Heritage Debates Flashcards
Questions
What is heritage?
What does it mean for a building to be ‘authentic’?
What do we make choices about what to conserve?
How does conservation work? Material aspect - should reinforced concrete be used to support medieval build?
What does it mean to conserve? Restoring to pristing moment of production or maintaining aura of the past?
Who is involved in initiating and running conservation projects? Who should pay - charities, local ppl, state?
Is conservation nostalgic or progressive? Giving local ppl back past or return to golden age which may or may not have existed
How to do we balance need to adapt w preserving historic character?
Public access vs preservation?
Samuel vs Wright debate - heritage just m-c conservative project of story of the nation that whitewashes or ignores more complex British pasts?
Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849
The seven lamps:
sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, obedience
Major accent on historicity
Absolute defence of the material truth of historic architecture
Restoration is an impossibility, first because it must at some point rest (like Pearson’s spire on Idmiston) on mere conjecture about an imagined earlierstate
Second objection based on belief that the conditions under which art is produced directly affect the quality of artistic achievement. He stressed that the social status of the medieval mason was utterly unlike that of the Victorian building worker, enslaved by a ruthless wage economy based on mass production
no such thing as a perfect copy, because no product of the modern age has the “spirit” of the authentic original.
‘Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse’
Anglican revival -
Great parliamentary “Survey of Church Building and Restoration,” published in 1874
Between 1840 and 1873 roughly seven thousand medieval churches in England and Wales were restored, rebuilt, or enlarged
This was almost three times the number of new churches built over theperiod
Picturesque tradition
worried that restoration robbed ancient buildings of their irregular, almost organic appearance, upsetting the delicate balance that centuries of wear and settlement had created
Historians’ arguments against restoration (Miele)
ancient buildings were often the only records of past events in the life of a parish and therefore had to be preserved as documents
G. Stephens, art editor of the Athenaeum, Survey
the vast amounts spent on restoration had generated huge profits for professional architects. Because they calculated their fees on a commission basis (5 percent was the norm), they had every incentive to counsel extensive rebuilding
Ruskin and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)
that summer of 1874, he rejected the honor, the first and only person ever to do so, on the grounds that the profession had not chosen to accept salaries or fixed fees for work on old buildings
Although the then president of the RIBA, the leading Goth and restorer Sir George Gilbert Scott, tried to keep the rebuff quiet, news of it leaked out and galvanized opinion among younger architects whose interest in the budding Arts and Crafts movement made them the natural enemies of the old Gothic guard
Morris stirred to action
Morris’s eyes lighting on the advertisement in the Times appealing for funds to restore Tewkesbury Abbey to the plans of G. G. Scott; his angry and near libelous letter published by Stephens in the Athenaeum of March 10, 1877; and his appeal to interested parties to found a pressure group for setting things right
SPAB Manifesto, 1877
- Medieval architecture = craft. No real prof identity. Totally unrecognised by future generations in particular restorers
- Ageing shouldn’t be expunged - contrib to beauty. Marks of ageing/ change over time cld be seen as essential element. Building only reached maturity after several centuries
- Only minimum should be done to protect/ conserve
manifesto equally avoided any direct attacks on restoration architects, perhaps
forgives architects for having been se- duced by the false doctrines of the Gothic Revival into believing that a great modern style could be founded on the study of past architecture. This
brand of historicism had persuaded architects that they could surpass the ancients themselves by discerning the scientific principles that under- lay medieval design. But the best way to satisfy the most
people was aesthetics, and the manifesto concludes with words and phrases strongly influenced by a picturesque conception of architecture
Johileko -
Manifesto had two essential considerations for the evaluation of historic buildings:
1st, protection now not limited to specific styles any more, but based on critical evaluation of the existing building stock
2nd, ancient monuments represented certain historic periods only so far as their authentic material was undisturbed and preserved in situ
Any attempt to restore or copy would only result in the loss of authenticity and the creation of a fake
conservative repair and staving off decay by daily care
Morris scandal as secretary of SPAB
climax came in the summer of 1879, when Morris took on the Bishop of Truro for
planning to tear down the late medieval parish church of St. Mary’s to make way for a new cathedral. Morris’s language was so rude and presump- tive that the bishop, who had initially expressed strong sympathy with the aims of the Society, resigned his member- ship in protest.
