Heritage and preservation

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Heritage and preservation

"‘What I think has happened in the last 30 years really, since the 1980s, is the tremendous expansion of what heritage is seem to be by these bodies, English Heritage and the National Trust and so on. You've got that kind of proliferation of blue pat plaques now all over the place for people you've never heard of. So I think there is a problem. And I think we are trying to preserve too much, but really, because we are unable to make judgments about what should and shouldn't be valued. That would mean in my book, yes, letting things go. But not necessarily to give them over to the rats and the mice that you write to Caitlyn so beautifully about, but maybe to create a space to build something new.’

‘So you feel there is a danger that we actually are going to lose contact with some parts of our past if we follow Caitlyn's-’

‘There is a danger and that's not all bad. Actually. I think some of the some of the cases she talks about, yes, you should let them go. We preserve too much because we are not deciding what is important to save… if you take something like the Liverpool docks, which is a World Heritage Site, it is now very difficult for them to build anything new on it, because it's been preserved by kind of UNESCO. So that's really limiting new growth and new build for something that perhaps isn't as important as heritage people think it is’...

‘The object, whether it's something like the Elgin marbles, or the human remains that are in museum collections around the world, that is what is important here, not the relationship. That's what I'm interested in. The subject that can tell us about ancient Greece and Athens or the Ottoman Empire, or even the British elite and the Bavarian elite in the 19th century when they retrieved the Elgin marbles and brought them to Britain or restored them in Greece. So the object is what's important. The objects is what is important. When it comes to human remains, research on human remains is what led to an understanding of patterns of human evolution and where populations go to and from. So this is really vital research material, it is sort of what people choose to go see when they're visiting museum collections. That's why people go to heritage sites, they want to see the thing. So it does matter. It is important. And where it is, is important.’

‘So you'd want to say that the historical interest in say the Elgin marbles, or all sorts of related interest, trumps questions of ownership, or are questions of ownership almost impossible to decide?’

‘Questions of ownership are difficult and I think we have to look at why they've become really prominent in the last 20, 30 years. And that's one thing that's concerning me. So I think one of the things that happened is that the kind of remit of the museum to pursue knowledge went into kind of a crisis. Critical questioning, no longer confident about that. At the same time, as you've had the politicization of culture. Culture has always been political. People have always used it in political ways, but it seems to have really come to the forefront now. So you have indigenous movements now, arguing for the return of, quote, unquote, their culture, as a way of doing all sorts of things, which I think culture can't do. So I don't think culture, can raise self ,esteem can create community, can do all these things. In a way it's too much is asked of it. And that's often what is at the heart of arguments over ownership.’...

‘In Scotland, where there's a modernist seminary that was built in the 60s, used for 20 years ish, abandoned in the 80s. And it's been a derelict space, abandoned, spectacularly ruined for a long time. People value that, that ruined state of that building. And so the organization that's now managing that site has decided they're going to partially restore elements of that seminary structure, but they're actually going to allow the ruination to play out in other parts of it. And they're going to allow the way that people value that rawness and that openness of the site to persist if they can’...

‘In the heritage context, how many preserved Cornish engine houses do we need?... And it may be that there's one out there where it's more interesting to actually allow the people, the fringe, the radical fringe who really enjoys this kind of encounter with ruins to be in relation to that object, that lost engine house and I think it's just there's a very narrow sense now of how we do right by our heritage objects sometimes. And I think if we think about those relationships and unfolding processes, instead of thinking about permanence and fixity, then really fascinating things can start to happen.’