The world’s most extreme conservation project: saving Shackleton’s and Scott’s Huts

The decade long programme to restore Shackleton’s and Scott’s Huts is an extraordinary conservation story about a remarkable place and people. Nigel Watson travels from New Zealand to describe the painstaking story to ensure that these sites remain a cultural marker of a heroic journey in the era of Antarctic discovery and human endeavour. At this fourth talk in their new events programme, World Monuments Fund Britain explore the world’s most extreme conservation project.

At the turn of the twentieth century dozens of men, including Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, travelled to Antarctica. The expeditions built prefabricated wooden buildings that served both as homes and laboratories. From here men set out on quests for glory in bids to reach the South Pole and in many cases to explore the Antarctic continent in the pursuit of science and knowledge. When WWI cast its shadow on the world, Antarctica’s heroic-age of exploration ended. Remarkably, after more than a century, the small wooden buildings remained intact but vulnerable.

WMF first ‘Watch Listed’ the sites in 2004 and again in 2006 and 2008 and since have been credited as a catalyst in the initiation of the important conservation work. Extreme conservation challenges were faced as the buildings were threatened by encroaching ice and the time window for work was cut short by the climate. The stories discovered through this work are fascinating; a note left pinned inside stating that there were sufficient provisions and equipment to last fifteen men for one year, the discovery of century-old photographic negatives in Ponting’s darkroom, plus bottles of MacKinlay and Co. whisky found buried underneath Shackleton’s hut.