Morris’s socialism
1884 annual general meeting
The fine surface loved by connoisseurs is but the “material sign” for the free and healthy state of the medieval workman, a state that the modern “commercial system” has destroyed just as surely as it has destroyed all the real beauty in life.
strongly influenced by “a great man whom I suppose I ought not to name in this company,” and Karl Marx remained unnamed
In the months that followed, more members resigned than at any time since the Society’s founding
word. Hereafter Morris would take great care not to mingle the SPAB and politics in any forum
Morris 1882 - lecture to the Leek School of Art
preservation and enhancement of all forms of “external
beauty” must be a political act since it produces joy in the life of all classes and with it a greater desire for the equality of all. 15 Only the upper classes, “a small knot of cultivated people,” could take the lead in this form of militancy, he grudgingly admitted, because the middle classes were too caught up in the struggle for luxuries and the working classes for necessities.16
Meanwhile, the official voice of the Society, Thackeray Turner, was busy portraying
“protection” as a matter of taste or intellect, drawing his arguments from the language of connoisseurship and historical scholarship.
SPAB’s early slow progress
the Society’s secular rhetoric made little impact on clergymen for whom restoration was chiefly a doctrinal matter
only managed to intervene when a clergyman or a church patron was already in sympathy with its ideas. So it was that in the summer of 1886, the Reverend Oswald Birchall, a Christian Socialist in correspondence with Morris over political matters, asked the Society to draw up specifications for the repair of an ancient church in his care, St. John the Baptist at Inglesham
SPAB tactics
Realizing the only hope for success lay in educating that portion of the profession that took a special interest in old buildings, the Society has in this century focused more of its attention on special training courses for students and practitioners
In the late nineteenth century, when the odds against the Society’s success seemed impossibly long, the strongly antiprofessional tone developed by Morris and his colleagues had at least the power to bring together people from opposed political camps
Change in SPAB rhetoric after Morris’s death 1896
several members were willing to try to formulate a Tory agenda for the Society. The question was taken up with relish at the 1898 annual general meeting by H. E. Luxmoore,
Society’s brand of conservation was the natural ally of conservative politics because properly conserved ancient buildings were relics of a day when the mass of people had humbly accepted their lot in life,
Miele’s view on conservation and state control
The apparatus of state control threatens to rob conservation of its ability to have any political meaning, as history and monuments are fed into a bureaucratic machine producing historic buildings. Whether they are “listed,” “landmarked,” or “scheduled” in this process, they acquire a kind of absolute value that is not easily questioned. As a result there is no extended debate, in England at any rate, on the meaning conservation might have to the host of people whose class or background excludes them from an appreciation of historic monuments, on whether it is, ulti- mately, worthwhile for public resources to be spent on archi- tectural conservation. The “heritage” establishment has depoliticized monuments… reducing industrial archaeology, Georgian terraces, country houses, medieval castles, even Victorian churches to the same bland base level, draining them of explicit cultural meanings. This, surely, is a state of affairs that Morris would have found intolerable
Ruskin, the stones of Venice, 1851-3
Not enough that a building has the Form, if it have not also the power and the life
Ruskin’s admiration and love for nature
4th Volume of Modern Painters 1856 - writings important in exciting the passion for natural landscape
Ruskin much influenced by William Wordsworth’s love for Lake District in his youth
Ruskin’s views on beauty
typical/ vital
forms = beautiful so far as they derived from nature.
Thus classical architecture rubbish, as was Renaissance w a few exceptions
Henry Dryden, 1854
No deception, authenticity
However, churches still needed to be used
Mustn’t try to restore original form but rather nearest to the best
Scott, paper presented to RIBA meeting 1862
Ruskin gone to far in conservatism, buildings had to be used
Applied Ruskin’s principles as far as poss
must keep as much ancient work intact as poss
George Edmund Street
Restorer of York Minster
Emph in import of architect’s personal involvement.
