CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 33 WELLBEING and HERITAGE to remove media bias and discover a more genuine level of reaction. I circulated an online survey in April 2024 on Facebook to local history and community groups, including ‘Save The Crooked House’, ‘South Staffordshire History Group’ and ‘The Black Country Page’, asking participants to anonymously answer questions about their response to the loss of the Crooked House. I received 238 responses, with 125 responses in the first 48 hours alone. Participants were asked to recall the last time they felt the same way as they did at the loss of the Crooked House, and what these emotions were in response to. While 50 per cent of participants recalled feeling this way about a building, a substantial 37 per cent were reminded of human events, such as the death of a loved one or public figure, divorce or losing a job. One possibility for the scale and strength of emotional responses to the loss of the Crooked House is the timing of events, which followed hard on the Covid-19 pandemic and recession. Fiona Brook, lecturer in counselling at Birmingham City University, suggests that in the UK, the process of grieving as a community is perceived as an acceptable form of emotional expression. ‘In the west, and especially in Britain, there is almost a time limit on grief. And this [manner of communal grieving] is almost an acceptable mode of grieving.’ Brook’s hypothesis is that the outpouring of grief at the loss of the Crooked House represents deeper losses, such as those experienced during the cost-of-living crisis, which had yet to be mourned. ‘There is displacement,’ she says. ‘We’re allowed to grieve for this... There’s a cultural shift of small businesses being shut down, and community identity shifting as well.’ Brooks has found in her own practice that people are still coming to terms with the losses of those who died during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when grieving was even more isolated than usual, with funerals streamed online and mourners anonymous behind their masks. It is possible therefore that the ‘acceptable mode of grieving’ permitted by the loss of the Crooked House also allowed an outpouring of grief for a society still finding a channel for traumatic emotions in a post-pandemic world. This sense of communal bereavement has arguably been intensified by the venerable age of the Crooked House. As human beings, we seek out ontological security – a state in which one feels secure in one’s existence. To sustain it, we seek out feelings of safety, trust and reassurance by engaging with comfortable and familiar objects, beings and people around us – especially those important to our self-identity. Twenty-three per cent of survey participants were reminded of the loss of the tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall, which can also be explained within this context. A venerable tree provided a sense of security. When it was suddenly lost, our link between the past, present and future was violently broken. . Survey participants also reacted with anger at the loss of the Crooked House. This anger Visitors flocked to the ruins in the days following the demolition. (Photo: Birmingham Live, 2023)
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