Heritage is a conservative idea (and this cannot be allowed to stand)

Treasuring heritage is a deeply conservative idea. Indeed conservatives are criticised for almost fetishising the past, for seeing in heritage the means by which we guide the future - Roger Scruton's collection of American Spectator essays is called the "Western Heritage" and The Heritage Foundation is perhaps the USA's most important conservative think tank. Heritage matters to us.

So, it should come as no surprise that, in the manner of modern academia, the conservative 'ownership' of heritage as an idea must be challenged. As if it is some old statue in the corner of a square that represents 'troubling views', the conservative idea that what has gone before matters and should be treasured requires destruction. Welcome to "Critical HeritageStudies":

Above all, we want you to critically engage with the proposition that heritage studies needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, which requires the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’. Heritage is, as much as anything, a political act and we need to ask serious questions about the power relations that ‘heritage’ has all too often been invoked to sustain. Nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, cultural elitism, Western triumphalism, social exclusion based on class and ethnicity, and the fetishising of expert knowledge have all exerted strong influences on how heritage is used, defined, and managed. We argue that a truly critical heritage studies will ask many uncomfortable questions of traditional ways of thinking about and doing heritage, and that the interests of the marginalised and excluded will be brought to the forefront when posing these questions. 

The mission is a sort of anti-heritage year zero approach to the framing of history in society. Some of what emerges really isn't new - ideas around oral and working class history, for example - but the subject is presented as an attack on "...the conservative cultural and economic power relations that outdated understandings of heritage seem to underpin."

Note here that not only is conservatism presented as an 'elite' mission, but its ideas are 'outdated'. And, with a search for wider dimensions of heritage ("...truly international through the synergy of taking seriously diverse non-Western cultural heritage traditions...), Critical Heritage Studies disconnects heritage from place. This connection is to be rejected for it "...privileges old, grand, prestigious, expert approved sites, buildings and artefacts that sustain Western narratives of nation, class and science." I assume that ideas like 'world heritage sites' or 'listed buildings' maintain this privilege requiring an (unspecified) new way of thinking about heritage.

For The Heritage Foundation, that which needs preserving is the set of ideas - "(f)ree enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense" - that are at the heart of that nation's reason for being. And these ideas are symbolised by both built heritage and by a set of national symbols. The conservative idea that Critical Heritage Studies seems to think 'outdated' is that these ideas, the buildings, or places that help contain them, and the symbols that embody them are the essential core of American heritage.

The same applies to British, French, Indian or Chinese heritage. It is inevitably linked to place and to the events that shaped that place. And, yes, this means some sites, buildings, or artifacts matter more in national identity, history or culture than do others. For all that it might chafe, the Houses of Parliament are a more significant heritage site than Bradford Town Hall, and Lullingstone Villa than our little Roman camp in Cullingworth.

The result of all this is an approach to the interpretation of heritage that focuses on guilt - for slavery, for wars, for sending kids down mines or up chimneys, for racism. A progressive panoply of sins paraded before the visitor designed to make him or her "think" or to "confront" the wrongdoing, expunging the guilt associated with the heritage place or object. The idea that progress is a function of confronting sin rather than the betterment of our lives sits at the heart of this 'critical' approach to heritage. This outlook denies us the right to celebrate the achievements of the past, or to simply stand impressed at what what done, at a building's magnificence, a paintings brilliance, or a room's opulence. We're not permitted to look at the Magna Carta and cherish that in it are the seeds of the ideas The Heritage Foundation aim to protect - freedom and equality under the law.

Nostalgia should not push aside truth but, equally, we should not ignore the cultural importance of heritage as simply our heritage just to berate people with a list of past failings requiring atonement. Above all we cannot load onto the past the (or a carefully curated selection of) values of today. Heritage, whether it's a museum collection or a library of folk songs, is a conservative idea and seeking to exclude conservatives is yet another example of how academia seeks to infect public policy with the idea that simply describing what is before a person isn't sufficient. Instead everything must be 'challenged', every item or idea needs to be 'questioned', and every representation that conflicts with today's values either destroyed or hidden away. In this new critical heritage world, we haven't got the conservation of heritage but its selective exploitation to promote a specific minority worldview and to reject the idea that we can get pleasure from the mere fact of past achievements.

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Making a 'sustainable' park - thoughts from a visit to Rome

"Towards a sustainable park" proclaims the blurb on the posters that have been carefully pinned to the solid but, one hopes, temporary fencing. Or rather it says that in Italian complete with diagrams, pictures and the mindless impenetrability of bureaucratic language.

So what is this 'sustainable park' you may very well ask? After all that word 'sustainable' is one of those weasel words so confounded by being discussed and contested that the sense and purpose of the original word is lost in a fog of verbal concern wrapped around with calls for poorly specified action.

