WHAT FUTURE FOR CONSERVATIONAREAS? 'A RADICAL NEW BEGINNING' The Association is delighted that Lord Montagu, who so ably guided English Heritage through its formative years, has agreedto review hisperiod as Chairman. In many ways the creation of English Heritage in 1984 was a radical new beginning and a great deal was expected of it. We were given several distinct tasks, which previously either hac! n9t been done very well by government or had not been done at all. The one which tended to capture the headlines, of course, was the urgent need to offer the public a better visitor experience at the 400 monuments in the car'e of the nation. Under the old Department of the Environment, this had a very low prioriry - perhaps not entirely surprising when ministers were struggling with local government finances, rate-capping, abolition of the GLC and many other far more pressing issues, and when marketing and promotional activities were so bureaucratically centralised. Understandably, satisfying the visitors was not an objective. Great castles and abbeys which stirred the imagination cried out for interpretation and friendly visitor facilities. Instead, all too often there were old Ministry of Works notices, 'Keep off the Grass' signs, a custodian in a prison-warderlike uniform, and often the more interesting parts of the building were closed to the public because the maintenance staff were storing their wheelbarrows there. If this sounds like a caricature you only have to cast your mind back or ask anyone who visited these historic sites then. It is no wonder that in those early days many of us at English Heritage had something of an inferiority complex towards the private owner or National Trust, whose houses were so much better presented, so much more welcoming and attractive. We have travelled far since then, and I am very proud that our visitor numbers have .r'isen by nearly 30% since we began in 1984 and that we have nearly 300,000 members. Nobody now believes that we went in for vulgar 'pop' heritage. On the contrary, English Heritage is actually setting the standards of accurate historical CONTEXT 36 representation. We have shown decisively chat interest and enjoyment can be combined with education and scholarship. At our properties we offer visitors their history at several levels. Some families may come to watch an historical re-enactment but they will then stay to look at the actual castle - something they might not otherwise have done. We produce attractive illustrated guidebooks, but if people want to pursue their interest further, then we offer chem membership, academic publications and a chance to go on guided tours with expert historians and archaeologists. School parties are allowed free admission and many of the properties have separate education rooms for just this purpose. The second reason for setting up English Heritage, equally important, was to provide an independent public body as a guardian or spokesman of the built heritage. Our critics -and they were not lacking - expressed the fear that we would popularise the nation's monuments in a crude 'theme park' fashion; that our much vaunted 'independence' from central government was illusory, and that we would actually be nothing more than a tame lapdog to ministers, taking the heat off them but causing them little real trouble and making little real impact on conservation. But it is in the area of conservation that we have taken on some of the greatest challenges and naturally encoyntered some of the greatest misunderstandings. We have finite powers and finite resources but over the past eight years I believe we have deployed these as skilfully and effectively as anyone could have done, not least in putting pressure and offering help for every local authority to have a Conservation Officer. The critics who carped on about English Heritage not being truly 'independent' were missing the point. We are not a pressure group, like SAVE Britain's Heritage. Such bodies have an essential role to play and we co-operate closely with them, even when they criticise us. Bur our role is different. As the statutory adviser to government and the, major provider of repair grants, we cannot conduct our advice and negotiations in the glare of publicity. As a body ultimately responsible to Parliament and as a manager of taxpayers' money, we cannot step completely outside our defined powers, nor can we put huge sums of money into every deserving case. Unfortunately, we often have to say 'no' and consequently cake the criticism from this or that interest group. My good friends in the Historic Houses Association have said some hard' words about us. But the fact is chat compared with the 1950s the repair of great historic houses has had to compete for funds with many other conservation causes - townscapes, archaeology, industrial monuments - which were not even considered then. Within these powers and resources, we have achieved a very great deal and we have done it because, being separate from government, we could more easily initiate improvements than simply respond to events or sit uneasily in the balance of a thousand other political considerations. It was under English Heritage that the great Listing Resurvey was completed, some 30 years ahead of the original schedule, resulting in half a million protected buildings. We started the Monument Protection Programme, which will increase the number of scheduled monuments by five times. It was we who initiated the Register of Buildings at Risk, to spur local authorities into coping with the great problem of dereliction - the vandalism of neglect. It was we who took the initiative over that cherished item of street furniture, the Jubilee telephone kiosk, which was on the point of vanishing completely. The powers given us we have used to the full, in prosecutions and emergency repairs actions, and there will be plenry more of those in the future. It was we too, with a little help, from our parliamentary friends, who persuaded Parliament to strike out the notorious Clause 19 from the Kings' Cross Railway Bill, which would have suspended all the normal conservation controls and driven a coach and horses through the whole framework of legislative safeguards chat Parliament had built up over so many decades. None of these actions could have been done from inside government. Conservation itself, paradoxically, is an ever-changing philosophy. Thirty years ago, 9
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