(Inter...) National heritage? Who cares!

[Nemesis]

Yesterday the Scottish government approved the ghastly Caltongate development in the Edinburgh World Heritage Site, with the demolition of listed buildings involved.

http://www.eh8.org.uk

Monday's Guardian editorial says a great deal about the current state of conservation in this country:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/16/architecture.art

National heritage

Building blocks

Editorial The Guardian, Monday June 16 2008 Article historyThe buildings we leave for our descendants are a vivid illustration of the national state of mind. It is not only the ones we create in our own time. The survival of the stately home, for example, reveals a respect for the brilliance of the architects, designers and craftsmen who created them, as well as a tendency that may surprise future generations to treat those who inherit them as inherently distinguished. This does not preclude valuing more humdrum architecture: the most recent buildings to be listed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport were two sausage shops. Deciding what to protect and what to let go is contentious. But often fine and important buildings are simply allowed to fall into disrepair and fall down.

Bath Mill in Mansfield - in theory protected by its Grade II listing - has just been demolished after years of neglect by the council, which failed to prevent repeated vandalism on one of its best buildings. In Peterborough, another town careless of its inheritance, the 19th-century Great Northern Hotel is under threat from a scheme to redevelop its "station quarter". Without its station and railway line it would still be a Fenland backwater with a fine cathedral. The chief executive of the chamber of commerce dismissed protesters' "emotive pleas".

Margaret Hodge, the DCMS minister responsible, is deliberating the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London. It was designed in the 1960s by Peter and Alison Smithson, two of Britain's most adventurous architects at the time, whose ideas about how people would live in the near future influenced a generation. Sadly, its "streets in the sky" walkways and too-narrow staircases meant it did not work for families. Although English Heritage, which has approved for listing some Smithson buildings, does not think it important enough to protect, the review panel of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment told Ms Hodge the "ground-breaking" estate deserved to be saved.

Despite their differences, all three buildings could have told future generations something about the way we have lived, or worked, or dreamed of living. It is too late for Bath Mill, but the decisions taken about the others will say something else about the generation in power now. It is as impossible as it is undesirable to try to save everything for ever, but too often, under pressure from developers, those who could protect the great or the merely interesting cave in. Ruing the destruction of Bath Mill, the Mansfield councillor who said that "Losing our historic buildings is like throwing away the family photo album" was surely right.

 

[Nemesis]

Bath Mill:


http://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/bar-mansfield.pdf

http://www2.mansfield.gov.uk/aksmansfield/images/att3536.doc

http://www.chad.co.uk/news/Historic-Bath-Mill-is-bulldozed.4147000.jp

 

[ilikecobwebs]

I was very sad to read about this development in Edinburgh. It seems we are now living in an age where widespread removal of the past is just meekly accepted as being an "inevitable" price to pay for progress. There are an awful lot of people, unfortunately, who just have no care at all about heritage; they're only interested in obliterating it and making money on the cleared sites. I really think that people just want old buildings out of the way because they are too "troublesome" and can't be bothered with them. Makes the whole business of having them listed rather pointless if developers are given permission to knock em down.

 

[Nemesis]

Well, we warned them and now it's happening - UNESCO will be paying a visit soon:


http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Unesco-to-investigate-if-Edinburgh.4261096.jp

 

[Nemesis]

And here's a bit on t'telly:


http://www.stv.tv/news/East_Central_Scotland/Council_claims_Edinburgh_Heritage_statu_080707185338250

 

[ljn]

More telly. Robin Hood Gardens video feature in the "most watched" section on the right (guess it won't be there for long)

http://www.channel4.com/news/

It's kind of funny when English go on about Italians or Greeks not being able to look after their heritage so we have to keep it safe in England for future generations, when the Battersea Power station is in a derelict state White City is destroyed, Adam brothers Adelphi, most city centres have been demolished to make way for some shopping centre... Not much hope for Robin Hood Gardens. I think ignorance will prevail.
Maybe the verb "to hodge" a building could be added to the dictionary to celebrate it's demolition.

 

[Nemesis]

Well, some of us are doing our best for Edinburgh, and many another place besides.


Actually, I don't think Robin Hood Gardens was listable, but there you go. No matter who jumped up and down, it wasn't actually very groundbreaking, and the Smithsons have far better examples listed.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1564561919

I agree with Tom Bloxham though.

 

[Nemesis]

Times today on Edinburgh:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article4289882.ece


Here's a bit of Adam on TV yesterday:

http://www.stv.tv/news/East_Central_Scotland/Council_claims_Edinburgh_Heritage_statu_080707185338250

 

[Nemesis]

Another article in the Times by Mike Wade (good man):

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article4354058.ece?Submitted=true

 

[Nemesis]

Sounds interesting...


http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/short-courses/summer-courses/art/edinburgh

 

[Nemesis]

Great piece in the Scotsman today by David Black:

Edinburgh: a city under siege, all in the name of progress

New wave of ‘philistines’ poses a major threat to the capital’s historic skyline, claims DAVID BLACK

THOSE of us with long memories might just recall the early Seventies, when Edinburgh University’s firebrand student rector, a certain Gordon Brown, established “the rector’s working party on planning”.

