DCMS's Unhappy Birthday

 

Although I’m normally a sucker for a good anniversary, one recently passed me by with little notice. On 11 April the Department for Culture, Media and Sport celebrated its 20^th birthday, having been created in the days that followed the 1992 election.

The Department of National Heritage, as it was then called, was formed to bring together various separate responsibilities that were held across Whitehall. Sport came from Education, heritage came from Environment, while the old office of Arts and Libraries provided the job of sponsoring national museums and the Arts Council. Together, they formed the ‘Ministry of Fun’ as it soon became known under the brief leadership of its first Secretary of State, David Mellor.

A Minister for Fun

Given that the DCMS, as it has been titled since 1997, is this year responsible for some fairly major national events, it is perhaps hardly surprising that it took little interest in marking its own 20^th birthday. Only a blog from Toby Sargent on the DCMS’s website served to mark the anniversary. And this is as it should be: the passing of decades is of little interest by itself, after all.

Culture towers, Cockspur Street.

 More intriguing, however, has been the flurry of speculation in recent days over the future of the Department once this year’s ‘summer of celebration’ is over. According to the shadow culture minister, Harriet Harman, Number 10 is actively plotting for the dissolution of the department at some point soon, presumably with its spoils shared back among various of the big beast departments in Whitehall. Ms Harman has published an open letter to Jeremy Hunt to try to uncover the truth - though I do wish she would take the trouble to spell the department’s name correctly.

(The world is divided into those who call it the department ‘of’ culture, as opposed to the department ‘for’ culture. Or at least my small world is.)

The speculation has prompted others to come out of the woodwork with their own views on the department. The Institute of Economic Affairs claimed on Thursday that scrapping the department would save Government £1.6 billion, enabling a cut in fuel duty of 3p or various other fiscal benefits.

Maurice Davies of the Museums Association fought back on the Today programme the next day, when he pointed out that simply abolishing the department would not itself save that amount of money. There would instead need to be a conscious decision by Government to pull out of any subsidy or support for sport and the arts - which legally it cannot do overnight. Admission charges on the doors of the national museums would never recoup the vast amounts of money that is required to maintain collections in this way, so the price of a few pence off the price of petrol would be a fullscale retreat by Government from culture as a legitimate area for intervention.

Graham Hitchen, an arts and design consultant who knows the department well, has offered a more measured piece, speculating on a possible scenario in which the department is split up in a post-Olympic games reshuffle into two principal blocks. Arts and sport would join the Education department, while the creative industries and tourism would join the Business department, newly led by a newly promoted Jeremy Hunt.

Such speculation is an entertaining enough parlour game for those who like that sort of thing (and I should declare my own interest at this point: I was a DCMS employee for around a half of its lifetime, from 1998 to 2008). There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer of course, and only the politics of the coming months and years will determine the fate of the department. I offer here my own observations on the issue:

• DCMS’s demise has been predicted at just about every election for the last 10 years or more. Each time it has grown in size instead, absorbing other responsibilities. Past performance is therefore no indicator that DCMS is about to face its demise.

• The other great innovation alongside the creation of the department was the invention of the National Lottery, to provide funding for the ‘good causes’ of arts, sport, heritage, charities and the Millennium. The Lottery has had a seismic impact on the world of culture since 1994. To split up the department would presumably also mean splitting responsibility for the Lottery – not a great move.

• Most other EU and European countries have a separate culture ministry of some sort. Splitting up the department would mean a loss of European and international influence.

• Few people have addressed what would happen to heritage if DCMS was split up among other departments. Would it return to the modern-day successor to the old DoE, the department for Communities and Local Government? Or has the impact of nearly 20 years of HLF funding now changed the view of heritage so much that it is no longer regarded simply as a planning issue? In which case, if the Hitchen scenario plays out, does it get shunted in with tourism, or is it placed alongside arts and museums in a reconstituted education department? Neither quite works.

 Arguably, the best place for heritage is in its own department sitting alongside museums, the arts, tourism and the creative industries.  A bit like DCMS, in fact – although recent anti-heritage moves by Government (eg the new VAT on alterations to listed buildings) suggest that the case for heritage is not being quite made as loudly as it could be.  It will be fascinating to hear what the Heritage and Tourism Minister as to say on this, and on the future of DCMS more generally, when he gives a keynote speech on heritage and the economy in a few weeks’ time.

