C O N T E X T 1 3 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 4 15 VALUING HERITAGE GARETH HOSKINS The vagaries of value A research project comparing designation in the built environment in the UK and the USA shows how the system serves to hide political bias and perpetuate social divisions. Anyone wishing to glimpse the vagaries around which different bits of the built environment are assigned importance need only browse through formal lists of historical designation. Entries, presumably once inked in heavy cloth-bound ledgers and now held digitally on servers occupying the basements of, for instance, English Heritage headquarters in Swindon, or the United States National Register of Historic Places in Washington DC, provide a window into the changing pattern of architectural taste and historical interest. All buildings and places are in some way historical, but some are more explicitly historical than others. How then do we decide which are the most precious and worthy of public esteem? How exactly is that distinction identified and ultimately assigned? These questions form part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project, soon to be completed, entitled LocatingValue.The project involved agencies in the USA (National Park Service, State Historic Preservation Office,National Register of Historic Places, Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, National Trust for Historic Preservation) and UK (English Heritage, Cadw, National Trust) to investigate how the peculiar, ambiguous and oft-contested quality of historical value becomes fixed. Among other things, the research found that those values are far less eternal, universal and enduring than we often take them to be. Broadly defined, they are the result of a struggle on the part of committed public sector workers to balance a number of competing imperatives: the imperative to be consensus-driven, the imperative to provide leadership with respect to architectural significance and historical interpretation, and the imperative for institutional self-preservation achieved acceding to political patronage and accepting the sponsorship of an economic elite. A huge amount of intellectual energy and practical resource has been devoted to the calculation of value of heritage (Clark 2008; Gibson and Pendlebury 2009; Harrison 2013; Jones 2013), offering insight into management and decision-making. But there has been far less interrogation of the concept of value and the practice of valuation as such. Measuring value: McKillican and Mobley General Store, North Bloomfield, Nevada County, California, inventoried in the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 as Malakoff Diggins-North Bloomfield Historic District. A plaque on San Francisco Bay Bridge
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=