| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| ESSAY |
... And gas lamps, stocks, drinking fountains, and the rest. Jeremy Milln reports
Archers addicts may remember Tom Forrest singing his party piece The Village Pump. Tom is gone but so too, alas - in many cases - has the pump itself, along with gas lamps, horse troughs, mile posts, wayside crosses and numerous other antiquarian bits and pieces which furnished our landscape long after they ceased to be used.
Certain items of landscape furniture are, admittedly, now beginning to foment special interest groups, in recognition of their intrinsic interest, and their contribution to the fabric of the countryside and the distinctiveness of localities. They include a `fellowship' for follies, societies for sundials and milestones, a trust for mausolea, a study group for pillboxes, an association for village lock-ups and another for public sculpture and monuments, and a group for wells.
In legislation, however, landscape furniture is not so well served, for it occupies a lacuna between the statutes for scheduled monuments, listed buildings and portable antiquities. In a planning department, an item like a milestone - not obviously a monument, building, or portable artefact - risks disappearing between the offices for building conservation and archaeology. It would be lucky to enjoy entry in the Sites and Monuments Record, and luckier still to survive a round of roadworks. Government planning guidance offers little solace.
In towns, the British have an ambivalent attitude towards street furniture. The campaign to save Gilbert Scott's red telephone boxes was largely successful, but few fussed about the loss of drinking fountains, gas lamps, horse troughs, indicator posts, porter's rests, service covers, water pumps and the like which have largely been swept away by tidy-minded local authorities. How interesting that many of those same authorities are now tarting up pedestrianised streets with benches, bollards, lamp posts, post-boxes and sign posts in pseudo-Victorian cast iron.
In the countryside, it is neglect which has been the chief enemy to the legacy of boundary stones, cattle troughs, ducking stools, finger posts, inscribed stones, maypoles, mile posts, mounting blocks, pillories, stepping stones, stocks, sundials, village pumps, wayside crosses, wickets, whipping posts and so on. With neglect, there is also theft and vandalism.
Some collectors are now attracted to landscape furniture, as others are by stolen architectural fittings, and are likewise served by a network of specialist antique dealers. In some ways this is more worrying than the classier trade in garden statuary and the like, for while the latter may be traceable, ordinary landscape furniture is usually not. There are no reliable figures for the rate of loss.
Some items of landscape furniture may be either listed or scheduled, but the vast majority are neither. There are also anomalies: a good number of milestones have been listed, while boundary and wayside cross stones tend to be scheduled. To be fair, English Heritage are trying to rationalise the situation - albeit frequently by deletions from, rather than additions to, statutory lists and schedules. When the Anglo-Saxon crosses at Lyme Park, a National Trust property near Manchester, were descheduled in 1997, I was told that this was because they are not in their original position, and in the belief that they were `not fixed' - a principle with implications for all such features.
Equally, one might ask whether an item of landscape furniture can properly be listed, where it is not a `building' as such, capable of alteration or demolition. Mile-stones, wayside crosses, telephone kiosks and the like may therefore be awkward to list or schedule.
So then what can be done? In Conservation Areas, individual items could be routinely identified at the time of revision or designation. Elsewhere, authorities might help in the monitoring of local registers, much as they do for trees covered by Tree Preservation Orders.
Active conservation and security are, however, challenges which have hardly been tackled. Art-historical material in the country house gardens of English Heritage or the National Trust is often protected by sophisticated electronic tagging, but this may be inappropriate or too expensive as a general measure, and all that has seemed possible is the bolting down of a few seats in the municipal park.
Volunteer archaeologists have shown how good fieldwork can be accomplished at little cost. What is needed now is increased recognition of landscape furniture within local authorities. This could start with the enhancement of SMRs, perhaps in a way comparable with the portable antiquities reporting scheme (see BA, July), and lead to national guidelines for the protection of these precious and fascinating features of our historic environment.
Jeremy Milln is an archaeologists with the National Trust
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1999