C O N T E X T 8 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 9 Judith Martin Restoration drama Whew – after all the fanfares and fireworks, its over. Thirty buildings, more than three million viewers, scores of celebs, and nearly £3.5 million for the thoroughly deserving winner, Manchester’s Victoria Baths. You could deconstruct BBC2’s Restoration in a number of ways – if that’s not an unfortunate term when some many of the buildings are so nearly totally deconstructed – and doubtless Endemol, the producers, are doing just that. Audience profiles, building types, peaks and troughs of interest. The programme’s internet notice board carries a number of grumbles about how the British public will always opt for the stately home – and yet, despite the extraordinary magnificence of in their blood, I imagine, I have decidedly mixed feelings. Endemol’s Big Brother format seems a little undignified in this context. Are the three million viewers really new converts to ‘heritage’, or are they the same people who rush to Heritage Open Days and Open House weekends? After all, the National Trust now has over three million members, and they don’t all join just for the teas. Griff Rhys Jones exhorted viewers to dial the voting hotline with all the manic insistence of the latest ad for a service that is not 192 – could that have turned some people off? It was certainly more entertainment than education. There was no suggestion Victoria Baths. Photograph © MarkWatson that this dereliction is a recent malaise, but equally there was little indication of just how wilful some of the neglect, and the failure to act by some of the statutory bodies, had been. The odd property ‘goes on fire’ as they say in Scotland, but on the whole the impression is given that this is just the ravages of time. William Adam’s enchanting Mavisbank, in Midlothian, won its regional heat. Thinking it looked familiar, I turned to SAVE’s publication. There it is, in the 1982 ‘The Country House, To Be or Not To Be’, then, going back, in ‘Tomorrow’s Ruins?’ of 1978, even in the 1974 ‘Destruction Victoria Baths. Photograph © MarkWatson Kinloch Castle, and the charming and eccentric owner of Lissan House, who has given her entire property to a buildings preservation trust, the winner is a spectacular example of municipal Victoriana. It seems that, as museums were the answer to every redundant building in the 1990s, until the Heritage Lottery Fund cried ‘enough’, so the solution for the 21st century is the Arts Centre. Griff Rhys Jones did his best to point out that any restored building needs a proper use, yet often the proponents of a candidate seemed vague and overoptimistic.What if one of these had won? Would HLF still have stumped up its £3 million contribution? Was there wrangling behind the scenes? Like many people with conservation
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