Mustn’t leave heritage in govt hands - as dem by wholesale restorations of France
1865 RIBA practical rules and suggestions for Conservation
Conservation of Ancient Monuments and Remains
Based mainly on Scott’s paper
Recomendations included careful archaeological and historical survey, measured drawings and photography
Every building had historical value, which would be gone if its authenticity destroyed
Still some lingering influence of the Cambridge Camden Society in the ‘clearance of obstructions’ such as wall linings
Ruskin’s thoughts diffused and taken over by others
e.g. Sidney Colvin, 1877, Restoration and Anti-Restoration -
Building = work of art
Bear the marks of many modifying forces, and the more they bear these, the greater their historic value and interest
John James Stevenson
crit Viollet-le-duc
‘unintentionally amusing’
portions of polychrome niches restored in exact imitations of the old colouring, but found necessary sometimes completely to repaint them, in consequence of the discovery in the old work of some colour w which the new work would not harmonize
From this we may judge of the uncertainty of the restoration, and its authenticity in telling us what the old work was
Morris, 1877 (and 70s)
everything made by man’s hands had a form, beautiful or ugly.
‘beautiful if in accordance w Nature, and helps her’
Agreed w Carlyle and Ruskin that the art of any epoch should be the expression of its social life, but that the current social life did not allow this
Morris business change 1877
until then, 1/3 of the stained glass production of Morris’ company went for old buildings
After that, no more commissions for windows in ancient buildings
SPAB Guidelines
1903
Powys, secretary of SPAB 1911-36
Repair of Ancient Buildings -
summarised the principles and showed how duties of caring for ancient buildings may be performed so that work may be done with the least alteration to the qualities which make a building worthy of notice - workmanship, form, colour, texture
SPAB successes and growing influence
Schemes to add to Westminster Abbey and rebuild Weston Hall, to demolish the old school buildings at Eton and two classical churches in London, St Mary at Hill and St Mary-le-Strand
SPAB foreign influence example
San Marco in Venice
Moris public lectures
Petition with over a thousand signatures presented to Italian Ministry of Education
France
national law for protection of historic buildings 30 March 1887
Anatole France - strongly attacked Viollet-le-Duc for his restorations at Pierrefonds and Notre Dame of Paris, and like Victor Hugo emphasised the import of preserving the national memory in the authentic stones not only of historic buildings but of historic towns
Famous Victorian imitations of Middle Ages
Palace of Westminster, St Pancras Station
Victorian conservation groups
• 1865 - the Commons Preservation Society (today Open Spaces Society)
• 1884 - National Footpaths Preservation Society (today Open Spaces Society)
• 1877 - Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings
1895 - National Trusts
Viollet-le-Duc
Viollet-le-Duc:
* Fr architect * Famous for preserv of medieval Fr architecture * Oversaw restoration of celebrated Fr historic sites * Notre Dame restoration * Made changes to make seem more medieval than before. Took away modifications from between medieval and 19th C. Added more gargoyles. Added central spire. Act of creativity, not just preservation. Turning it into what he imagined medieval church to look like * Cathar stronghold. Walled city in Pyrenees. Le Duc put in charge of restorations. Bulldozed past additions. Destroyed Cathar archaeology. Turned relic of Cathar soc into symbol of Fr national prestige. Went out of way to make building look/ feel more like what he imagined medieval architecture to look like. Returning to pristine moment
Term restoration and thing itself = modern. To restore is not to preserve, repair or rebiild. It is to reinstate to condition of completeness that cld never have existed at any given time. No clear def
* Emph on restoration as modern * Pristine, idealise version of Middle Ages - central to his ideology of what conservation must be * Writings profound impact on what architects doing in Br
1970s on, upswing in interest in Br heritage
- Lively debate over what that meant for Br society
- Upsurge in museums opening
- Hewson - 100s opened every year 70s and 80s
- Notable new activity around nation’s past
- Mid-1980s expend of depart of envi on heritage = 86 million.
