James Stourton chooses a quotation on the theme of loss to begin this excellent and companionable tour of the British heritage movement: from its Victorian origins, through the cris du coeur of the post-war era, to today when the National Trust and English Heritage (with the Historic Houses Association on their heels) have turned heritage into a national post-leisure religion.
The achievement of this book is to show how heritage today has been radically re- invented by the heritage lobby into something that “belongs to everyone”. No other nation has anything approaching such a cult-like devotion to its architectural history (sorry: “built heritage”). The story of England is also the story of our buildings, and nobody could be a better guide than Stourton: biographer of Kenneth “Civilisation” Clark and a former chairman of Sotheby’s.
Themes of architectural ruin, revival and redemption run through this book, but what makes Stourton’s history of heritage is his presence as a personal tour guide. Country houses facing rack and ruin are his natural habitat: the A1(M) now screams across the parkland at his childhood home, Allerton Castle – now “a specialist and wedding venue”.
This is very much a tour around the “greatest hits” of Britain’s modern heritage landscape – think Tattershall Castle, Mentmore Towers, the Euston Arch and so on – with Stourton in ebullient form with the microphone at the front of the bus. His mother’s family home was Heslington Hall, sold for a pittance and rescued by becoming the University of York’s Senate House. Stourton calls it “a clear case of social gain trumping heritage loss”.
The changing roles of these two family houses act as a “suitable allegory of Britain in a changing world”, and this sea-change in the public perception of the purpose of heritage today is a main theme. Whereas heritage originally was about saving (often by privately buying) iconic sites, today it is not so much about “saving” sites or preserving buildings, but about their re-invention and regeneration.
Few Catholic references escape Stourton’s eye. He notes that the developer Urban Splash has converted the 18th-century Catholic chapel of St Peter in Liverpool into the super-trendy Alma de Cuba nightclub, popular with footballers. Meanwhile, the rescue of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship galleon, raised from the bottom of the sea in 1982, was an event watched by an estimated 10 million TV viewers. It was a blockbuster moment for heritage in the national consciousness; Stourton shows how heritage conservation becomes something of a national cause, inexorably tied up with our own sense of cultural and historical identity.
Heritage is no longer the preserve of the privately wealthy. A useful example of this volte-face is the re-purposing of The Grange in Hampshire. The former mansion of the Barings banking family, it was left as a “deserted domestic Greek temple” after it became roofless after years of neglect and a fire. When John Baring bought back his old family property in 1966, he just wanted to demolish it. As a sign of the times, building consent for this was granted in 1970 with all its fixtures and fittings flogged off in June 1972.
Such stories were repeated all over the country in the post-war years. But by 1973 (helped by a wave of public indignation stirred up by the “Destruction of the Country House” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum) a public campaign stopped the demolition of The Grange. By 1975 the Department of the Environment (later English Heritage) took on the cost of repair; it is now the home of the flourishing Grange Opera, open to all.
Today, largely thanks to such bodies as the Acceptance In Lieu Scheme and the National Lottery and Heritage Memorial Fund (both of which Stourton has served) heritage is considered to be a driving force of mental wellness in the public sphere and local communities. Academic reports vouch for the heritage “happiness” factor: local heritage helps forge identity as well as economic and arts regeneration.
At Ampleforth, Stourton’s trinity of influences were Kenneth Clark, John Ruskin and William Morris. They would all have enjoyed this book, albeit a little bewildered by what heritage now means and stands for.
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