Conservation Area Management Plan (CAMP) for Georgetown, Guyana wins heritage research award

Commissioned by the Commonwealth Heritage Forum on behalf of the government of Guyana, the CAMP takes a rigorous approach to assessing the historical and architectural significance of Georgetown for the regeneration of a part of a historic port city that looks to the future.

As part of the brief developed by the Commonwealth Heritage Forum, DIA worked in close collaboration the Department of Architecture at the University of Guyana. Like most Conservation Management Plans, the Georgetown Guyana CAMP is wide ranging in its pragmatic suggestions; it addresses, for example, how roof insulation and air conditioning units might be sensitively introduced into the bedrooms of historic houses; it also looks at how street trees might encourage cycling.

In her acceptance speech, heritage consultant and DIA practice director Victoria Perry said:

"Over the past few years, Donald Insall Associates has worked on several projects which looked at the issues of contested heritage, from the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool’s docks, to an analysis of potential sites for a memorial to the victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in London. But the Georgetown Guyana Conservation Management Plan, for the capital of the former British sugar plantation colony of British Guyana, stood out because it was not just a building or sculpture commemorating the past, but the regeneration of a part of a historic port city that looked to the future.

Historic buildings and sites are an immediate and accessible way of understanding the complex, intertwined histories of the former British Empire and its legacies. My hope is that the authorities in Georgetown will manage to present the histories of its amazing canal system — once called the ‘Venice of the West Indies’ — and timber gingerbread style colonial buildings in a similarly nuanced fashion."