Demolition of the Euston Arch (1962), which the Euston Arch Trust aims to rebuild.
As architecture is added to the heritage minister’s portfolio, Patrick Wright recalls the fraught, politicised battles over conservation, modernity and style in the 1980s.
The word ‘heritage’ has been drifting about in Whitehall ever since Margaret Thatcher refused to countenance the creation of an Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Culture in Britain. As an vagrant fragment of bureaucratic jargon, it has been attached to various offices and ministers without necessarily carrying much meaning at all. So does it really matter that the new coalition government has given responsibility for architecture to John Penrose, who is Minister for Tourism and Heritage? As a veteran of bygone arguments on the subject, I’m inclined to suspect that this last-minute decision may be rather too well adjusted to the coming period of austerity.
Like tourism, ‘heritage’ can easily suggest a backward-looking perspective – implicitly conservative, and indifferent if not actively hostile to the new. Old suspicions were also enlivened in the spring of 2009, when Prince Charles renewed his assault against Richard Rogers, this time over his scheme for Chelsea Barracks, and threw his influence behind an alternative proposal by the classical revivalist Quinlan Terry. Here we were again, it seemed, reliving the row that accompanied transmission of Charles’s television documentary A Vision of Britain in 1988, and doing so without a single change in the leading characters.
What Prince Charles and his followers gave us first time around was a crudely polarised style war, in which classical revivalism squared up to a demonised ‘Modernism’. There was a lot of rage and bluster in the debates that followed, the confusion only increased by the fact that many arguments on both sides were ghost-written by partisan courtiers. One who did write his own response was the architect of the royally-maligned British Library, the late Colin St John Wilson. He repudiated the royal charges in a bad-tempered debate with Leon Krier at the V&A, and went on to spell out his counter-attack in more persuasive detail.
In his book The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture (1995), Wilson argued, entirely convincingly, that mid-century architects such as Alvar Aalto had addressed many of the questions that Charles and his posse would throw in the profession’s face 40 years later – about functionalism, the human scale, and the humanisation of new technologies – and that they had done this within the now reviled Modern Movement. This was the ‘uncompleted project’ of which Charles apparently knew nothing, and it surely represented a far more productive approach than the crude polarisation of Ancient and Modern proposed by the prince and his followers. Their classical revivalism was a merely stylistic ‘re-enchantment’ of the nation, and it quite failed to engage with the actualities that continued to shape architecture, planning, and development in Britain as they had done since the second world war.
If Prince Charles’ camp was responsible for this demonisation of Modernism, there were gross oversimplifications on the other side too. In earlier decades it had been entirely possible to be both modernist and a conservationist. AR Powys, an architect who was also a leading light of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings between the world wars, was happy to write in favour both of new modernist developments in the cities and of preserving traditional buildings in rural areas. Peter and Alison Smithson may have been notorious as New Brutalists, but they also wrote a book in praise of London’s Euston Arch, controversially demolished in 1962. In the polarised rhetoric of the late 1980s, however, it was as if the two impulses were utterly opposed and always had been.
By the late eighties, the modernist condemnation of ‘heritage’ often seemed to deny any legitimacy at all to historical conservation. This inadequate state of affairs went on to find comic expression in Tony Blair’s first government, which is said to have been so hostile to the idea of ‘heritage’ that ministers were discouraged from being photographed anywhere near an old building. It was easily forgotten that the first to speak critically of ‘the heritage industry’ were actually people who had formed their views while directly involved in conservation activities in the early 1970s. The reorganisation of policy under the rubric of ‘heritage’ was questioned at that time by Michael Middleton of the Civic Trust, and also by Colin Ward, who was then promoting ‘urban studies centres’ through the Town & Country Planning Association. Both felt that their collaborative activities were being undermined by the centralising and excessively past-orientated new categorisation imposed in the run-up to European Architectural Heritage Year (1975).
As these earlier arguments surely indicate, there is a lot to be gained from leaving behind the grossly oversimplified positions that emerged in the late 1980s. We will see what John Penrose makes of his new brief. In one sense, at least, I would have preferred responsibility for architecture to go to Ed Vaizey, as originally planned. In his portfolio it would have been combined with ‘the arts’ and ‘creative industries’. But there is another reason why he might have been more sceptical about the attractions of polemically-driven ideas of ‘heritage’. It was his father, the social scientist John Vaizey, who in 1983 protested that the contents of Calke Abbey – then an obscure pile in Derbyshire which campaigners were trying to persuade a sceptical Margaret Thatcher to save for the nation – actually seemed to consist of ‘skiploads of junk’.
Patrick Wright’s books include A Journey Through Ruins (1991) and On Living in an Old Country; the National Past in Contemporary Britain (1985), both of which explore the rise of the ‘heritage industry’.
First published in AT209, June 2010
