When you upload a Planning Application to the government’s portal, get ready to be hit by all manner of approaches from specialist building suppliers. Still it was surprising to receive a marketing brochure from a conservation specialist which contained a rather ghastly image of a skeleton framed by archeological ruins. WHAT_ knows that architecture is not ‘still life’. Running a research-orientated chartered practice is a vivid commercial tightrope. The office is finely balanced, perhaps treading a life-or-death economic existence but do we really have to buy into to specialist conservational input to professionally liberate ourselves from grave robbing marketing propaganda? We are in a recession but things haven’t got that cut-throat yet or have they?