- SAVE, 1975 - publically campaigned for pub histor builds
- Industrial to service economy
- Interest in industrial heritage incr
- Big pit coal mine Blaenavon. Closed after miner’s strike
- Telford Ironbridge Gorge museum. Later postwar period iron industry left. Ironbridge Gorge Trust 1968, Museum 1973
Patrick Wright, On Living in and Old Country
• 1979 - couldn’t believe what had happened to the country, having spent 5 years living in North America, mostly in Vancouver
• ‘I felt as if I had stumbled inadvertantly into some sort of anthropological museum
• Disturbed by passion for conservation
• Material interest in past becoming cult
• These versions of past culturally produced
• Heritage past = imaginary realm
• Ppl of 1980s must learn to critique pastoral, pure England as construction by enemies of modernity
• Reactionary counterculture
• Deep England mainly aristocratic or bourgeois
• Implied natural Eng hierarchy corrupted by Democracy, immigration etc
Heritage closely allied w Thatcherite project and return to Victorian value
cultural manipulation pervades contemporary British society - not least in endless public invocations of the national identity and tradition
Lowenthal on museumification
diagnosis of museum section: tame past by giving new function. Tamed. Potency destroyed. Ancestors displayed and made harmless. Once memorialised loses ability to harm present. Past complex and destabilising
E.g. closing mills and pits - abandonment of working class, decline of industry
Hewison, The Heritage Industry, 1987:
ndivid museums fine institutions
• Collectively their growth in num points to imaginative death of country
• Worthy aims but together show country obsessed w past and unable to face future
• Crit heritage industry not just bc many products fantasy of world that never was, not just bc involves reasserting Victorian values, but bc worsens climate of decline
• If only new thing we have to offer is improved version of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change
• Move from progressivism of postwar period to more conservative society
Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 1996
- Heritage arrived as progressive force, educationally and architecturally
- Examples on BB
- Open air museums, derided today as quintessence of conservatism, were at outset, in 1960s, in hands of museums profession’s young Turnks - curators who (BB)
- Heritage not inherently conservative force. Emerged from progressivism/ socialism/ Radicalism
- Criticises critique/ condescention aimed at heritage industry from jealousy. High culture world of history in academy little traction on pop consciously whereas hist in open air museums etc receiving much more pop attent influence
Trinder, in History Workshop on Ironbridge Museum:
- Practitioner academic
- Of kind Samuel speaks of
- Museum teaches past through getting volunteers involved and tactile experience
- Ironbridge pushing at what historical work could be
Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 1985
‘Once confined to a handful of museums and antique shops, the trappings of history now festoon the whole country. All memorabilia are cherished, from relics of the Revolution to artifacts from Auschwitz
Americans en masse find comfort in looking back
British conservationists mount guard on everything from old churches to ancient countrysided, deplore the drain of heritage across the Atlantic, and solace present discontents with past glories’
Perspective of past as foreign country is a recent one. Only in late 18th C was past conceived as diff realm.
Venerated as font of communal identity, cherished as precious and endangered resource, yesterday less and less like today
The more it is appreciated for its own sake, the less real or relevant the past becomes
Nostalgia transcends yearnings for lost childhoods and scenes of early life, embracing imagined pasts never experienced by their devotees or perhaps by anyone
Benefits of the past:
Familiarity of recognition; reaffirmation of belief and action; guidance of example; awareness of personal and communal identity; diachronic enrichment of present experience; respites or escapes from the pace and pressure of the here and now
Drawbacks:
forgeting or obliterating malign or traumatic hist
Glorious heritage may overwhelm, its superiority extinguishing even the will to rival it.
Traditional or inherited perspectives may seem pernicious to all but their few inheritors, and sometimes even to them.
The past itself is gone - all that survives are its material residues and the accounts of those who experienced it.
No such evd can tell us about the past with absolute certainty
Canons of historical inquiry and consensually shared data set historical knowledge on a seemingly firmer footing than what is known from memory alone.
Every account of the past is both more and less than that past
What historians do depends on present views of what history ought to be about.
Historians always rewrite the past from the standpoint of the present
The past is not dead, as J H Plumb would have it; it is not even sleeping. A mass of memories and records, of relics and replicas… lives at the core of our being. And as we remake it, the past remakes us
Nostalgia’s profitability incites real estate agents to drum up interest by digging out every shred of history
N = mem with the pain removed
What pleases the nostalgist - less the memory of what actually was than of what was once thought possible.
