Happy heritage

I had a great day and a half at the end of last week in Suffolk, for the Happy Museum symposium.

The event brought together the commissioned projects running as part of the Happy Museum project, with museum sector people who have an interest in the implications of the Happy Museum work.

Our role was to help shape the evolution of the Happy Museum Manifesto, and to share our experience of what conditions lead to the emergence of happiness in a museum context. Happy organisations, happy professionals, happy visitors, happy society. The commissioned projects all sounded like excellent examples of the sort of practical difference that a focus on happiness can make.

But this was no warm, fuzzy concept of happiness. I was surprised to find myself on the first day listening to a captivating talk by Paul Allen of CAT, about the environmental catastrophe we face: its causes, its impacts, and how we can do something about it.

What has this to do with happiness?

Well, from the start Tony Butler reminded us that caring for ourselves and caring for our surroundings are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have happy people without also having a happy environment. The insistence on the role of museums in tackling environmental problems – through their inspiration and their day to day practice – was one of the great things about the symposium.

We also heard on the first day from Andrew Simms at NEF about the role that the past can play in inspiring the future. We don’t need to wallow in despair – looking to our heritage can bring us happiness. America in the 1930s and Britain in the Second World War are examples of how human resilience can rise to the most challenging of circumstances. We even managed to upgrade the track gauge of 177 miles of the great western railway from London to Penzance over the course of a single weekend in 1892. So why shouldn’t we rise to the challenge of changing our consumption-driven lifestyles into something more enriching, rewarding and environmentally sustainable?

The other inspiration I took from the event was hearing more about the Transition movement, which several of those attending had been involved in. It was great to speculate on the role that culture, heritage and the arts might play in Transition.

The event prompted all sorts of questions… Are ‘happiness’ and ‘sustainability’ one and the same concept? What needs to change in the practice of museum professionals in order to achieve the happy state? What are the lessons for the wider heritage sector? What are the implications for governance and the way our museums and heritage organisations are run? There were no answers to these questions as such, but that was not the point.  This was a conversation about how to start a new way of doing things, and while there is much that needs to happen now I was excited by the possibilities for the future that the event raised.   

(PS Being in Snape also made me happy – as did the chance to have a brief tour of the concert hall. A wonderful re-use of a redundant historic building, providing another clue to the way that our past may hold the key to a successful future.)

Planning in NT magazine

A new year brings a new National Trust magazine (as sent to all NT members). This Spring's issue carries a wonderful piece by David Hockney about his love for Bridlington in east Yorkshire, and why that landscape means so much to him: 'It's the one I've always come back to and it's beautiful. It has meaning.'

He ends by saying that 'When it comes to things like the threat of development to our landscapes, we should speak out a bit more, stand up more. We're a bit too polite at times. We should shout 'Hold it!'. It's a lovely country ours. It's green, not mean.'

There's a piece by me by way of introduction - setting out the background for why the National Trust got so heavily involved in the campaign against the NPPF. The text is copied below for those not lucky enough to subscribe

"Many people – Government ministers among them – were surprised to find the National Trust taking a high-profile public stance against proposed changes to land-use planning in England last summer. Yet anyone acquainted with the Trust’s history would have known that from time to time there are moments when we simply have to speak up and demand action.

The National Trust was founded in an era that pre-dates the planning system as we know it today. Arguably, indeed, it was the absence of any sort of planning restrictions at the end of the 19^th century that made the creation of a National Trust such an irresistible idea. Our mission is to care for places of historic interest and natural beauty of all kinds, whether or not they are in our ownership. That has seen us, at different times in the past, championing causes like threats to country houses or the plight of the coastline.

The publication of a revised planning policy framework, rushed out after Parliamentarians had left for their holidays late last July, demanded a clear response from the Trust. The document outlined a new approach to planning which emphasised above all the need for new developments to be approved swiftly and in much greater quantity.

We called for a rethink of the plans, and were delighted at the reaction to our campaign. Within weeks, tens of thousands had signed up to our petition, online and at properties, demonstrating that our fears were widely shared.

Our principal concern was that, although the policy deployed the language of ‘sustainable development’, there were too few assurances against the sort of urban sprawl that had so troubled our forebears in the 1920s and 1930s. While the green belt and other special areas were given specific guarantees, two-thirds of the English landscape was not protected in this way. Our anxiety was that the green fields and open spaces at the edges of towns and villages could be swamped by proposals for new warehouses, superstores and housing developments.

Similar concerns lay behind the publication of Clough Williams-Ellis’s England and the Octopus in 1928 and his edited collection Britain and the Beast in 1937. Writing in the latter, C.E.M. Joad presented a nightmarish vision of the consequences of sprawl, suggesting that ‘In fifty years’ time there will, in southern England, be neither town nor country, but only a single dispersed suburb … from Watford to the coast’. The solution was the creation of defined development plans for areas, which was the basis for the planning system as it evolved from the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act onwards.

The essentials of that post-1947 planning system remain intact today. Indeed, Government’s defence of its proposed new policy framework was that, if anything, it reinforced the importance of local plans for areas, as opposed to the top-down targets imposed by Whitehall or bureaucratic regional administrations.

There is much in this that the National Trust could welcome, not least given our own passion for localism. The trouble is that large parts of the country have no plan – nearly half (47%) of local areas were not covered at the time when the new policy was launched. In the absence of a plan, Government made it clear that decisions needed to be taken in line with its national policy, which contained a strong presumption in favour of development (as long as it was sustainable, of course). Our concern was that this weighted the whole process so heavily in support of saying ‘yes’ to new development that it was, effectively, recasting the planning system as an agent of economic growth above all else.

We are not against change and growth – far from it. The Trust engages with the planning system every day, whether in response to others’ proposals or in submitting development applications of our own (including for housing schemes). Yet for us, planning serves a much broader purpose as the arbiter between different interests – nature, heritage, community wellbeing, transport, and much else besides. These different aspects are not always in conflict with one another, but where they are the planning system needs to arrive at decisions that best serve the long-term public interest and not short-term economic gain. 

We will continue to make a stand where we see places under threat in this way. We also want to make a positive contribution by helping people take a closer interest in the future of their local patch. Our polling tells us that 70% of people are currently "not very likely" or "not at all likely" to get involved in forming neighbourhood plans. What better way for us to be true to our going local ambitions, as well as our long-term mission to look after the landscape, than to encourage greater participation in the decisions that affect the everyday places where we live and work"