Heritage and aporia …
This is an essai, in the proper sense of the term, ‘a try’, about a configuration for the term Heritage, a chance to think about the concept and some of the ways in which the term might find not its definition but rather its dissolution within an expanded field of other disciplines: history, geography, politics, local and national policy on culture, certainly, but also psycho-geography and phenomenology and not least, in the conflicted lived experience of being surrounded by what has come before and our attitudes to it. This essai, then, is polemical and in its present form makes few scholarly claims. I set out my arguments first and then test the literature after.
Normally, there is a healthy distance between the subject of my research and my own position as a researcher. Were I an active participant in my academic home ground – the French Revolution – I would have been a Girondist. I would have been there at the Champ de Mars celebrating with Helen Maria Williams and Wordsworth as the whole world came together to celebrate Liberty, Brotherhood and Equality. Although here, we might pause. When I recently shared some of my research with art therapist colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire, some were intrigued by why I should spend so much time delighting in revolutionary politics. Were they not some form of repressed lament for my experience of a failed left-wing project over my own lifetime? Quite possibly, Nietzsche wrote about this process of personal identification with the past and called it antiquarianism. Heritage’s own participation in the past is not uncontaminated by the tensions between how things might have been, how things are and how they may be again if the discipline of heritage gets its way. When, for example, public address systems fracture the peace of the one-time landscape garden and now municipal park behind our home – as they too frequently do – a Bubble Rush here, an evangelical Christians’ meeting there – we find a clash between the ersatz capitalist consumerism I so roundly despise and my reading of Rousseau’s Emile, a pastoral ideal of peace and social and political content. But here too there are dangers, Rousseau’s fascism is never far from the surface; the idea that we all might find our place with the fasces of Nature is by definition exclusionary. (Note to self who has written about the fascist Rousseau?)
Let’s start with the material fabric of the place, what place exactly doesn’t matter that much. The street is very old; medieval in places. One wall in a nearby Thai restaurant frames exposed wattle and daub made about the same time Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. Like so many towns, this town peaked just before the construction of a nearby canal made its twenty or so coaching inns pretty much redundant and it has since fallen into gentile decline. But Pevsner still rated it as one of the finest period market towns of the early-eighteenth century. On an early spring morning as sunshine rakes across its western flank, the street’s façade is heart-stoppingly lovely. But this does only partial justice to the town’s fabric. Rock-solid oak gates of the early Tudor period bar the entrance to a parking-space for a hairdresser’s salon specializing in hair-straightening. The gate bears the scars of incaution as a succession of vehicles have failed to squeeze in a gap meant only for horses. The more recent past has been piled upon the older fabric of the town; and, inevitably, each layer has something to say about Heritage, already a polyglot formation… An eighteenth century shop front stuck on a seventeenth century building, a desire to avoid eighteenth century traffic by turning a house around so its new eighteenth century front faced inwards into a once chic little court. It’s an architectural gem but one now sullied by the spicy exhaust of an adjacent Indian Restaurant and mountain bikes belonging to the restaurant’s staff who leave far too late to catch public transport. Old photos in the tea-shop down the road – and this too is nothing if not Heritage red in tooth and claw – show how the town’s high street flourished in the nineteenth century just before it was bypassed again in the twentieth century. A brutal New Town a mile to the south is now so old that it too raises further issues around Heritage. Sadly, its uncompromising modernism is now in the process of being swept away by housing developments and parts at least are surely worth preserving. It boasts the first multi-story car park in Britain and a lovely ceramic mural showing the town’s history: the quaint train-line that was axed by Beaching’s reforms in the 1960s, Henry VIII handing the town its charter. Here, half a century ago, we lived happily, freed from our north London slums and looked after by a National Health Service. If you are in any doubt about the town’s political credentials, look no further at the little parabolic arches that support fences around the New Town’s front gardens. They were based on those Le Corbusier designed for the Moscow Pavilion in 1922 and borrowed again later by MacDonald’s. For the moment however, the street exists in some kind of repose; recently cheered up by a make-over, replacing quiet tarmac with the clatter of cobblestones. Council-owned properties sit cheek by jowl with owner-occupiers and start-ups move in and out of vacant shops to get their businesses off the ground; some successfully other less so. But it is within the vignette of everyday life that the radically fractured nature of Heritage as a discipline shows its face. The thin line of catering workers and residents who turned back a rabble of fascist protesters raises a cheer but less so the make-over of a local restaurant that saw its eighteenth century door replaced by a Regency hardwood alternative from B&Q. But these too are among the most compelling parts of the town’s uncertain Heritage and the very stuff of aporia …
The street has its problems and these are written within the fabric of a contested heritage. We love our local church but not necessarily what goes on inside it, a happy-clappy form of Christianity articulated through the conduit of kids’ drawings of a rainbow nation and soft cushions where a medieval font once stood. Rather, I love it as an example of Norman architecture with its disproportionately large spire stuck on it 200 years after its completion to reclaim it back for the English after a brazen act of French, specifically Norman imperialism, that spread throughout the country after 1066. And we have very long memories. When the French moved into the farmers’ market a few years back, they were roundly abused, not racially because 1066 made sure that most of us share the same DNA, but cultural abused because the spirit of Albion so clearly spelt out in our pubs, its fare and the schedules played on its wide-screen TVs were inimical to our cultural fabric. There’s a failed antique shop too that serves as a UKIP (Heritage again?) outpost, displaying a faded photocopy of Tommy Robinson. There is more to be said, but the essai perhaps sketches out something perhaps of an agenda for the subject of heritage …
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