Mistrust of the future fuels today’s nostalgia
Retrospective nostalgia coexists with impatient modernism. Revolutionaries exorcise recent evils by appealing to older exempars, and end by resucitating what they once rejected
All awareness of the past is founded on memory. Through recollection we recover consciousness of former events, distinguished yesterday from today, and confirm that we have experienced the past
Remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity, to know what we were confirms that we are. Self-continuity depends wholly on memory
History extends and elaborates memory by interpreting relics and synthesizing reports from past eyewitnesses.
For all the expertise of historians and archaeologists, history remains, in Rosemary Harris’s phrase, ‘something of an odd, semi-fictional subject, part fact, part myth, and guesswork’
Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates self-awareness
historical knowledge invariably subjective
Historical facts are timeless and discontinuous until woven together in stories. We do not experience a flow of time, only a succession of situations and events
The segregation of historical from fictional narrative was a by-product of late-Renaissance concern about the validity and accuracy of historical sources. Previously fused in classical and medieval epic
Interaction with a heritage continually alters its nature and context, whether by choice or by chance
Display arouses the impulse to conserve, but also increases the need for it
Seeing the past in our own terms, we necessarily revise what previous interpreters have seen in their terms, and reshape artefacts and memories accordingly.
We alter the past to become part of it as well as to make it our own.
Modern parents still follow Henry James’s duchess. ‘We take the children to Stonehenge’, writes Penelope Lively, ‘but we’d probably shrink from exposing them to a candid account of Bronze Age beliefs and practices. We like the past gutted and nicely cleaned up.’ The filth and stench of early town life, the foraging of pigs in city streets, the din of horse-drawn vehicles on cobblestones, the terror of pain before modern anaesthesia, are never reproduced
Nothing seems too horrendous to commemorate - Auschwitz, now World Heritage site
In defiance of known facts we continue to envisage a rose-coloured past
Remaking the past to embody their own wished-for virtues was a major Victorian enterprise. By modernizing the greeks and archaizing themsleves, the Victorians could view the ancients as living contemporaries
Paradox implicit in preservation - itself reveals that permanence is an illusion. We suspend erosion of remains only to transform them in other ways
Plumb’s conclusions dubious. Cult of nostalgia, yearning for roots, demand for heritage, passion for preservation show that the spell of the past remains potent
a patrimony simply preserved becomes an intolerable burden; the past is best used by being domesticated - and by our accepting and rejoicing that we do so.
The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively.
LP Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’
J H Plumb
The Death of the Past, 1969
‘objective’ history based on firm canons of evd has largely dispelled dependence on a fixed and fearsome past
Lownthal, the past is a foreign country revisited, 2015
The lengthened and deepened past has become almost omnipresent, engulfing the media and personal memory. Yet at the same time collective memories have withered away. While historians know more and more about the past, the public at large knows less and less, and what is commonly known is increasingly recent, trivial, and ephemeral. Both in private proliferation and public demise, the past comes to resemble the present. Domesticated into today, it is ever less a foreign country. Memory overwhelms history, and authoritative understanding succumbs to untutored surmise
Cynical doubts assail the entire corpus of the past
Corollary of conflating the past within the present is failure to realize that bygone people lived according to other codes
Linking the living, the dead, and those to come as a continuing community, we become responsible for the past in its entirety. Informed tolerance toward our total legacy is a necessary condition of enhancing the present and enabling the future
Nostalgia is today’s favoured mode of looking back. It saturates the press, serves as advertising bait, merits sociological study, expresses modern malaise
Victorian Britain:
Assaults against customary ways provoked regressive defence of past tradition in medievalist fancies of the 1830s and 40s
Industrialization further spurred looking back
Many take refuge in the past as an antidote to present disappointments and future fears. They hark back to the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome burdens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsed immediacy and certitude, in some Golden age of classical serenity, Christian faith, pastoral plenitude, or childhood innocence
Decline of import of the past. In today’s digital age, intellectual legacy of the past little relevance in schooling. Hence the growing tendency to flatter children that their values are more enlightened than elders
new admiration of historical ignorance
We have lost the ready familiarity with the classical and biblical heritage that long imprinted European culture and environment
Heller, A Theory of History, 1982
everyday life is above all situated. It always occurs in relation to a person’s immediate locality: ‘the terrain of a king’s everyday life is not his country but his court’
Lara Rutherford-Morrison, ‘PlayingVictorian: Heritage,Authenticity, and Make-Believe inBlistsHill Victorian Town, theIronbridgeGorge’,The Public Historian37 (3) (2015),
The British heritage industry has long been a subject for debate in the UK, with
critics arguing that heritage invests history with a nostalgic idealism that sanitizes and
simplifies the nation’s past. This article examines Blists Hill Victorian Town, a British living
history museum that purports to re-create everyday industrial life of the 1890s, within the
context of these debates, arguing that Blists Hill portrays the late-Victorian period with
more complexity than many critics would allow. Shifting the lens of how such sites have
typically been evaluated—away from questions of authenticity, to instead focus on how
living history museums engage visitors in meaningful play—I consider the ways that Blists
Hill promotes creative learning through an imaginative, visceral engagement with history.
