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22World Heritage Sites
It has been a huge privilege to not only visit a large
number of World Heritage Sites, but also to have had
the opportunity to work on several of the key British
sites and emerging sites. This selection of photographs
is a mixture of pseudo-iconic views and random jottings
It is hard for us in the West, even now, to believe easily in the incredible
history and relevance of the Baltic States to our own world after the mayhem
of the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War. So much of the Baltic
that was hidden from us is the original culture for the fairy tales that we have
grown up with and the buildings evoke this enormously. All across the region
lie features that date back to the time of the Teutonic Knights. The historic
centre of Riga in Latvia is symptomatic of this conundrum, particularly because
several of the key buildings have had to be completely rebuilt using the original
fabric where possible. This picture shows the House of the Blackheads, originally
for single German merchants in Riga built from 1580, bombed in 1941 by the
Germans and then demolished by the Soviets in 1948, rebuilt in the 1990s.
Riga is also a very important centre for Art Nouveaux architecture (1997)
