but any suggestion of making it easier has always been strongly resisted by both BAFRA and, perhaps more importantly, by the public. Assessment for accreditation examines not just the applicant’s bench and design skills, but also their artistic and business skills and integrity, historical knowledge of design, detailed constructional techniques and conservation disciplines. Many people ask: “What is conservation?” Conservation is very closely allied to restoration and for the most part the skills of each go hand-in-hand. The key discipline in conservation is ‘maintenance of object integrity’; ie its purpose and evidence of origin and natural ageing must be retained and protected. Each year BAFRA publishes its own Annual Directory of Members and two Journals. Both publications are unique and are designed to be retained as reference material for anyone interested in furniture and the moveable heritage. Copies may be obtained from BAFRA head office and annual subscriptions for both are available. |
| Last Updated on Tuesday, 11 May 2010 06:18 |