Blists Hill Victorian Town is an English open-air museum,
located in the formerly industrial region of Shropshire
One of ten interlinked
museums in the area known as the Ironbridge Gorge, Blists Hill is an
immersive museum that invites its visitors to ‘‘[e]xperience life as it was over
100 years ago through the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of a recreated
Victorian Town.’
Blists Hill appears frequently in
these debates, with Bob West devoting an entire article to accusing Blists Hill
of promoting a ‘‘spectacle’’ of idealized Victorian labor, and Hewison deriding
the museum as having the ‘‘authenticity of a film set.’
If we shift our view away from debates that
define heritage in terms of ‘‘real’’ versus ‘‘fake’’ history, and instead consider
how authenticity functions in relation to the imagination, then Blists Hill—
simulated history though it may be—becomes a space for creative learning,
based in bodily experience and human interaction.
The IGMT has explicitly disavowed nostalgia as an aim of the Ironbridge
museums.22 One of its early directors, Stuart Smith, explained his approach to
heritage and heritage museums by warning that,
[i]f you are not careful you will wallow in nostalgia, in this sort of myth that the
past was wonderful. I personally believe the past was awful
Costumed workers at Blists Hill exhibit a variety of skills, many emphasizing
the fact that most of these skills have now been relegated to the domain of
‘‘hobby’’ or have been lost altogether
For example, on one of my visits, Blists Hill’s lace maker explained to
the visitors gathered around her work table how the rise of mechanized lace in
the early- and mid-nineteenth-century devastated the handmade lace industry
and destroyed the livelihood of thousands of lace makers in Britain
Blists Hill presents an implicit argument that change
is the basis of history.
what constitutes an ‘‘authentic’’ experience of a fake
town? If we were to define ‘‘authentic’’ as descriptive only of those things that
actually came from the nineteenth century, then Blists Hill, with its mixture of
original and reconstructed buildings, would fail to qualify
Visitors are able to report authenticity as one of Blists Hill’s great assets,
even as their guidebooks declare that ‘‘Blists Hill is not a real town,’’52 because
their sense of Blists Hill’s authenticity is not contingent on historical reality.
Although there are homes and a church to walk through,
animals to visit, and ironworks to tour, the bulk of the town is made up of
Victorian shops. In each one, the visitor can interact with Victorian objects
and tools, converse with the costumed interpreters, and purchase souvenirs.
These keepsakes include objects made by traditional methods in Blists Hill
In declaring the opposition of historical representation and money-making,
West ignores the centrality of commercialism within the late-Victorian social
world
Interactivity is crucial to the success of Blists Hill as an engaging learning
environment. As Dicks points out, visitors decode heritage sites of all kinds,
actively interpreting even ‘‘traditional’’ heritage exhibits in conjunction with
their own points of view. However, Blists Hill, like many other living history
museums, foregrounds the process of decoding, explicitly presenting the
visitor with the task of deciphering the museum’s messages.
Unlike traditional
museums that direct their guests from one exhibit to another in a prescribed
order, in Blists Hill, tourists are relatively free to roam.
