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“A CENTURY SURVEYED - The History of ACES”, was published in April 2010 to commemorate the Association's centenary in 2008. The background to the publication is explained in Section 1- Introduction which is reproduced below.

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Introduction

ACES was formed by the amalgamation of two predecessor bodies, namely CLAVA, the County Land Agents and Valuers Association and ALAVES, the Association of Local Authority Valuers and Estates Surveyors. With the advent in 2008 of the centenary of the formation of CLAVA, the elder of our two founder associations, the ACES Council decided that the occasion should be marked by producing a history of ACES and of the two predecessor bodies.

Source material for the two predecessor bodies turned out to be very straightforward. In 1977 Ken Blessley (of whom much more, later in this tome) had produced the first edition of a very thorough history of ALAVES and he subsequently extended this to cover the period up to the time of amalgamation in 1986. On the CLAVA side, Donald Bailey had in 1983 produced a similarly comprehensive history of the first seventy five years of that body.

With the ALAVES and CLAVA stories already very well covered, that left us to consider how to deal with the ACES story since amalgamation. There was little confidence within ACES that we could match the level of detailed information, personal continuity and insight shown by Messrs Bailey and Blessley. The strategy which then emerged from the ACES Council was to build a compendium history by asking every former president to give us personal reminiscences of his or her year in office. Bob Perry of Cornwall Council, then our Junior Vice-President, took responsibility for contacting and cajoling the past-presidents and I was given the task of compiling the reminiscences and other material into a single publication, a job which I was delighted to take on because it was for me a very appropriate way to mark the end of an eleven year stint as the ACES Editor.
One unexpected yet delightful by-product of the exercise has been the emergence of an old scrapbook of photographs of CLAVA meetings extending over several decades. These fascinating photographs encouraged me to include a much greater visual content alongside the text-based reminiscences, lists and tables which would otherwise have made up the entire document.

Finally, on behalf of the Association, I would like to record our thanks to the British Property Federation whose generous financial support has assisted the publication of "A Century Surveyed".

Colin Bradford FRICS
President 1994/95 and ACES Editor 1998-2009

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A CENTURY SURVEYED The History of ACES - 1908-2008

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