which he pleached and tended have grown out or been removed for farm machinery to chew efficiently through hectare upon hectare of alien new crops. Power lines and phone lines snake everywhere. A golf course has dispersed its lakes and bunkers along the meadows, with a new executive-class estate of houses where the village school once stood. On the positive side, the castle ruin has been conserved and tidied as an ancient monument, and brightly-clothed children play where once they would have worked long hours potato picking. But our Victorian jumps in fear of his life whenever shiny cars flash by at speeds which kill. It has been a long century in its varieties of experience. We may have thought somehow that '20th centuty' stood forthe 1970s, '80s, '90s-our own times. Just a little perspective on the phrase already reminds us that the century stretched far beyond the lives of most of us. It arcs from the apex of expansion of the railways to the utter domination of the motorway; from the golden age of the landed estate to the consumption of the countryside by urbs in rure and the megalopolis. In 1900, seaports echoed to the heyday of the merchant marine and vast new floating docks were being built with confidence; by 1999 the industry of sea trade was decimated. At the beginning was the suburban terraced house, at the end the sinuous estate. Architecture has raced breathlessly through a stylistic succession unprecedented in architectural histo1y:the sweetness and light of Atts and Crafts, the Georgian revival, the brave new world of Modernism, Festival of Britain whimsy, brutalism, high-tech, post-modernism, to mention but a few. Another of the new inventions of the 20th centllly was the active practice of conservation. A hundred years ago development was ordered or deflected only by ancient landed interests, but throughout the 20th century a growth of planning apparatus, green belts, National Parks and conservation areas transformed the rules of landscape change. Suddenly, we find we must consider what aspects of the 20th century itself should be conserved, and re-evaluate our relationship with what this now closed chapter of our past has left behmd. How do we feel about the building types and landscape features which marked out the 20th century? Should we be anxious to preserve examples of the shopping centre, the multi-storey car park, the conifer forest, the pit head baths, the motorway service station? It is hard to imagine there is real character and quality among these things, but we should recognise that one often has 32 Thehighestof the ElanValley reservoirs,a municipalwater schemethatflooded a valley landscapein 1904theonly 20th centurydevelopmentHoskinscouldapprove.Photo:PeterWakelin. poor eyes for one's own time. We happily embrace the Georgian spirit of the age to be seen in what may then have been regarded as vulgar, artisanbuilt shops or noisome cottages; so can we gradually embrace tl1e spirit of the 20th century in the local co-op store, prefabs and Barrett homes? It is always worth remembering how universally Victorian architecture, especially the commercial kind, was despised until the 1960s - in contrast to its present huge enjoyment and firm protection. We are only at the dawn of revising our appreciation of the products of the 1960s themselves. Part of the responsibility of conservation is to anticipate what it is that powers of hindsight will reveal. We have to make our value judgements not by instinct but by marshalling present knowledge toward future thinking. We have to unplug ourselves from some of the values of our contemporaries. It is all too easy to dec1y the changes of the 20th century. Some of this will naturally be misplaced nostalgia for things the 20th century destroyed - the elegant but inherently cruel regime of the country house, or for the damp, insanitary conditions of unimproved tenements. Yet views that change in the landscape in the 20th centllly was universally damaging have been held by the general public and influential commentators. W G Hoskins expressed a widely held opinion in TheMaking of the English Landscape (1955) when he wrote, "... especially since the year 1914, eve1y single change in the English Landscape has either uglified it, or destroyed its meaning, or both. Of all the changes in the last two generations, only the great reservoirs of water for the industrial cities of the North and Midlands have added anything to the scene that one can contemplate without pain." Philip Larkin similarly railed against post-war development in his poem, 'Going, Going', And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, The guildhalls, the carved choirs, There'll be books; it will linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres. Yet these attitudes are partial. There is real enthusiasm for much of the inheritance from the 20th century, as well as respect for the immensely important historical shifts that it reflects. My father was one of the many architects trained in the 1940s who continued to convey his admiration forthe clean, bright functionality of Modernism and the optimism and joy of post-war building, just as readily as his love of the Georgian or Victorian built heritage. Who could look without delight upon the lakes formed from old gravel diggings around Reading, a citadel of city centre skyscrapers, Lubetkin and Tecton's Penguin Pool at London Zoo, the graceful arc of the Humber Bridge, or the airship hangers at Cardington. Pre-war buildings are easy to love these days, including Edwardian department stores and thirties Odeons. There are those for whom the heart beats faster when they see a pill box, an airfield or a football stadium. The process of re-evaluating post-war structures is well under way in both academic circles and in English Heritage's postwar listing programme. It is surprising how previously reviled examples of Context65 March2000 m H C, ri, la C IY ]l a1 Vv tr V,, ti, is p al B U ft tl 0 C tl t< n a C n tl tl I: s, s n V 11 f1 tl t< 11 11 Ii V C f, V il a C t1 t C t C t s t C r f r 1 s C 8 t Co
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