As we arrived in the park, it was clear that is was - as your mum would say - in a rather sorry state. It wasn't just the temporary fences or the lack of grass where the grass should be but rather the impression that nothing much had happened for a very long time. Yet the park had sustained - it's probably among the world's oldest parks (the very definition of 'sustainable' one might suggest) so it's not its continued existence that is the bother for those bureaucrats but something else.

Indeed, despite its slight sad state the park was well used combining the dog-walking and children playing functions of parks with a newer purpose of providing a place for African immigrants to lounge around - taking a break from the tough job of trying to flog cheap stuff to tourists (the plaintive cry of 'selfie selfie' being the newest street call from those trying to get folk to buy a selfie stick). And there's a basketball court (or rather whatever the Italians call a 'multi-use games area') where a bunch of young men were playing volleyball as well as what might once have been a properly laid out five-a-side pitch.

Along the sides of the slightly potholed paths are trees. Big trees - mostly stone pines, that icon of Italian treedom - and smaller trees. A multitude of trees. And it's these trees that are the problem with that sustainability. We have - as well as the conflict with regular every day uses of the park - an additional complication for this is Rome and the park is the Colle Oppio, one of the original seven hills of ancient Rome. Meaning, of course, that underneath every inch of the park lies irreplaceable ancient heritage. Those lovely trees - and most of them are lovely - have root systems that are gradually destroying that precious remainder of the lost city. The structures that remain - old bath houses, thermal springs, mosaics, monuments and homes - are unstable, quite literally crumbling away resulting in the project to do something.

And the something is - at its core - trying to get to a balance between the park as a place of play, the park as a green place in an urban environment and the park as a preservation of the past. You get a sense that each tiny piece of completed betterment has only come as a result of careful bartering between the heritage champions, the greens and the local folk who want somewhere to sit or a place for their children to play.

When people ask about political decision-making, we tend to think about new laws or grand strategy. We seldom consider that the toughest political places are these very contested places where many good things are wanted but their priority is contested - ancient ruins worth saving, trees that help the city breathe, playgrounds for toddlers to swing and gardens for us to walk. We can have all of these things but only if we accept some limitation and it falls on the political process - in its broadest meaning - to decide on those constraints, to broker agreements between trees and ruins, and to referee the disputes and disagreements. While all the time knowing that there's an imperative to get the job done, to make that sustainable park.

Right now the Colle Oppio is a mess. At some point it won't be. The challenge will be - and I hope this is the case although my Italian is far too limited to understand everything the signs say - to balance those competing needs, to make a place for tourists (Colle Oppio is 400 yards from the Colosseum), residents, workers and the inevitable flotsam of a city park.

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Open Access: It's not free you know - not even a little bit...

The Internet I mean. Yet that's what people persist in believing - and worse that somehow forcing it all to be 'free' (it isn't free by the way) is some kind of righteous moral crusade:

"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

Now let's deconstruct this argument.

Firstly, prior to the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies, that scientific and cultural heritage was found typed onto paper stored as journals, books, monographs and so forth in myriads of libraries across the world. Nothing that MIT has done - or for that matter any of the publishers of academic research - changes this situation. Those books and other source materials are still 'locked up' in libraries and archives. Some of which have public access but most of which don't.

The point of JSTOR and other similar digital archives isn't to wickedly exploit the world's heritage but to ensure that, whatever happens to the current holders of that heritage, it remains available to the world's researchers. And the process of digitizing that heritage isn't cheap but right now is being paid for by the fact that JSTOR is able to recover costs from users (who otherwise might have to trip round the world to view the documents in question unless the holders of those documents were happy to use the well-established 'inter-library loan' system).

The question for all these self-righteous campaigners for "open access" is therefore, who pays? After all there's still a cost to digitizing content - it has to be scanned, key-worded, indexed, abstracted and stored in a searchable and recoverable way. And funnily enough all that work costs a lot of money. Then it has to be made available, promoted, catalogued and the server space paid for. This also costs a lot of money.

If the user isn't going to pay - directly through a per-use fee or indirectly via their institution - then somebody else has to cough up. And the only remaining candidate for stumping up the cash is the government - the taxpayer. So, far from being a liberation, so-called "open access" simply involves handing control of the entire system to the government and the costs to a load of people who have no interest in accessing the information.

So we replace a system where the world's intellectual heritage is largely available when needed to people who want to use it but which costs the taxpayer nothing with a system where everyone - including all those folk who aren't interested - can access but where there's a multi-billion dollar cost to the taxpayer.

This isn't about copyright but about how we pay for things we want - like saving the world's heritage for posterity. And it's much better done without loads of extra cost on the poor old taxpayer don't you think?

Finally, let's remember that seeking - through hacking and illegal downloading - to undermine this process serves nobody. It threatens the work of academic societies, it undermines the librarianship and archiving role of libraries and it means that access can only be sustained if it is the government's wish for that access to be sustained.

However we look at it, Open Access isn't free. Unless of course you steal the books.

