CONTEXT 175 : MARCH 2023 53 Book reviews History and justice A Bittersweet Heritage: slavery, architecture and the British landscape Victoria Perry, Hurst and Company, 2022, 311 pages, 63 colour illustrations, ISBN 978 1 787386 96 9, hardback, £25, also available as an eBook Monumental Lies: culture wars and the truth about the past Robert Bevan, Verso, 2022, 376 pages, black-and-white illustrations, ISBN 978 1 839761 87 4, hardback, £16 with free eBook Victoria Perry, a historian, an architect and practice director at Donald Insall Associates, wrote an award-winning PhD thesis on Slavery, Sugar and the Sublime. A busy life seemed to mean that her hopes of turning it into a book would have to be a retirement project. The situation changed with the killing of George Floyd and the growth of Black Lives Matter: ‘Black history’, formerly a specialist subject, became part of mainstream British history and public discourse, and Perry found that her concept had become publishable. Her subject is the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. Trade in slaves and profits from Caribbean sugar plantations paid for stately homes and landscape gardens, and supported the prosperity of ports such as Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, and fashionable centres like Bath. The wealth led to poor, isolated areas of Wales, Cumbria and Scotland becoming tourist destinations that we now know as Snowdonia, the Lakes and the Highlands, with what was thought of as the ‘natural scenery’ of mountains, rivers and rocks being viewed as landscape art, appreciated for its sublime and picturesque qualities. The appreciation of those two distinct qualities, the ‘sublime’, on the one hand, and the ‘beautiful’ or ‘picturesque’, on the other, was provoked by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry of 1757. The sublime, characterised by vastness, dramatic height or danger, could be of equal or greater aesthetic value as buildings and landscapes created by human hand, Burke wrote. Understanding such ideas today helps us, in turn, appreciate the works that they helped to shape. Perry highlights, in particular, the stories of Piercefield Park, Monmouthshire; Danson Park, Bexleyheath; Harewood House, near Leeds; and Penrhyn Castle, North Wales. Her investigations have widened to how sublime and picturesque qualities were perceived in newly created landscapes in Britain, the Caribbean and the mainland American colonies; how they were represented in paintings, prints and the written word; and how they were experienced by those places’ first tourists. Her message is that over a period of more than 300 years of colonisation and empire, much of British history happened overseas. Understanding fully the landscapes and much of the 18th, 19th and early-20th-century built heritage of the British Isles depends on studying more than just these islands’ history. Victoria Perry has a positive and timely conclusion to her fine, wellillustrated work of (often painful) history. ‘As the vigorous public debate following the Colston statue’s theatrical ducking demonstrates, historic landscapes, structures and buildings, as well as sculptures, memorials and paintings, can provide a means of engaging with complex, global histories and identities that is immediate and accessible’ (and her article on page 39 of this issue of Context has a specific suggestion). A Bittersweet Heritage is convincing evidence of that. Like Perry, Robert Bevan is concerned with how monuments and buildings shape our understanding of the world around us. His important book, Monumental Lies, explains how we can be manipulated, and discusses many of the political issues that are central to the practice of historic building conservation. When ruined historic buildings or parts of cities are being reconstructed, for example, ‘the intent… may range from straightforward aesthetic and academic reinstatement, the lure of the tourist dollar, or outright manipulation for political ends,’ Bevan writes. He puts the case persuasively that we need to be able to tell the difference, and his
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=