The Heritage Industry
Britain in a Climate of Denial
Robert Hewison
Having read it
★★★★★
Brilliant. Also relevant, insightful and constructive in its perspective on heritage (and its interpretation and use) in England, even though it was published in 1987.
Its comments toward and around the economic and societal issues and problems of its publication time are actually timely (albeit in a different mix of similar recipes) today – certainly in the ’10s and ’20s of the twenty-first century.
Britain (read England?) doesn’t seem to help itself – a seemingly ongoing, generational difficulty and attitude – despite it liking to show and have ambition for a future, but one which doesn’t allow real admittance, understanding and breaking free of endless museums, heritage and a history that writes a story not helpful to genuine progress and improvement and just seems to be a conservatism that wraps a myth in a falsehood to perpetuate hierarchy, (lack of real) insight and endeavour that is locked in its self-justifying prison cell of Conservatism.
Still, these words from the book are clear...
At best, the heritage industry only draws a screen between ourselves and our true past. I criticise the heritage industry not simply because so many of its products are fantasies of a world that never was; not simply because at a deeper level it involves the preservation, indeed reassertion, of social values that the democratic progress of the twentieth century seemed to be doing away with, but because, far from ameliorating the climate of decline, it is actually worsening it. If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotised by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.
...as is the book’s blurb:
With deliberate provocation Robert Hewison’s [witty, polemical] book sets out to protect the present and the future of life in Britain from their most dangerous enemy: a creeping takeover by the past. He sets today’s obsession with yesterday in the context of a climate of social and political decline. The economic uncertainties and cultural convulsions of post-war life have made the past seem a pleasanter and safer place. But how true is that image of the past, and whose past is it, anyway? Hewison questions the way institutions like the National Trust are helping to create a past that never was. While the real economy crumbles, a new force is taking over: the Heritage Industry, a movement dedicated to turning the British Isles into one vast open-air museum.
Far from securing our future cultural vitality, these museums, the media, the Arts Council and the multiplying heritage organisations are conspiring to deepen the national depression. Their habit of contrasting today’s difficulties with the delights of a non-existent past, a place to which we can never return, may be even more debilitating to our culture than the loss of Empire.
A good passage
Part of the magic of the country house is that the privilege of private ownership has become a question of national prestige. Those who have held on to their houses, and the majority of all country houses remain in private hands, have had to concede a greater degree of public access in exchange for tax exemptions and repair grants, others have turned their historic houses into commercial enterprises, but the hierarchy of cultural values that created the country houses remains the same. Private ownership has been elided into a vague conception of public trusteeship. The Earl of March, prominent during the wealth tax campaign, has said of his successful enterprise at Goodwood House in Sussex: ‘I never feel that I am the owner – only a steward for my lifetime, and not principally for the benefit of the family but for the whole community.’34
One of the best ways to stimulate public concern, as did The Destruction of the Country House, is to claim that the object of concern is about to disappear for ever. The campaign on behalf of the country house has been so successful that it is more flourishing now than at any time in the last century. The capital and incomes of private owners are in a much healthier tax position, as the National Trust confirms, and it turns out that, far from the country house disappearing, more than 200 new ones have been built since the war.
This information comes in a fascinating survey by the architectural historian John Martin Robinson, The Latest Country Houses. The book is, in a sense, a reply to Clive Aslet’s earlier survey of the period up to 1939, The Last Country Houses.35 Robinson writes: ‘The subject could almost be subtitled “furtive house-building” as the owners have not been particularly keen to draw attention to their enterprise in this field.’36 The book challenges claims of crisis and decay that have been made on behalf of the country house owner. ‘The traditional landowner has maintained a surprisingly active role in local life and fulfils a function not dissimilar from that of the constitutional monarch in national life, still acting as the focus of social, ceremonial and charitable activities in his area. Above all his estates have survived as viable economic and social units.’37
While country house life has continued independently of the Welfare State, and its scions continue to supply the media with its staple diet of fashion and scandal, the growth of tourism has created a fresh source of revenue, and the phenomenal rise in the price of works of art – so alarming to public institutions concerned for the heritage – has been a discreet source of funds. Robinson comments, ‘At least three of the new country houses described in this book (the reader must guess which) were paid for largely out of the proceeds of a private treaty sale of a painting to the National Gallery.’38 The Duke of Devonshire has raised at least fil million from the sale of works of art to endow the charitable trust which owns a long term lease on Chatsworth, while a sale of Old Master drawings from the Chatsworth collection in 1984 realised ?21 million for the Devonshire family.
The great majority of the new houses Robinson describes have been built by authentic landowners on traditional estates, including the inner circle of ‘Court’ and ‘ruling’ families like the Derbys, Halifaxes and Norfolks, and established eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dynasties like the Rothschilds, Hambros and Barings.’39 Financially, politically and culturally country houses and their owners appear to be more secure than we have been led to suppose.
A second good passage
When museums become one of Britain’s new growth industries, they are not signs of vitality, but symbols of national decline.
A third good passage
A change in cultural perception has taken place which narrows the imagination and cramps the spirit. In the nineteenth-century museums were seen as sources of education and improvement, and were therefore free. Now they are treated as financial institutions that must pay their way, and therefore charge entrance fees. The arts are no longer appreciated as a source of inspiration, of ideas, images or values, they are part of the ‘leisure business’. We are no longer lovers of art, but customers for a product. And as the marketing managers of the heritage industry get into full swing, the goods that we are being offered become more and more spurious, and the quality of life more and more debased.