From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Mon Jan 07 2002 - 05:35:16 MST
I've long regarded Appleton's journalism with much interest, but this is a
particularly fine piece; exposing both the dead hand of ossified traditions
and reactionary conservatism that so characterise Britain and the
ideologically vapid New Labour inability to define modernity in any
meaningful manner.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D38A.htm
A fashion for heritage
by Josie Appleton
British heritage is back in fashion.
First, UK culture secretary Tessa Jowell declared the death of 'Cool
Britannia' - that uncool period in New Labour history where prime minister
Tony Blair courted pop stars and boasted about Britain's world-class design,
music and fashion industries (1).
Then Simon Thurley, young star of the UK museum world, left his post at the
Museum of London to become the new chief executive of English Heritage,
telling one newspaper that he wanted to make the historic environment
'central to our national life' (2).
And now, the clincher: a new government report entitled The Historic
Environment: A Force for our Future - which gives a new priority to the
preservation of local historic monuments, buildings and landscapes,
encouraging local authorities to develop better public education programmes
about the historic environment, and promoting the teaching of traditional
craft skills (3).
In short, this is the government's 'vision of a historic environment
standing at the very heart of our national life' (4). According to English
Heritage's Sir Neil Cossons: 'This is the most powerful endorsement by any
government for a generation about the value of the historic environment, and
its economic and social contribution.' (5)
This looks like something of a turnaround for a government that made the
word 'new' into the universal adjective. From the Millennium Dome to tax
policy to party conferences, everything Tony Blair did had to look, sound
and feel new. New Labour was formed fighting against the dead wood of old
systems - from the trade union bureaucracy in the Labour Party to the grey
stagnation of the Tory regime under former prime minister John Major.
Everybody wanted things to be different, and New Labour offered themselves
as the answer to a 'New Britain'.
Yet within only five years it seems that Labour has gone back on these
ambitions to create the world anew. The recent renovation of heritage
essentially indicates that New Labour has lost confidence in its ability to
imprint itself as an elite on national life. Unable to offer a vision that
is purposeful, it is turning back to national heritage for support and
identity.
'The past is all around us….it is central to how we see ourselves and to our
identity as individuals, communities and as a nation', states The Historic
Environment . The historic environment can 'bring communities together in a
shared sense of belonging'. It seems that we are being asked to find our
identity, not in the buildings our society chooses to build, not in the
things we create, but in the buildings bequeathed by the past.
'The government fully endorses the increasing importance attached to the
preventative maintenance of historic fabric', the report continues. '[It is]
essential that decisions taken at all levels…have regard to any potential
impact on the physical remains of the past.' A 'vision' for the future
founded in the preservation of things that already exist - this looks like
the conservative vision of a demoralised elite.
How did we get here? Well, you could say that it all began with the
Millennium Dome.
The Dome was New Labour's key attempt to make a statement about what it was
and where it planned to take Britain. In creating the Dome, New Labour lined
up against the elites of the past - the Victorian elite that put on the
Great Exhibition of 1851, and the postwar elite that authored the Festival
of Britain of 1951. Despite the fact that 1851 and 1951 occurred at the
opposite poles of the rise and fall of British Empire, they had something in
common. On both of these historic occasions the big national shows were
harbingers of a new era, where those in power made a statement about their
desire for a change of direction in national life, a statement about the
ambitions they had for the future.
Tony Blair, in his foreword to the official book on the Dome, said he wanted
the Dome to be seen as the work of a 'forward-looking people who are
breaking down old-fashioned barriers' (6). Elizabeth Wilhide, author of the
book, noted that the late twentieth century was marked by a 'turning away
from the present in favour of the nostalgic haven of the past. The
millennium presents the opportunity to turn and face the future'.
New Labour tried to turn and face the future, it tried to make a statement
about what it was and where it was going - but it failed miserably. Because
although it knew that it wanted something new for the Millennium - something
that wasn't a traditional national celebration and didn't just appeal to
Britain's glorious past - it had no idea what that something new was.
As such, despite an impressive and innovative structure, put up in record
time (7), the contents of the Dome were essentially improvised . The zones
were designed by people whose ideas kept changing, working in groups that
kept changing. Elizabeth Wilhide commented that, from the outside, the
creation of the Millennium Experience 'all looked faintly comical, like a
game of musical chairs where all the chairs kept changing shape' (8). People
messing around with marker pens spent millions of pounds.
<http://www.spiked-online.com/images/pixel.gif>
<http://www.spiked-online.com/images/pixel.gif> People messing around with
marker pens spent millions of pounds
The Dome was rubbish, universally reviled. It was a massive, embarrassing
statement of emptiness that is still a source of discomfort as the
government is finally selling it off. The hole at the heart of the Dome
contaminated both the architectural structure and the very idea of a big,
national project. A desire to do something new - not for good reasons, but
simply to escape the old - is something that New Labour had in common with
the Dadaists of the 1910s and 20s. And, like the Dadaists, the efforts of
the Dome-fillers were more infantile than they were innovative.
