The car drums across a bent cattle grid, past a half-derelict farmyard and on through the puddles, sluicing into the middle of nowhere. A barn floats like an ark in an ocean of fields, its hollow silence deepened by the fluting of doves. Ancient trees, shawled in ivy, receive a sudden shrapnel of jackdaws as we pull up in front of the barn’s more aristocratic neighbour.
Baconsthorpe Castle in north Norfolk is, or was, a fortified manor of the mid-15th century. All that’s left are two broken-down gatehouses; a blocked well in a grassy court; a crumbly flint perimeter wall; a weed-choked moat; clumps of wild garlic; a small lake now reflecting greylag geese, coots, a pair of mute swans and a shelduck. Its form is blurred by decay, yet it remains somehow immaculate in its dereliction, as rooted in the landscape as corn and oak. There is no evidence that its walls ever had to withstand so much as a flung pebble, or that they shielded their inhabitants against anything worse than their own paranoia. The irony is that its current custodians face a worse and more persistent threat than any of their historical predecessors. But it is a very modern kind of siege. These days we don’t talk bullets, blades or boiling oil. We talk economy; we talk prudence; we talk dogma.
And boy, do we talk dogma! It takes vision of a very special kind to reflect upon historic buildings – earthworks, megaliths, castles, forts, churches, abbeys, bridges, houses, palaces, gardens – and ask what contribution they can make “to the delivery of the government’s central ambitions”. Or to feel so embarrassed by the sheer Englishness of them that you start to babble about racism. “Issues of personal and group identity are an intrinsic part of the construction of the historic environment, and therefore race equality is an intrinsic part of the management and work of English Heritage.”
The first quote is from the anonymous author of the funding agreement that seals the contract between English Heritage and the government. The second is from Dr Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage, in his annual report for 2003-4. Inevitably under the Blairite code, there are performance indicators, targets and a droning emphasis on delivery, outreach, inclusion and roll-out. You might ask why “the lead body concerned with the conservation of England’s built environment” has dispensed with its nine regional managers and taken on a “head of social inclusion and diversity”. Or why it needed the services of a “work-flow engineering consultancy”, or a “customer insight manager”.
Or why, when the precise point of “heritage” is that it has an aesthetic and cultural value that transcends the bean-counters, English Heritage should have come up with a “property prioritisation programme” that focuses its investment on “properties with the greatest commercial potential”. Or why it needed to develop a hospitality business offering top-drawer venues for weddings and corporate functions. You may wonder, too, why it fired a generation of young archeologists and architectural historians, and why 80 staff responded to Dr Thurley’s invitation to English Heritage’s 21st-anniversary party in June 2004 with a curt rejection: “I wish to inform you that I will not be attending and want you to put the money saved into the pay budget”; and why staff in May this year voted for industrial action.
The answers are all the same – a degree of governmental apathy to what is now called “the historic environment sector” that is difficult to distinguish from enmity. In early March, senior aides of the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, let it be known that she was thinking of dismantling English Heritage (an official body) and transferring responsibility for historic buildings to the National Trust (a charity). Jowell denied this in a letter to the quango’s chairman, Sir Neil Cossons, in which she professed to have been “astounded and infuriated” by the Sunday Times report, but significantly, she made no complaint to the paper itself.
Cossons makes no secret of his unease. In the March issue of the English Heritage members’ magazine, Heritage Today, he put it bluntly: “There is no point in pretending that we were anything but bitterly disappointed when the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) cut our budget... If you sideline our heritage, you sideline the nation’s soul.”
This kind of stuff may rally the faithful, but it does not play so well with the Whitehall roll-out merchants. They don’t talk much about “soul”, and even if they did, they wouldn’t go looking for it in a castle. New Labour, with its addiction to newness (“Forward not back”), does not care to associate too obviously with anything as uncool as antiquity, particularly when it invites nostalgia for a pre-socialist age.
Not even the lesson of the Millennium Dome, a hubristic search for national identity wrecked by the government’s refusal to acknowledge the achievements of the past, could bridge the party’s synapses. Its fear of history – elitist, racist and off-message – is rooted deep in the ideological subsoil. In the agenda of Jowell’s DCMS, obsessed with the Olympics, super-casinos and the BBC, the historic environment hardly merited a Post-it note. In October 2004, when the Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell asked how many English Heritage sites the secretary of state had visited in the previous 12 months, he received the answer “none”. She “has not had an opportunity”, explained the sports minister Richard Caborn.
This was like saying the secretary of state for defence had not had an opportunity to visit an airfield. “Can you imagine?” says Thurley.
“We are the second biggest NDPB [non-departmental public body] in the DCMS after the Arts Council. It does speak for itself.” Tony Burton, director of policy at the National Trust, was not surprised. “She doesn’t really care about heritage issues,” he said. Neither was Catherine Craig, negotiations officer for the Public and Commercial Services Union that represents many of English Heritage’s beleaguered, insecure and increasingly poorly paid staff: “You always got the feeling she wasn’t interested.”
It is not apathy alone that’s the problem. English Heritage has a statutory duty to protect the historic environment, and does so with a zeal that not everybody finds convenient. England now has half a million listed buildings, none of which may be altered without its consent. Those who feel thwarted by it – property owners, planners, architects, developers – tend to characterise it as a busybodying architectural traffic warden. “There’s a lot of dinner-party lobbying that English Heritage is a complete pain in the arse,” says Burton. “It’s petty bureaucrats wandering around with listed-building forms, telling people they can’t put dormer windows in. That’s the sort of rather tiresome lobbying it’s subjected to on the opinion-former circuit.”
More dangerously, it has had to thrust itself, like a hen defending its chicks, between vulnerable townscapes and the bristling, antagonistic form of John Prescott. Standing up to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) is the duty of anyone who feels concern for the environment, and English Heritage has led by example. One of the most notorious of the ODPM’s follies has been the chain of demolition schemes – known, in faultless new-Labourese, as “Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders” – with which it menaces northern England. Hundreds of thousands of mainly Victorian terraced houses have been targeted for demolition, and their communities threatened with dispersal, to clear land for new development. In official language this is “housing-market restructuring”, designed to “create sustainable communities”.
