Context 152 - November 2017

40 C O N T E X T 1 5 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 Vox pop Robert Huxford Who has been your greatest inspiration? On the whole I am inspired by people who have come up through the university of life and the school of hard knocks, carrying with them all the while their enthusiasm for their subject or particular cause. It is their persistence and determination that marks them out as different, some continuing well beyond retirement. What has been your best idea? Ideas are pretty useless unless they are put into effect. In this age (and perhaps all ages) we give too much credit to ideas, and too little to deeds; too much to marketing spin and PR, and too little to substance. My best idea, although it’s hardly an idea, was the realisation of the significance of roads, highways, ways and rights of way. They are a practical embodiment of the idea of freedom. In this urbanised world, for most people it is the highway on which they exercise their right to come and go. The highway boundary is where publicly accessible space ends and private land begins. It is no coincidence that the first recorded use of the word street in the English language is in a land charter, dating from 604 AD (24 April, to be precise). Highways are perhaps the longest- lived of all humankind’s creations. Today’s highway edge may be what was once the boundary of a bronze- age field, or a burgage plot, or an 18th-century surveyed field. Latterly they are the consequence of a prevailing philosophy on street layout. Unfortunately, some of these post-war layouts look, from the air, no different to the mazes that farmers create out of crops, with absurd loops, bends and dead ends. They will inconvenience people for centuries to come. How do you reply when at a party someone asks what you do? People with my sorts of interests don’t get invited to parties. What is the biggest frustration in your job? People using long words and phrases to disguise the bankruptcy of their ideas. Ken O’Callaghan, an architect who specialises in museum design, quips: ‘People who use language like that have either something to hide, or nothing to say.’ What is your favourite building? Without some appreciation of the people who created them or the communities that used them, buildings can seem meaningless. I was recently sitting in the late-12th- or early-13th- century nave of Romaldkirk Church in Northumberland, with its solid cylindrical columns and Romanesque arches, listening to three astonishing musicians singing from the Conductus, a compilation of 12th- and 13th-century songs. It is the nearest thing on this earth there is to time travel. Add to this a large west window, lit by the setting sun, silhouetting the bare branches of a large beech or oak, and there can be few finer experiences. Your favourite place? It is nice to be in the countryside Locally distinctive: paving of ragstone setts and cubes in SuttonValence, Kent (Photo by Robert Huxford)