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No, Cllr Slater, they did it because they're criminals

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Damaging and stealing from 'heritage' buildings seems to be a problem and this extends to Bradford where:

In January, up to two tonnes of stone, valued at £6,000, was stolen from the Grade I listed Bolling Hall in Bradford. 

A crime that, at a guess, would require some lifting equipment and a decent sized truck. However, Cllr Val Slater, bleeding heart socialist somehow thinks this isn't organised and systematic crime:

“This report surprises me and dismays me and is a sad reflection of our current society. It reflects how some people are desperate for money in the current economic climate and the lengths they will go to.” 

Sorry Cllr Slater this is rubbish. These are criminals pure and simple. Criminals with a truck and lifting equipment not desperate, unemployed youth.

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Jimena de la Frontera - thoughts on ruins, heritage and the price of historical interpretation

At Jimena de la Frontera in Andalucia there is a ruined Moorish castle above the town. You can see the castle from a fair way off (I suppose that's why they built it there) but to actually reach it you have to go up through the old town, up steep winding streets lined with white-fronted houses. The streets are very narrow - so narrow that the trip down is not for the faint-hearted or the owner of anything bigger than the Citroen we were driving. And, so typically of Andalucian hill villages, every second front step was occupied by an elderly man, woman or some small children.

There are no signs to the castle. One supposes that this is because anyone local knows where it is - at the top of the village - so directions would be a waste of space. Which problem provides our first clue about the attitude to heritage here. Back home there would be brown signs containing the appropriate castle symbol, there would be an expectation that visitors would arrive and want to visit the castle.

Anyway, we wound our way to the castle. You know you've arrived because there's no more road and a tatty little car park in which we found one of those international groups that bring a smile - a chatty Spanish chap with some very fine photography equipment and an elderly Austrian lady (who was really a local as she lived in the village and had done for a lot of years). A brief chat with this pair revealed that they were - I wasn't quite clear why - showing a young Irish couple around.

Now imagine what such a location would be like in England. There would be a barrier or gate, a little visitor centre and shop. And, of course, a charge of £4 or £5 just to go in and look at the ruins (you would be able to pay extra for a little guide book that explains the history). You get none of this in Spain.  No visitor centre, no shop and no charge. We simply have to walk up through the old Moorish gateway.

At some point in the past the local council had put up a series of "interpretative" notices. Over the years these had become rather tatty and, in some cases, difficult to read and where still legible really didn't assist much in understanding who had built the castle and how it became a ruin. It seems that Jimena has been there a long time though:

This gem of a village, has a fairly checkered historical past, having been inhabited at various times by the Iberians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians as well as by the Romans, who made good use of the rich metal deposits found there. Around the year 750, it was of great commercial importance to the Moors, who also used it as a strategic military point. Over the centuries Jimena was conquered and re-conquered on many occasions and twice fell into the hands of the Christians, but by in 1879, during the reign of Alfonso XII, Jimena was so highly considered that it was given the title of Cuidad (Town). With a present population of just over 9,000 inhabitants (some 1,000 of whom are foreign residents - many British), its narrow cobbled streets and white washed Andalusian houses, it certainly retains its village ambience and is a delight to visit.

Whatever the history, the ruins are just that - untidy, unkempt, uninterpreted by the mavens of plastic history. You can wander round at liberty, there aren't any don't go there, don't do that signs. There are no rails, no barriers - just the ruins of a Moorish castle with kites, kestrels and vultures in the skies and the most spectacular view.

It seems to me that, in our desire to inform, to educate, to manage our heritage, we have lost a little of the magic of looking at the ruins of what once was great. Rather than staring at the old tower, looking up through a hole broken in the ceiling. Rather than allowing the visitor's mind to wander, their spirit to soar in personal reflection and speculation, we force that visitor's eyes down to the approved, official interpretation of the heritage. Visiting an "interpreted" castle we come away better informed but less inspired than is the case with the uninterpreted place like this castle at Jimena.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't cherish our heritage but this needn't mean turning it into an "attraction" resplendent with a visitor centre, shop and cafe. Leaving it stark, allowing us to draw our own lessons, get our own undirected pleasure from the visit, might be as good, if not better. Maybe Jimena's apparent lack of care relates to past poverty rather that present decisions - indeed the big board by the castle bedecked with EU symbols suggests that the dead hand of officialdom is creeping closer. For once, I hope that the usual path of European funding in Southern Europe applies and it vanishes into the dusty hills rather than into shiny attraction management at this lovely little castle.

It was a delight to visit this castle, to wander its walls, to poke my head into the tower, to look out at the view - the reason the castle was built here I'm sure - and to ponder on how different is was a thousand years ago when the Moors were running Andalucia. Whether the cork woods were still the same, if the fields were filled with horses and fine cows - plus the great bulls destined for the blood and passion of the ring - and what the economic importance might have been? Above all it was a delight to look out and soak up the spirit of the place.

Maybe it will stay that way?

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