History for the Taking?

It’s been quite a week for heritage announcements. 

Monday saw the launch of the English Heritage corporate plan, the National Heritage Protection Plan and the National Heritage List. The latter is a searchable database of all designated heritage assets – the map is extremely easy to use and should be a great asset in its own right. 

The NHPP meanwhile is English Heritage’s ambitious framework for protecting the whole of the nation’s heritage, setting out priorities for research and action. At present it reads too much like an EH-only document, but the idea is that this is something the whole sector will unite behind.

The English Heritage corporate plan comes at a time when the organisation is facing cuts of 32%. Such drastic cuts have meant a refocusing on priority areas, which EH have interpreted as, principally, the act of physical conservation. As a consequence, the NHPP is driving much of their business, while the word ‘outreach’ no longer appears.

There was some unfortunate confusion in the reporting of the launch of these plans. Baroness Andrews, EH’s Chair, stated quite honestly that “As public funding diminishes, it is imperative that we concentrate on what only we can do”. However, this was reported by one commentator as “it is imperative that we concentrate only on what we can do” - a rather less inspiring form of words.

The next day saw a rival collection of views on the state of the nation’s heritage in the form of a new collection of essays from the British Academy Policy Centre. The accompanying press release stated that “Government spending cuts and rushed legislation within the cultural heritage sector are leading to a “devastating” loss of vital expertise, and to human activity that has the potential to “destroy” heritage irreparably.” This was a far gloomier message – whether or not it rings true remains to be seen.

The truth is that ‘heritage’, per se, is not something that enjoys automatic and unbridled public support, and is therefore often the thing that gets cut first by politicians. A retrenchment back into the practical business of researching and protecting assets may not be the best way of guaranteeing longer term political support. 

Conversely, when it comes to the national forest estate, it would seem the weight of public opinion is able to completely reverse government policy. A debate at the Hay festival this weekend explores the provocative idea that “When It Comes To Heritage, Britons Care More About Trees Than Buildings”.

Living Landscapes

A joint publication by Steve Daniels and me can be read for free on the Bloomsbury Academic website, here.

This relates to the AHRC's Landscape and Environment programme, using case studies from the National Trust. More on the programme can be seen here

The Stones of Newport

The landscape of Newport, where I live, owes much to geology. During the Anglian Ice Age, vast sheets of ice covered the country almost as far as London, and certainly covered this part of what is now north-west Essex.   As the ice formed and retreated, it cut valleys into the underlying rocks, leaving gently undulating hills covered in boulder clay, and streams, rivers and ponds in the valley floors. The ice also left large stone boulders known as ‘glacial erratics’ which can still be found dotted around and about – silent mementoes of an insanely distant past.

These pictures show two roadside examples from Newport. The first is the distinctively shaped sandstone 'sarsen' stone known as the ‘Leper Stone’, which stands by the side of the village’s main street, the modern-day B1383.  It is the largest standing stone in Essex. Its name derives from its proximity to the site of St Leonard’s Hospital, a medieval lay establishment founded by Richard de Newporte during the reign of King John (1199-1216). 19^th -century antiquaries speculated that the hospital was devoted to the cure of leprosy, owing to the belief that lepers would leave money in a hollow in the stone in return for food. But there is no evidence to suggest that the hospital was specifically devoted to leprosy – so the story is likely to be more myth than fact.

The other erratic lies to the side of the road that leads to the station. Unlike the Leper Stone, it is a puddingstone – ‘a conglomerate of flints and other pebbles in a sandstone matrix like raisins in a pudding’.  Rather brilliantly, both stones are featured on The Megalithic Portal, as examples of Essex’s ‘sacred stones’.

These stones are often anonymous and unassuming – these days, you might entirely miss them if you weren’t looking for them. Farmers have often moved them around, hence the fact that they are often found at the edge of roads or on corners. Presumably, they made excellent marker points for communities defining their local patch – the sort of thing that Nicola Whyte talks about in her book Inhabiting the Landscape. (On a similar theme, I am looking forward to reading Alexandra Walsham’s The Reformation of the Landscape, looking at the spiritual significance of local landscapes.) 

As far as I know, such stones are entirely unprotected – you can’t ‘list’ or ‘schedule’ them. But then, they’ve been there a while, and they aren’t going anywhere soon.

Allotments - who won?

The Independent on Sunday is today claiming victory in its campaign to save allotments, following the inclusion of Section 23 of the 1908 Smallholdings and Allotments Act in a review of duties imposed on local authorities by central government (the consultation on which ran from 7 March 2011 to 25 April 2011). Section 23 obliges ‘allotment authorities’ (eg parish or district councils) to ‘provide a sufficient number of allotments and let them to persons resident in the area (where they are of the opinion that there is a demand)’.