Open-air and living history museums, though increasingly common within
the heritage landscape, are still often saddled with the derogatory label of
‘‘theme park.’’ ‘‘Theme park’’ is not, in fact, an inaccurate term for Blists
Hill—it is, after all, a simulated space dedicated to the entertainment of
tourists. But while ‘‘theme park’’ has long been used as a catch-all for the
passivity, sentimentality, and inauthenticity of contemporary tourism, a close
look at Blists Hill shows how the simulation and make-believe of the theme
park can further a more complicated approach to history than such a label
would suggest, an approach that presents history as a process of continual
change
Rooted in play, living history and heritage reconstruction
mediate the space between a distantly perceived past and the immediacy
of lived experience, between knowing something to be true and feeling
it as an integrated part of one’s intellectual and emotional life. Counterintuitively,
it is through the experience of make-believe that history gains a sense
of personal reality
Definition of ‘Heritage’
Lara Rutherford-Morrison:
‘‘heritage’’ as a concept has been used to cover a broad swath of
the historical landscape and can include remnants of the physical past, such as
buildings, furniture, and machines, as well as harder to quantify cultural
objects, like historically bound skill sets, aesthetics, and folk music
When freed from models that
place heritage within a few carefully curated historical objects, or that reject
heritage as uncritical sentimentality, the concept instead emerges as a complex
interplay of history, communal and individual memory, emotion, and material
culture.
A heritage site is effective to the extent
that it can direct visitors’ memories and expectations toward an intellectual
and emotional investment in the history being portrayed; this investment, in
turn, is vital to achieving the site’s educational goals.
In the case of heritage tourism, the meaning of ‘‘authenticity’’ is even more
tenuous, and its fantasy aspects more obvious. What would it mean for a contemporary
person to experience the past in an authentic way?
Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (2006)
heritage is dominated by what she labels the ‘‘authorized heritage discourse.’’4 This discourse, embedded in the
charters of heritage agencies and state institutions across the globe, locates
heritage within culturally significant objects, and figures the primary work of
heritage organizations to be the preservation of these objects. In this construction,
authority over heritage rests firmly in the hands of experts, who are
responsible for preserving and interpreting heritage artifacts, while protecting
them from the masses. Early manifestations of British heritage tended to be
of the ‘‘stately home’’ variety, with an emphasis on preserving the homes of
the elite. This type of heritage, still popular today, typifies the authorized
heritage discourse.
heritage
is not simply a ‘‘thing’’ to be consumed, nor is the visitor an empty vessel
into which preordained messages can be poured.41
until recently, the authenticity of ‘‘traditional’’ British heritage sites like stately homes has largely gone unquestioned.4
Poet and critic Tom Paulin on the heritage industry
‘‘a loathsome collection of theme parks and dead values’’
Lara Rutherford-Morrison on ‘historical authenticity’
Authenticity is not quantifiable, but is instead a perceived quality, based on
a variety of factors that have little to do with objective historical accuracy or
the preservation of real historical objects. As Smith and Magelssen have both
noted, authenticity is a social construction;53 it is a relational concept, ‘‘produced
in the interaction between exhibition and visitor.’’54 Bagnall describes
this relation as specifically emotional in nature, arguing that authenticity arises
from a sense of ‘‘emotional realism.’’ In this construction, authenticity lies, not
within the object, but in the object’s ability to tap into the visitor’s subjective
experience and evoke personal and familial memories.
Jordanova, History in Pratice (2000)
public history:
mostly for mass audience
For some, import part of radical hist mvmnts critical of elitism, seeking to promote politically self-conscious, community-based histories
Also tool of establishments
‘history’ in many senses - academic discipline; dissemination and display of its findings to wide audiences using all available media; past itself; diffused awareness of that past varying person to person, group to group
Heritage:
doesn’t always claim to be instructing on history
Not generally that interested in academic history
Nonetheless contributes to ideas people hold of history/ past
Museums - major cultural forces
Highly refined past
Original materials/ means by which processed/ rendered = almost invisible. Display only selected objects
Can’t allow full transparency
Shape forms curiosity can take - convey narratives/ values about everyday life
Operate within idiom of heroes and villains
Likely to stress moral clarity and individual agency - from desire for patterns of responsibility
Emotive
National Trust, country houses - supposed to be as original as poss - problematic - houses evolve. Unlikely to be one time house evokes. Result = merge and creation of unspecified historical ‘authenticity’
Memorials:
Typically affirm values upon which war based. Honour to personnel/ instigators.
