| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| COMMENT |
The Government still getting it wrong
Ministers still don't understand about the historic environment, writes Richard Morris
The day after last year's General Election I wrote an article on this page which offered the new Government some advice. It said that national heritage is the sum of local heritage, and pointed to the `values of typical local buildings and landscapes which invest different parts of Britain with their personality' (see BA, May).
Care of the characteristic, I suggested, `calls for a national strategy . . . and the continuing presence of local organisations which can provide the necessary information and guidance.' I pointed to the dangers of indefinite pressures on local government to do more with less.
I also drew attention to the lack of any policy centre for Britain's historic environment. Responsibilities are split between a number of departments, agencies, and the Lottery. Mindful that I was talking to a Government which preached `education, education, and education', I mentioned that while Britain's cultural history spans half a million years, the English History Curriculum begins only with the Romans. Ten months on, what has happened?
Far from heeding the advice, there are signs that the Government doesn't even understand it. The historic environment should be at the heart of inter-departmental debates on greenfield/ brownfield housing allocation, transport strategy, the desirability of establishing a Department of Rural Affairs, the defence estate, and agriculture. In fact, it is invisible.
While archaeological services in counties like Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire are drastically weakened (see News), The Department of Culture remains mute. English Heritage's grant has been cut. The position of history itself within the National Curriculum is now insecure. And by a telling irony, the other day I was sent a recent photograph of the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire, the beleaguered monument which was used to illustrate last year's article. It is a site in national guardianship, for which Mr Smith is ultimately responsible. Its condition has not improved.
In short, as far as the historical dimension of culture is concerned, there is a virtual policy vacuum. True, the culture department is talking of action on Stonehenge, there is an emerging strategy for World Heritage Sites, and a scheme has been introduced to encourage the reporting of archaeological finds. Welcome as they are, however, the first two initiatives centre on what is exceptional rather than characteristic, while the voluntary finds reporting scheme was inherited from the previous Government.
The signs are that this Government is nervous of the past, seeing it as off-message, some sort of obstacle rather than an asset. While Mr Mandelson officiates at the altar of the Cult of the New, Ministers have yet to see that the historic environment is contemporary, that it is interesting, life-enhancing, all-pervasive, contributes vastly to the nation's economy - and that you can only destroy it once.
An interesting sidelight on all this is thrown by the campaign to return the Lindisfarne Gospels from London to Durham Cathedral. The Gospels were removed from Durham in 1537 on the orders of Henry VIII. Today they are in the British Library. An impressive coalition of MPs and church leaders has formed to deliver the Act of Parliament which will be needed to send them back. The Gospels have been dubbed `the Elgin Marbles of the North'. The soubriquet insinuates a wrong to be righted. And as The Guardian noted on 2 February: `The first stage of the return . . . has already been negotiated by the Newcastle-based Assembly of the North, the most vigorous of the `shadow parliaments' developing in the English regions.'
I am not averse to debate about restoring the Lindisfarne Gospels to the context of the Community of St Cuthbert, or indeed about regional government. I do worry about calls for the break-up of coherent collections because particular items within them happen to have been hijacked as badges of fashionable causes, threatening to parallel single-issue politics with single item heritage. Are we to expect campaigns for the Bayeux Tapestry to come back to England (where it was made), or the restitution of Stonehenge's bluestones to Wales?
Frankly, I don't much mind whether the Gospels are in London or Durham. Either way they will be well cared for. The CBA minds about the destruction of all those parts of Britain's past which aren't cared for at all, and the wastage of good advocacy on inessentials. If influential opinion-formers can mount a campaign to move a book, how much greater is their cause of educating the Government to the tragedy of agricultural ploughing, which grinds down irreplaceable sacred monuments four times as old, the importance of history's place within the National Curriculum, or the need to retain an adequate archaeological service in counties such as Buckinghamshire.
Richard Morris is the Director of the CBA
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