21 Jun 2013 03:42:19
It's an odd title for a book about the preservation of ancient monuments, but there's a political point to it. Civil servants have always been the butts of ridicule – wasn't there a radio comedy series many years ago called The Men from the Ministry, with Richard Murdoch and Deryck Guyler? – but were never so seriously disparaged as they became with the advent of Thatcherism. It was in the early Thatcher years that the old Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, part of the Department of the Environment, was replaced by a hands-off "agency" with the snappy modern name of English Heritage, partly to inject it with a bit of market savvy and entrepreneurialism, on the ideological (neoliberal fundamentalist) grounds that things are always better run this way. Simon Thurley's main object is to show that in fact the old department was working pretty well before it was transformed, thank you, and that we owe the preservation and restoration of most of our most beloved historical places to it. One could infer from this a more general conclusion: that the state can be at least as efficient a provider of services to the nation as the private or semi-private sector. "Governments and civil servants," he writes, "rarely get the credit for anything they do." This book seeks to set the record straight for this bunch of them, at least. Not that the old men from the ministry were above criticism. That would scarcely be conceivable in a field as full of mantraps as this. The main role of the department was to identify, preserve and if necessary restore historic "monuments" that seemed to be under threat. Later it was given powers to prevent landowners from allowing them to deteriorate or, worse, from demolishing them, and in the last resort to acquire them itself. By 1982 it had accumulated a portfolio of 880 properties in this way. Obviously this laid it open to furious criticism from landowners and developers on the one side, always of course on grounds of principle – "private property", "progress" and all that – and by conservationists on the other, who didn't think that 880 was enough. Another resentful group was probably children who (like mine) used old ruins as adventure playgrounds, and youths who scratched their names along with their lovers' on Stonehenge, but they weren't organised so well. It was partly this sort of vandalism, in fact, that gave rise to the monuments' protection in the first place (the first defacer to be prosecuted rather gave himself away by scratching his address as well as his name), and then to the introduction of admission charges, on the assumption that if they had to pay, visitors would keep their kids under control.
But there were other bones of contention. Exactly which "monuments" should be privileged? The first ones were either prehistoric or iconic, such as Stonehenge and the Tower of London; after that it was usually the buildings of the good and the great. This was partly because of the way history was presented then – from the "top" – and partly because the heads of and advisers to the department were invariably aristocrats. (To be fair, it was mainly the great houses and castles that had survived. Old elites could afford to build solid.) That was until Labour's George Lansbury became the department's ultimate boss (as commissioner of works) in 1929, and turned out to be surprisingly sympathetic to its mission, to the amusement of some Tories, who twitted him – "the revolutionary, the iconoclast" – with "propping up relics of feudalism". (The answer to this sort of jibe, of course – and my response to those who disapprove of my love, as an agnostic, for ancient cathedrals – is that they were the work and expressions of the artistic aspirations of ordinary people. The church and aristocracy merely commissioned them.) But there was a case for extending the department's "collection" to, for example, smaller houses, nonconformist chapels, townscapes, "lost villages", industrial remains, and also to more recent structures, in line with new trends in history research and teaching; all of which were eventually taken on board, though a little tardily.
Then there was the prickly question of what "preservation" should properly involve. Take an ivy-covered medieval ruin with later accretions. Should it be left as it is, and merely shored up: the "romantic" solution? Or de-ivied and then protected in that form? Or the accretions taken away to show how it looked earlier? And if so, how many accretions? Should we remove the perfectly good Tudor porch on an early English church, for example, to show what it looked like when it was first built? Should fallen stones be put back in place or not? Should gaps be replaced with modern materials, and if so, should they be disguised or en plein? And so on. Architects and antiquaries had been arguing over these matters since early Victorian times. You couldn't please everyone. The men from the ministry changed tack on this over the years, finishing up, in the 1970s, with the pattern that is familiar to us today: minimal and plain restorations, historically accurate, but not particularly romantic (no ivy), set in tidy close-mown greenswards that are about as alien to the environs of medieval castles and abbeys as one could imagine. That marked what Thurley regards as the department's highest point, and its most "expansionist" and "arrogant" – which hubris, he suggests, might have contributed to its downfall. Lastly, there were struggles with the Treasury over funding, and turf (or sward) wars with the part-complementary, part-rival National Trust.
Overshadowing all these was the question of what exactly this great enterprise was for. At first it seemed to be mainly to delight upper- and middle-class antiquarians. It was they, however, who then dressed it up in the language of "national heritage", which was an important conceptual shift, because it implied that the whole nation had a stake. (Lansbury agreed; it was his reason for calling his heritage work "practical socialism in action". Of course, that was exactly what the landowners feared.) Thurley rates this stake very highly indeed. "English identity," he claims, "is very closely bound up with the physicality of England". The problem with this, of course, is that it can too easily buttress a conservative and even reactionary "identity"; but that depends on which monuments are showcased, and how. Most castles have dungeons. It might be a good idea to exhibit great houses in combination with the peasant hovels that serviced them, or an old industrial-revolution mill with its surrounding slum, as one Louisiana slaveowner's mansion I once visited did by restoring and opening some slave cabins. Thurley suggests that Regent's Park mosque might qualify for "heritage" status in time. As it happens, he is currently the chief executive of English Heritage. That gives one some hope that it won't turn into a mere "business" – selling a nostalgic and sanitised view of past English glories to schoolchildren and foreign tourists – in its modern agency form.