It is difficult to overestimate quite how demoralising the Dome experience
must have been for New Labour. It was 'too ambitious a thing for a
government to have tried to have done', said Blair afterwards (9). The then
culture secretary Chris Smith tried to duck responsibility, saying he
personally would have preferred 'something rather smaller and rather more
wholly focused on educational work' (10).
Today, the Dome is like a curse, capable of instantly dooming any new
project it becomes associated with. Various plans for a new national
football stadium have crumbled amid whispers of 'remember the Dome....'
(11).
And the Dome experience encouraged New Labour to seek stability, not change;
security, not risk. Preserving national heritage offers this stability and
security. Historic monuments and landscapes that already exist are
uncontroversial - we didn't make them, we don't have to take responsibility
for them, they offer no possibility of failure. They have, to a degree,
succeeded already by simply existing. So rather than building a new monument
and saying 'this is what we are about', New Labour is saying: 'Look what's
already around you: this is what we are about.'
The Historic Environment: A Force for our Future talks about the 'imprint of
history' being our source of international renown - a far cry from the shiny
'rebranding' of Britain in New Labour's first term. The report calls for the
teaching of traditional craft skills, such as dry stone walling, to 'ensure
that the necessary skills are fostered and passed on from generation to
generation' (12). It is remarkable that the regime that once promoted
design, pop and fashion is now talking about the importance of learning how
to thatch roofs.
Focusing on heritage is not a new phenomenon. There are similarities between
the visions portrayed in today's The Historic Environment and the obsession
with national heritage in the 1980s. In both cases, there is a looking to
the past to help forge stable identities for the present. While The Historic
Environment talks about the importance of 'collective memory' and the way
that 'a historic church or park can help define a neighbourhood and create a
sense of local cohesion', influential American academic Allan Bloom wrote in
1987 that 'the active presence of tradition in a man's soul gives him a
resource against the ephemeral' (13).
But many of the people who attempted to renovate heritage in the 1980s were
hankering after a more exclusive, nationalistic view of the past. Today
there is a great deal of discomfort about this view of the past - The
Historic Environment celebrates the 'widening of the definition of what
people regard as their heritage', and insists that the historic environment
is 'something with which the whole of society can identify and engage'. It
sees English history, not as the story of English nationalism, but as a
'gradual accumulation of movement and arrivals, new stories attaching
themselves to old'.
This amounts to a more confused use of heritage. Indeed, it could be said to
corrode the very idea of heritage. While the renovation of heritage in the
1980s aimed to forge a unified and stable national identity, today there is
a denial of the possibility of one national story. The Historic Environment
emphasises that the 'diversity of ways in which people experience or relate
to our historic environment is one of its strengths'. In this context, the
heritage promoted in The Historic Environment can be pretty much anything
anybody decides it is; not only Buckingham Palace, but the local park, the
local mosque, or a pop star's childhood home. We end up with a society that
is cut off from a common view of its past, as well as its future.
When 'heritage' is everything, it is also nothing - it is simply anything
around us bequeathed by the past. Each specific group or individual is told
to find itself in its own past and locality, in its ancestors and their
creations. This essentially becomes a way of shoring up the fragmented
identities of contemporary society, rather than encouraging people to engage
with other members of society to decide what projects we should work on
together in the present.
All of this doesn't mean that the Labour government has completely
jettisoned its attack on tradition, or the old elites who represent this
tradition. There will be no let-up in 'modernising' assaults on everything
from foxhunters to parliament to the legal system.
Indeed, the rediscovery of heritage is completely reconcilable with these
modernising attacks - both are part and parcel of the new elite's inability
to forge a future for society. On the one hand, New Labour tries to define
its agenda by attacking tradition - it doesn't know what it stands for, but
it certainly isn't that. On the other hand, it promotes a vague and
relativist version of heritage as the source of social identity.
But while the modernising attacks on tradition will not stop, we won't see
another attempt to carry off a Dome - there will be no more stand-alone
attempts to stamp something new on the heart of society. And as Tessa Jowell
makes clear, we have also seen the back of the shiny branded New Labour.
While the 'new' this and 'new' that of Cool Britannia was irritating and
directionless, the promotion of heritage is deadening. It reinforces
parochialism and a sense of stasis - reinforcing the idea that tomorrow will
be pretty much like today. And it dampens the debates that - especially at
the start of a new year - society should be having, about the buildings,
landscapes and monuments we want for ourselves. Not because they are new,
nor because they are old, but because they are what we want.
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