At the Heritage
Exchange event hosted this week by the Heritage
Lottery Fund, delegates were invited to vote for the greatest scourge of
our built heritage. Was it, the poll asked, the 1960s town planners who wreaked
such destruction on historic city centres up and down the land in the post-war
era? Or was it those meddlesome badgers, who as well as moving the goalposts
like nothing better than to burrow
deep into Bronze Age burial mounds? Or perhaps the greatest disdain should
be reserved for the Victorians, forever scraping away at the crumbling walls of
medieval churches or pulling them down altogether in order to replace them with
smart new ‘old’ buildings?
The 1960s town planners topped the poll, you may not be
surprised to hear, even though today the fate of much of our historic
environment is entirely dependent on the ongoing survival of the planning
profession (and the IHBC, ALGAO and English Heritage have some
pretty troubling stats
about the demise of planning services and conservation officers in particular).
But another heritage enemy was highlighted this week, when
the BBC carried an article about Buddleia.
Enemy? How so? Buddleia is a plant that looks splendid at
the moment – its bright purple flowers erupting like fireworks in the flower
bed. Butterflies love them, and there can be no finer sight on a drowsy summer’s
day than a buddleia plant swarming with insect life of all kinds. There’s a
plant at the bottom of my garden in fact, which looks amazing, and just grows continuously.
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| Buddleia at the bottom of my garden |
But that is the problem. As the BBC article pointed out,
buddleia is also one of those plants that can cause great damage to the built environment.
It is highly invasive, thanks to its tiny seeds which are carried on the wind
and find homes in the most unlikely places – railway verges, cracks in the
pavement, holes in the wall. Once it gets into mortar it can cause huge damage
to buildings. Hardly surprising that derelict buildings are nothing without the
obligatory tuft of buddleia protruding from damp window sills or gutters. Once
the plant is in it is costly to remove and to clean up after.
This battle – between natural and built heritage – was one
of the issues debated at some length at Heritage Exchange. We all want
beautiful gardens that are rich in widlflife, and Butterfly
Conservation are actively promoting the planting of buddleia (with sensible
precautions) to encourage butterflies. But how do we balance this with also
ensuring that the built heritage is looked after and protected from invasion? Others, after all, warn
against any form of buddleia planting because of its rapacious characteristics.
More generally, how can we ever possibly find a language
that enables us to weigh up our feelings for built heritage with those for the
natural world? Are the two inevitably collision-bound? Or can we find a way of
talking about what we value that ensures room for both? If so, is it possible
to translate this into a political message? Governments, after all, are prone
to ‘divide and conquer’ approaches, putting all the nature experts into one
ministry and its quangos (Defra/Natural England) and the buildings experts into
another (DCMS/DCLG/English Heritage). One of the conclusions of the Heritage
Exchange was that we needed to find a better discourse to articulate the values
that are held simultaneously in both natural and built components of the
landscape.
The organisation I work for, the National Trust, has been riding this tension
between the built and the natural ever since we were set up 120 years ago in
1895. Indeed our charitable
purposes call for us to promote the permanent preservation of places of ‘beauty
or historic interest’, but especially in relation to the ‘natural aspect
features and animal and plant life’ found on our land. Having to decide whether
to cut down the buddleia in the interests of keeping the wall up is something
of a no-brainer, even while our ’50 Things’
campaign encourages
children to hunt for butterflies on the tips of buddleia.
Moderation in all things is surely the message. The idea
that built and natural heritage occupy two separate worlds is entirely
misplaced, despite some of the provocations
heard at Heritage Exchange. Buildings,
bugs, butterflies and buddleia: all are part of our rich tapestry, and deserve
our care and attention even while they pursue lives of their own.
PS Many thanks to all on Twitter who helped to identify the
other bug
I found in my kitchen this weekend! It turns out to have been a carrion-feeding
beetle. Yuk.
(*With apologies to Lauren Child)
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