Sheringham Park, Norfolk

Sheringham Park on the north Norfolk coast is a National Trust property that gets about a quarter of a million visitors a year. Many come for the fine displays of rhododendrons when they flower in April and May, or to use the park more generally for walking and taking in the views.

Sheringham Park (NT)

But the landscape is historically highly significant, since it still bears the imprint of the Georgian landscape designer Humphry Repton. Repton’s Red Book for Sheringham is 200 years old this year, and the purpose of my visit to Sheringham last week was to consider ways in which this bicentenary might be marked at the property, which is the subject of a recent project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Humphry Repton

The story behind Repton’s Red Book of 1812 is fascinating. Repton at first anticipated that Sheringham might have been an appropriate gift from the nation to Norfolk’s finest son Admiral Nelson, on his return from war. But the estate was acquired in 1811 by Abbot Upcher and his wife Charlotte, in an exchange facilitated by Repton’s lawyer son William. Repton was commissioned to turn the estate – at the time comprising mainly farmland and a now demolished farm house – into a smart residence and landscape.

Detail from Repton's Red Book for Sheringham (1812): the view from the house

Repton avoided placing the house directly facing the sea, given the inclemency of the spot in winter. Instead, he sited it in a wooded natural valley (actually formed by the retreating ice sheets of many millennia ago). The estate is not actually that large, and Repton used his full powers of design to contrive an approach to the house that accentuated its impact through a highly economic mastery of space and place. The park is entered first by means of a carriage ride, which lines the crest of the wooded ridge on the other side of the valley in which the house sits. Visitors would pass along this ridge, taking views out to the sea and to the surrounding countryside, before they reach ‘The Turn’. At this point Repton dropped the path off the ridge, and by taking a sharp bend visitors would catch their first view of the house ‘like some enchanted palace of a fairy tale’.

'The Turn' at Sheringham: the first view of the house

The house itself has no formal garden: it is designed to take in views of the wider park, which is cleverly given the illusion of greater extent through careful planting. The Trust does not open the house to the public, instead leasing it to private tenants in order to provide the income that enables the park to be maintained. Visitors to Sheringham therefore never see the view from the house itself – the estate is instead marketed as a landscape experience, or indeed as a site of particular horticultural and natural significance.

Sheringham's famous rhododendrons

Given that the site’s significance is so linked to Repton’s design of 1812, however, the AHRC-funded project is looking at the practical ways in which the bicentenary might be marked in order to enhance wider awareness of Repton’s art. A small visitor centre currently offers some helpful information about Repton’s life and work, as well as fine facsimile copies of the Red Book (although these are now suffering some wear and tear).

Facsimilies of the Sheringham Red Book on show in the visitor centre

But is this the best way of explaining the significance of a landscape to visitors? Other ideas that we considered included:

• The possibility of using phone apps or other technology to provide running commentary for visitors while they move around the landscape

• Using animation or moving images in the visitor reception, to convey the sense in which this was a landscape designed to be seen in transit, from a carriage, as well as from the house itself

• Finding ways of raising questions about how the Sheringham landscape has changed in the 200 years since it was designed, and what future changes may look like. (The rhododendrons were a later insertion in the landscape, for example, while the trees that Repton envisioned have now matured)

The latter point is of particular interest to me, in the context of the planning changes that were made by Government last week. The final NPPF reasserted the importance of local plans in the planning process, as a consequence of the campaigning undertaken by the National Trust and others. Sheringham has long been an example of effective planning, since the National Trust has taken care to map out the setting of the house and park in some detail, which has been incorporated into the local plan.  This has not stopped, however, a school development being built within the park’s ‘setting’, and clearly visible from the drive (if not from the house itself, which appears to have been the planning inspector’s main criteria). 

How can the landscape at Sheringham therefore be ‘protected’ from future incursions of this nature, at the same time as recognising that landscapes by definition change and adapt over time? An array of offshore turbines is clearly visible from Sheringham, for example, but as was pointed out during my visit, Repton’s own vision of the seascape was also animated, if then by the sails of passing ships. From ships to turbines, and from barns to schools, how can a landscape’s significance be protected without pretending that it is possible to preserve it forever, in aspic?