The grandfather report on material properties might just be the July 1990 report "The Harmonisation
of the Thermal Properties of Building Materials" by J A Clarke, P Yaneske and A Pinney
a Report for Project EM243 Construction Industry Directorate, Department of the
Environment. Much of this then found its way into the CIBSE Guide. The report
looked at information from ~dozen sources.

I have recently been updating the ESP-r material databases with annotations from
this Report e.g. impermeables, non-hygroscopic, inorganic-porous etc. as well
as the www reference for information sources of specific materials.

ESP-r also has some default values for linear thermal bridges (which can be assigned
to each surface-edge-join in the model) but tends to rely on users to supply information.

Regards, Jon Hand