The Independent on Sunday first raised the story on 1 May 2011, claiming that “The proposals could see local authorities, many of them strapped for cash under government-imposed cuts, selling off allotment land for social housing or even for profit to major companies”. It was a good non-Royal Wedding story to run, and was clearly trying to rekindle memories of the Save our Forests campaign from earlier in the year.

It was somewhat unclear what would be achieved by launching a public campaign in the week after a Government consultation had closed. Nevertheless, CLG responded robustly with a statement saying that the story was “simply untrue”:

“we will not remove statutory protections for allotments or any frontline services. However the Government is reviewing old and unnecessary duties imposed on councils in order to free them up from Whitehall red tape and as part of this we have published the full list of duties which includes allotments."

The Dig for Victory campaign nonetheless clearly resounded with politicians. It was raised at Prime Minister’s questions on 4 May 2011, eliciting the following response from David Cameron:

Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op): More than 100 years ago, Parliament legislated to make sure that local authorities provided allotments. Healthy local food is a very good part of good British values. Why therefore are the Prime Minister’s Government scrapping the obligation on local authorities to provide allotments?

The Prime Minister: I was as concerned as the hon. Gentleman when I read that report. I immediately checked, and found that that is not the case. It is extremely important that allotments are made available. Many Members will find that when they ask about that in their constituencies there are massive queues for allotments, as many people want to grow their own vegetables and food and understand more about where food comes from. It is a great movement, and it has my full support.

CLG claimed further credit later in the week, when it released data showing that 50,000 allotment sites had been sold by local authorities in the period 1996-2006. It allied the release of the data with a reminder that under the proposed powers in the Localism Bill, local people would be able to make their own decisions on land use, including the right to designate areas for use as allotments.

What can we learn from this episode? Unlike with the forests, here is a situation where both sides are claiming victory, and with some justification. Section 23 of the 1908 act looks like it will remain intact, but at the same time the Government has had an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to growing your own. Indeed, Eric Pickles took to Twitter to claim that in fact “Govt wants to increase the number of allotments”. How it will do this without imposing the sort of regulatory obligations that at the same time it wants to remove is not clear.

However, I note that the original consultation that gave rise to the IoS story also included the following obligations on local authorities from the 1990 Planning (Listed Buildings etc) Act:

• [to] Determine from time to time, which parts of its area should be conservation areas.

• Publish proposals for the preservation and enhancement of conservation areas.

• Exercise certain functions paying special attention to the desirability of enhancing or preserving the appearance of conservation areas

• In considering whether to grant planning permission affecting a listed building or its setting, have special regard to the desirability of preserving the building or its setting

The idea of Government abolishing conservation areas seems, to me, an even bigger threat than that of the loss of allotments. No such threat yet exists of course, but the devil is always in the detail, and we have yet to see the draft of the National Planning Policy Framework. 

In the meantime, is it possible to conclude that threats to 'green' things will always take a priority in the minds of journalists to threats to 'brown' things (eg heritage)?

Mayday Mayday

One of the most regularly consulted books on my bookshelf is Steve Roud’s book on The English Year: A month by month guide to the nation’s customs and festivals from May Day to Mischief Night (2006). It’s a brilliant work of synthesis, bringing together evidence of customary events that took place across the country and across the calendar.  I’ve just looked again at his chapter on May Day, which reveals that the start of May ‘was second only to Christmas in popularity with the English people’. As a date in the customary calendar it’s difficult to place clearly, since it was celebrated in such a variety of ways in different places. ‘We desperately need a full-scale historical study of the day in all its manifestations’, Roud writes.

The different ways in which 1 May was celebrated included:

• ‘Bringing in the May’: fetching greenery from the countryside to adorn towns and villages
• May garlands: which could be wreaths of flowers, or nosegays sold for luck, or even pyramids of shiny metal carried on the heads of dancing maids
• Maypole dancing
• Noise: in particular the blowing of horns
• Ducking or Dipping: dousing people with buckets of water if they do not carry a ‘piece of May’ as protection
• Fighting: as at Yarleton Hill in Gloucestershire, where residents of neighbouring parishes customarily met on 1 May to battle for possession of the May Hill
• Decorating horses
• Jack-in-the-green: chimney sweeps covered in a dome of greenery who would perform public dances
• Cheese Rolling
• Hobby Horses

1 May was also adopted as International Labour Day in 1889 and moved from being a romantic celebration of nature and working customs to having a far harder political edge as a day for union processions and industrial agitation.

Interestingly, we’ve only marked the May Day Bank Holiday since 1978, when it was introduced by Michael Foot under the last Labour Government but one. This archive BBC footage is fascinating, not only for the opposition to the public holiday on grounds that it was too ‘Eastern European’, but also because it shows how places like the Tower of London and Hampton Court were shut leaving Londoners with nothing to do.

Since then May Day has been a political hot potato, with the Conservative government of 1979 proposing to replace it with a ‘Trafalgar Day’ in October. This proposal was abandoned in 1993, but has recently been resurrected in the DCMS Tourism Policy paper. The battle for May Day therefore continues.