Hanna Conservation and architect Martin Stancliffe have won the £15,000 conservation prize in the Pilgrim Trust Conservation Awards. They received their award at a ceremony in the British Library last month.

The Pilgrim Trust is a charity that supports conservation, cataloguing, research and scholarship within museums and galleries in the UK. The Awards are organised by Resource, a strategic agency working with museums across the UK, and backed by English Heritage and the National Preservation Office. The aim is to focus attention on conservation.

The winners had been involved in a nine year research project to identify factors leading to the deterioration of stone carvings on a 13th century chapter house at Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire.

The aim of the project was to prevent further decay and meet long-term conservation objectives. In doing so it had contributed to a wider understanding of stone conservation through presentations to conservators and students and briefings of the guides who show 100,000 visitors round the Minster each year. The winners had also had articles published in the specialist press.

The project showed how monitoring could be used to avoid expensive underpinning and is an example of sustainable management being applied to an important building. The results of the winning project are already benefiting other buildings.

Seamus Hanna of the winning company said: Winning the award is a tremendous achievement and helps to raise awareness of the approach we have adopted, which will contribute towards understanding and solving complex deterioration problems.