Please read beyond the first paragraph. This is not an attempt by an anti-conservation fifth columnist to devalue the subject ... just the opposite. Most people who read Context spend all or most of their working time and probably also a fair amount of their leisure time dealing with the historic built environment. It is our job and we each have a detailed knowledge of various aspects of the subject. In this situation it is easy to develop an inward looking technical and jargonistic approach to the subject. We don't always listen enough to the common views on the subject and forget that the overwhelming majority of people in this country, even when they have an interest in conservation, are not specialists. When they do take a detailed interest, it usually involves an occasional specific local issue, such as a development proposal affecting a neighbouring historic building or area. and they don't always understand the wider arguments why buildings or areas should be preserved. Most of the time other matters - employment, education, for example - are far more important to members of the public than conservation. For the majority of people most of the time, historic buildings and areas are a sporadic, incidental part of a larger more complex environment. Their views are influenced by what they read in the media. Equally important, historic buildings are competing with other environmental subjects for public support at the present time. I am not convinced that we are winning the battle - there is for example, probably more public concern for the great crested newt than for the listed building. There is a great need for a more user friendly approach to the presentation of historic building conservation issues. To do this effectively, communication skills are as important as professional expertise. Throughout the last 300 years, economic and social commentators have written about what we would now call historic building conservation and there is a lot that we can learn from them. The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (1685-1712) is one of the earliest which relates to the country as it was beginning to take its modem form. This does have its uses in conservation but is not easily read in the 20th century. Perhaps the first which is 30 SIR TITUS OUIER PEOPLE'SVIEWSOF CONSERVATION really worth dipping into is A Tour Throughout the Whole Island of Great Britain (1722-1725) by Defoe whom we would regard today as an ex MIS agent. Generally however there is more to learn from modem writers about presenting conservation issues in a way which the public will understand. John Betjeman's views on Slough, written in 1937, are a good starting point: Come friendly bombs and /all on Slough It isn't fit for humans now There isn't grass to graze a cow Swarm over, Death! Mess up the mess they call a town A house for ninety seven down And once a week for half a crown For twenty years. The language is simple, the message easily understood. He wrote many other pieces on conservation issues of which this quote about modem architecture from a less well known post-war poem The Town Clerk is an example: In a few years time this country will be looking As uniform and tasty as its cooking Hamlets which Jail to pass the planners test Will be demolished. We'll rebuild the rest To look like Welwyn mixed with Middle West When Defoe wrote about Durham in the 18th century, he commented on the splendour of what was still very much the town of the Prince Bishop: "Durham is a little compact neatly contrived city surrounded almost entirely by the river Wear which with the castle standing on an eminence encloses the city in the middle of it:as the castle does also the cathedral, the bishops palace and thefine houses of the clergy where they live in all the magnificence and splendour imaginable" BillBryson is a modem American journalist/author with a racy style who spent some time living in this country. In his Notes from a Small Island he had a similar high opinion of the town itself but commented particularly about the absence of charges for entrance to the "magnificence and splendour" of the cathedral the fabric of which can no longer be maintained by the Bishop: "The cathedral, a mountain of reddish brown stone standing high above a lazy green loop of the River Wear, is of course itsglory. Everything about it was perfect - not just its setting and execution but also no less notably the way it is run today. For a start there was no nagging for money, no 'voluntary' admission fee." Earlier in he book he comments very unfavourably about the commercialisation of Salisbury Cathedral. Although Bill Bryson's book is very wide ranging, it is clear that he has done his homework on the historic built environment: "it occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look upon it as a kind of inexhaustible resource. Consider the numbers: 445,000 listed buildings, 12,000 mediaeval churches, 1,500,000 acres of common land, 120,000miles offootpaths and public rights of way, 600,000 known sites of archaeological interest, 98% of them with no legal protection. Do you know that in my Yorkshire village there are more 17th century buildings than in the whole of North America. And that's just one obscure hamlet with a population comfortably under one hundred." The general public learn more about historic building issues from popular books or articles in the press than from scholarly academic works. CONTEXT49
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