John Ruskin and the Discipline of “Anxious Care”

John Ruskin and the Discipline of “Anxious Care”

July 15, 2026

We began work on this Anglican church in 2025, following an initial Conditions Assessment Report that shaped the conservation plan. Built in 1826, the church is a well-maintained example of the Early English Gothic Revival style John George Howard designed across Southern Ontario in the 1830s. Our work to date has focused on the buttresses added for structural support in the 1850s: repointing with lime mortar, stone consolidation and repair, and application of a hydrophobic impregnator on elements most exposed to water and freeze-thaw cycles.

This patient, incremental approach echoes what John Ruskin described in 1849. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in the chapter "The Lamp of Memory," Ruskin articulated what may be the clearest description of conservation masonry on record, written a century before the trade had a name for it:

"Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation… bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines… and do this tenderly, and reverently, and continually."

Ruskin was writing against "restoration" — the Victorian habit of tearing down a weathered building and rebuilding it clean, as though history were an embarrassment to be corrected. He called restoration "a Lie from beginning to end." What he wanted instead was tending: small, honest interventions, repeated for as long as the building stands, that keep it upright without pretending it isn't old.

What "Anxious Care" Looks Like in Practice

On this church, that has meant buttress repair and stabilizing the areas where water penetration has done the most damage — the kind of work that doesn't announce itself, because the goal isn't to make the stone look new. It's to make it sound.

None of this is restoration in Ruskin's sense. Nothing here is being made to look like it did in 1836. It's being kept — bound together, stayed where it declines, tended continually — so the building can keep doing what it's done for six generations of this city.

One Partner, Every Season

This is also, in its way, the clearest example we've had yet of what it means to be one partner across every stage. There's no handoff here. The same crew that did the Conditions Assessment does the repair work, and will do next year's, too. Ruskin thought a building's history was worth as much as its beauty. We think the way you look after that history is a decision as significant as any design choice.

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to read this. We look forward to the chance to continue to work on your valued properties.