Different definitions of ‘public’:
For mass audience popular non-specialist of concern to an entire polity available for anyone to see government
creators of PH oft drawn from small cadres w highly specific agendas - contrast w amateur history - products of which not usually called PH
collective identity shaped by education system, but further shaped + sustained, occasionally radially altered, by PH
Three principal issues of PH - non-academic audiences 4 hist; general cultural uses for past; specific displays that relate to hist broadly defined
State major role in shaping view of past - funding
Controversy over plans 2 put Enola Gay - plane that dropped bomb on Hiroshima - on display at National Air+Space museum in Washington DC 1995 - impossible to present WW2 events neutrally
Hist still loosely political even in more commercial forms - reproduction clothes - views of partic historical periods to general pub - priority to aristocratic
Creating image of distinct eras e.g. 18th C elegant
Inevitable tension between commemoration and analysis
hist always implicitly moralising
pop hists find multiple identities difficult to navigate
no such thing as clear-cut moral polarities and simple answers
diversity = helathy, but results must be transparent and able to be critically evaluated in both scholarly and public history
Past is inspiring and instructive - not font of clear, unambiguous lessons and recipes
Arena for contemplation/ thought
Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)
nation’s history key element of unifying but abstract notion of ‘nationhood’
Hoock, Professional Practices of Public History in Britain (2008)
from April 2008 conf in Liverpool exploring theoretical/ conceptual frameworks of PH
North Americans surprised few from UK indent selves as p hists
heritage debate of past 1/4 C over idolizing of stately homes and paternalistic values they allegedly represented. Also embodied more general critique of state’s attempt to create cultural consensus about national history - Tory plot to prop up ‘fading’ Eng nat ident
2000 Eng Heritage poll - 98% of pop considered heritage import to ed. children about the past
NT = largest private mem organisat in Europe
Public Record Office launched 1901 census online Jan 2002. 29 mil users per day in 1st 4 days, threatened collapse of Br telephone network
State promotion of heritage
Heritage Lottery Fund 1994, by 2006 £38 billion to 24 000 heritage projects. Urged by govt to address social inclusion agenda
Mandler optimism - serious hists can produce intellectually challenging wrk that stretches (wider) audiences more than in prev generations
Proport of serious biographies and hist books by academic historians designed for wider public reading = much higher than 40 yrs ago. Wolfson Prize celebrates hist books of highest standard 4 general pub
2008 Institute of Historial Research interviews - Cannadine, Daunton, Morrill, rejected unhelpful academic h/ph dichotomies
Jordanova/ Tosh - idea means of historical thinking and critical skills need to be conveyed as much as knowledge and content
Tosh, practical historicism - set of transferable skills in how to approach issues, opening terms of debate and analysing its pluralistic nature
Jordanova has crit Tosh for failing to consider fully obstacles in way of encouraging policymakers and pub to devel more informed underst of past. Must distinguish between diff challenges involved in engaging diff audiences/ publics in diff historical debates
Ruskin College, PH MA for adults
Kean - PH = people’s history. Criticises Tosh’s approach as too one-sided. We must recognise need to shre, participate, engage not as ‘experts’ but as ppl w interest in relat between past and present willing to explore, acknowl, value diff ways of configuring this
HLF-funded project on ‘Identity and the City: 1001 years of Ethnic Minorities in Bristol’
Lee + Tucker, HLF-funded restoration and repair of Birkenhead Park, 1st UK park. Outreach to teach schoolchildren
Conclude w plea - PH should encourage local participation but challenge stereotypes and assumptions, investing in long-term benefit to be derived from critical approach to historical record
Lipscomb - re-interpretation of Hampton Court by Historic Royal Palaces in run-up to 500th anniversary of HenryVIII’s accession.
Audience-led approach
History becomes public when shaped for audience to meet present demands irrespective of audience
Comparison w Fr hists since 2005 - campaigning vs manipulation of pub mem by politics. Exert signif influence over pub opinion and policy-making
Privileged voices protected by rigid consumer/ producer division
