Assessing the social values of historic shopping arcades: building biographies

Social value has a long academic tradition in the field of heritage studies, and while it has become part of heritage management, expert-driven intrinsic values still dominate the conservation policy and practice. This paper explores the use of building biographies as a way to assess, illustrate and record the social value of shopping arcades. A case study of the North Street Arcade in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is used to explore how building biographies can contribute bottom-up evidence to top-down value-based approaches of architectural conservation. The North Street Arcade is a listed shopping arcade that has been lying vacant and derelict for the last 30 years awaiting demolition and redevelopment. Archival documents, historic photographs, news reports and documentaries, interviews and anthropology were combined to compile the arcade’s biography. Allowing the combination of positivist and interpretive approaches, as well as merging community and expert voices, building biographies can produce localised and inclusive heritage narratives that accentuate the many dimensions of social value that different publics ascribe to built heritage. Policy relevance Although social value has become part of heritage management, expert-driven values still dominate the conservation policy and practice. The inclusion of social value in the statutory criteria for listing could afford heritage protection to places that are highly valued by local communities, thereby encompassing places that do not fulfil the architectural and historic criteria. This article explores the use of building biographies as a way to assess, illustrate and record the social value of shopping arcades. The building biography is an approach that combines qualitative methods deriving from anthropology and sociology with historical and architectural analysis, and can be used to highlight the link between people and places, as well as their ever-changing cultural context. This paper illustrates how building biographies can contribute bottom-up evidence to top-down value-based approaches of architectural conservation and highlight the social value of shopping arcades.