The shared objective among enlightened citizADVERTISEMENTens at that point was to scupper the manic demolition proposals which the philistine triumvirate of university bigwigs, property plutocrats and a right-of-centre “progressive” (no irony intended) town council had drawn up a decade earlier for the historic Southside of Edinburgh.

Among other things, Brown and his troublesome cabal produced a couple of polemical booklets under the aegis of the Edinburgh University Student Publications Board. The Forgotten Southside and The Unmaking of Edinburgh may not have been classics of the printmaker’s art, and the standard of spelling left something to be desired, as contributor Robin Cooke (sic) discovered, but they caught and reflected a growing public mood and helped to turn the tide in a historic city that was, in a very real sense, under attack.

As a result the Buchanan Road proposals, the university’s 1963 comprehensive development area plans, the flagrant misuse of the Section 13 (Dangerous Buildings) notice, and an equally wanton disregard for the legislation which had been enacted to protect our listed buildings were placed beyond the reach of the scorched-earth planning Ba’athists and their philistine henchmen.

A new age of holistic urban harmony was ushered in as the Crown Estate commissioners spent some of their North Sea oil gains on the restoration of Nicolson Street, housing associations translated derelict tenements into good-quality homes, a Georgian church scheduled for demolition became a community centre and another nearby became home to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The crowning achievement, perhaps, was when the establishment saw the error of its bad old ways and delivered a volte-face by declaring both the Southside and the Old Town outstanding conservation areas, clearing the way for central Edinburgh’s designation as a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Ah, but we were so much older then, we’re younger than that now! While we all retired from the scene, quietly convinced that the forces of philistinism had been well and truly routed, little did we guess that their discredited remnants would regroup a quarter of a century later, well provisioned by corporate largesse, and ride forth under a gleaming new banner – “The Rebranding of Britain”.

PR whizz-kids softened us up with siren rhetoric about how a city like ours, while it might be cute in a sort of old-fashioned way, really had to move with the times if it was to survive. The choice, we were told, was between “Modernity or Heritage” and this meant that we had to have lots ’n’ lots of flashy new-built icons.

The corporates and bureaucrats brought in a selected breed of architects to perpetrate a number of truly awesome aesthetic crimes within the world heritage site, such as the hideous Omni Centre and some daft, upturned Holyrood boats, which were meant to be symbolic of the “New Scotland”. Objectors were characterised as the enemies of progress.

There were, of course, some good new buildings. Few would question the dignified urban presence of Saltire Court, or the delightful quirkiness of the Scottish Poetry Library. But, more and more, the desire to squeeze as much revenue-generating floorplate out of a site as possible dictated the outcome as our planners cravenly acquiesced to the increasingly avaricious demands of behemoth developers, while telling the rest of us that we wurnae allowed to have window boxes on a listed building, or whatever.

Let’s take a rain check here. Right now, in our elegant capital city, one developer’s PR machine is schmoozing us with the idea that Edinburgh’s skyline of spires and domes clearly embraces the idea of vertical emphasis, so wouldn’t it make sense to erect a skyscraper atop the St James Centre?

Another developer, with the apparent support of the very council which is meant to be protecting our civic virtue, intends to tear down listed buildings in the Old Town and erect a bloated sprawl of aesthetically-bankrupt, commercial ticky-tacky that will degrade the historic environment more than anything which was ever proposed in the philistine 1960s.

In this fine city of ours, which should have had a metro years ago, we are extorting money from traders and residents for a tram system that will connect the Gyle with Leith waterfront, doing nothing for most of the citizenry.

We mustn’t kid ourselves – this city of ours, this sublime capital of an ancient nation, is under siege, not from the Barbarian hordes of yore, but from the oleaginous blandishments of Mammon and his sticky-fingered minions.

It is, of course, grossly unfair to generalise, for development can be benign, as well as malign, but the evidence of our eyes tells us that the balance is drifting inexorably away from the good towards the bad and the downright ugly. They have the cash and they can afford to fête and flatter and feed their guff to the media courtesy of an impressive PR juggernaut, which even includes former city councillors.

Isn’t it time we did something about this? Obviously, we can’t afford to commission a PR company, but we can at least pick up our pens and scribble. If a dozen of us – some old, some new – could each write a 2,000-word essay on the current shenanigans, couldn’t we set the tumbrels rolling, or at least encourage a reassessment of our current approach to planning and development?

There is a rich and diverse range of subjects which could be tackled – our PPP hospital, the great tram adventure, the Caltongate scandal, and even the screwing-up of some essentially brilliant ideas, like the over-designed nonsense recently perpetrated in St Andrew’s Square Gardens.

The trumpet has sounded! Rise up, ye sons and daughters of Edina, your city needs you at this hour!

• David J Black is author of All the First Minister’s Men.