Context 159 - May 2019

44 C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 Again, there is more than a single idea at work in all this. One thought is about the specific mission of the HLF. Maybe St Zac’s generates a bigger pot of social benefit than St Ald’s. But – you will argue – the HLF does not exist to promote any and all social goods, but chiefly those arising from what has value as heritage. Even without trying to define that term, you may suspect that the scheme at St Zac’s, however worthy on other grounds, preserves something of limited heritage value in order to promote goals only tangentially related to the enjoyment of historic buildings as such. (The people from St Zac’s may respond with an indignant: says who?) Another, closely related thought concerns instrumental versus intrinsic values. St Zac’s, being conveniently located, capacious and so on, is good for certain purposes: as a community centre, for instance. But St Ald’s, being a master- piece, is – you may think – good in itself. What exactly does this mean? Maybe that the value of St Ald’s flows directly from its unique identity, or at least from its status as an outstanding work of architecture, whereas the usefulness of St Zac’s does not. Any large building in this loca- tion would arguably serve just as well; indeed, a modern-purpose-built community centre might serve better. Alternatively, and more radically, you may mean that while St Zac’s is valuable largely for what it brings about, St Ald’s is to be valued for its own sake, apart from or in addition to its effects of people. (Response from St Zac’s: you only say that because of the gratifying effect it has on people like you!) This dispute might be framed as a contest between different kinds of value: for instance, following Historic England’s 2008 document Conservation Principles, between the primarily aesthetic value of St Ald’s and the largely commu- nal value of St Zac’s. That is right up to a point. But it is also about how we should understand the nature of these values in the first place. For instance, to what extent can the values at stake be quantified, that is, reduced to a common metric? How far can they be expressed in terms of experiential benefits to individuals? How ‘egalitarian’ should we be in weighing up personal and collective responses, and how far is the authority of such responses subject to public standards of criticism? Take a building’s aesthetic value. Some will think of this as simply a function how far people in general – regardless of who or why – enjoy looking at it. Others will see it as primarily determined by the considered (and argued-over) verdicts of experts and connoisseurs. Others still will regard it as an inherent property that underlies and explains all these responses but is not reducible to them, and whose presence is in theory independent of whether anyone gets to appreciate it. In similar vein, communal value might be determined simply by counting heads across the populace at large, which looks democratic but will tend to ensure that minority communities are sidelined in decision-making; or by regarding each community group as an independent and equal locus of value in its own right, which looks respectful but will tend to result in deadlock. To what extent, in any case, are the values of individuals and groups to be accepted ‘as found’, and how far do norms of reasonableness, well-informedness and openness to debate affect their claim to be recognised as such by the public at large? Finally, what about those sections of humanity that do not, and can not, form part of today’s public? As custodians of heritage, we like to agree with Ruskin that historic buildings ‘belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us.’ But neither our ancestors nor our descendants can respond to opinion surveys, let alone make fund- ing applications. How, then, are they to be taken into account? Suppose we believe that the build- ers of St Ald’s, unlike those of St Zac’s, aspired to create something that would last for centuries; or we surmise that our children’s children would prefer to inherit (what we ourselves judge to be) a beautiful building rather than a mediocre one. What difference, if any, should this make? We have still only dipped beneath the surface of some forbiddingly deep problems. To some readers, broaching these questions may feel like opening Pandora’s box, unleashing a swarm of conceptual troubles to make a straightforward practical decision, better resolved by a tick-box exercise using published criteria, seem impos- sibly complex. In fact, as I have tried to suggest, such decisions are rarely if ever straightforward, and to insist otherwise is to abdicate responsibil- ity for thinking them through. Philosophical reflection, having raised these problems, can not simply make them go away again. (You will notice that, as advertised, the above discussion has not magically resolved our funding dilemma.) But it can hold up a mirror in which we can recognise the structures of theory and evaluation concealed within familiar routines of professional judgment. It also gives us tools for locating and testing the foundations of those structures, and for modifying – to some extent – their configuration. We can thus hope to make decisions that are a little less in thrall to received wisdom and unconscious bias, and a little more responsive to the full range of values that the historic environment – both the buildings that compose it and the people whose environment it is – presents to us. It’s a start. David Garrard is senior lecturer and subject coordinator in historic conservation at Oxford Brookes University.