It is becoming clear that in the Britain of New Labour, Mr Blair hopes to preside over a cultural renaissance - a new belle époque.
Architecture is the most public of arts, and government is one of the main patrons of new building. Heritage ministers are stressing this Government's aim to exercise its patronage in ways which will encourage creativity and innovation. All this sounds good.
What sounds less good is the near-silence on matters to do with the historic environment. The Heritage Secretary, Chris Smith, and his colleagues have said little about this, and nothing to muffle the wind that now whines through the ruins of the English Heritage/ National Trust scheme to create a free-access 4,000 acre archaeological park around Stonehenge.
Stonehenge is a place where bewildered visitors stare as if at some sad, unkempt but once-majestic animal in a fourth-rate zoo. One of the first acts of EH's first chairman was to look for a way to liberate it from the road-burdened, car-infested ghetto in which it is imprisoned.
Thirteen years on his successor, Sir Jocelyn Stevens, is still looking. Last month Sir Jocelyn was told that the EH/ NT bid to the Millennium Commission for funds to realise a solution had failed. For all the controversy that the scheme might have provoked, it was driven by a desire to reunite elements of a landscape which belong together, and to allow as many people as possible to enjoy a richer experience of the place than they can at present. This was a noble aim.
One who disagreed was Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian's new architecture correspondent, who a few days earlier had denounced the EH/ NT proposals as a well-intended but foolish essay in misapplied nostalgia - an unnecessary attempt to falsify a landscape and resist the inevitabilities of change.
Mr Glancey is not the only one who talks like this. Some of New Labour's cultural outriders, if not conservationhostile, appear less than conservationfriendly. Their messages are that over-zealous conservation is stifling new architecture, and that conservation abets mediocrity because it seeks to keep too much. `Conservation, ' said the architect Lord Rogers recently, `has gone too far. '
The problem with utterances like this is not the possibility that, in a given case, they may sometimes be right, but rather that the vocabulary of conservation is being perverted. This matters, because it is in words and speech that concepts reside, and from concepts that action flows.
In the language of heritage-scepticism, care for an existing building becomes `embalm'. Designation of a conservation area translates as `pickling'. `Old' in front of `building' signals `useless'. The daft idea that buildings suffer from age, rather than that any building suffers from lack of maintenance, has resurfaced. `Heritage' has been hijacked to mean a manufactured past.
Conservation itself, for long a word of positive ring, is now being invested with undertones of bureaucratic oppression. People who cherish their surroundings are `busy-bodies'. Conservation agencies are tiresomely `nannying', and their work is likened to the spraying of some transparent lacquer which glazes things just as they are. Stewardship of the historic environment is being parodied with adjectives of the morgue: chilly, inert, and very dead.
After the post-war despoliation of so much that we would now prize, one might have thought that such fallacies had been laid to rest. Instead, they are climbing back out of their graves.
Nowhere is the corruption of meanings more evident than in the ominous notion that archaeological sites, landscapes and historic buildings are things from the past stranded in the present - curios on the nation's mantlepiece which gather dust and demand disproportionate effort to ensure we don't drop them - rather than a living part of everyday surroundings.
When you hear this, challenge it: repossess the vocabulary. The historic elements of our environment enrich it. They form a large part of our cultural habitat. This habitat enriches us - it stimulates minds, pleases eyes and moves hearts. And because the questions we pose about the past are ever-changing, what we call the past is always in a state of renewal.
Like most wasting assets, the historic environment appreciates as time passes. Much of it is also highly sustainable, for its consumption of materials and demands on transport are largely finished.
For all these reasons we must hope that Chris Smith and his Cabinet colleagues are alert to the fact that artistic reawakening and conservation are not jarring incompatibles. Rather they are more like words `. . . where every word is at home,/ Taking its place to support the others,/. . . An easy commerce of the old and the new,/ . . . The complete consort dancing together. ' (TS Eliot, Four Quartets: Little Gidding, V)
Richard Morris is the Director of the CBA
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1997