The masons are disappearing faster than the monuments

Money is the top worry of the people who look after the world’s great buildings, and the climate comes second. The quieter threat is that the people who know how to repair them are dying out.

Every two years the World Monuments Fund publishes its Watch, a list of heritage sites around the world it considers most at risk. The 2027 list isn’t due until February. The New York charity has already published what it learned from the nominations, and one finding stands out.

The WMF received 372 nominations from communities and campaigners. Lack of money was the most common concern, cited by 65 per cent of them. No one will be surprised by that, since heritage has always been short of funds. Climate change was second, at 54 per cent. Third, cited by just over a third, was the loss of the specialist skills needed to look after these places, and the charity says that concern is growing.

That should worry us more than it seems to. A cathedral roof can wait for a grant. A crumbling wall can be shored up for another decade. But the knowledge of how to dress stone, lay lime mortar or repair lead the way it was first laid isn’t kept in a funding bid. It sits with people, most of them getting older, and once they go it’s very hard to get back.

Britain knows this well. The charity Heritage Crafts keeps a Red List of endangered traditional crafts, and it gets longer more often than shorter. A country that inherited more old buildings than it could ever have built itself relies on a small and ageing group of masons, carpenters and glaziers to keep them standing.

Bénédicte de Montlaur, the WMF’s president, says communities are “being asked to do more with less”. She cites UNESCO’s finding that only one country in four has the means to safeguard its heritage.

There’s an encouraging side to it, and it doesn’t involve the state. The Watch is funded by the AXA Foundation for Human Progress. Since the list began in 1996, the WMF has put more than $125 million into nearly 350 listed sites. The charity says being listed has helped those sites raise another $300 million from elsewhere. That’s private generosity going to places that need it, which conservatives have always argued for and seldom see done so effectively.

Even so, money only goes so far without people who know how to use it. The 2027 list will say which buildings are in most danger. It will be harder to say who is left to repair them.