Published in the April 2018 edition of Real Review
Simmering throughout 2014 and 2015, and eventually boiling
over in condemnatory newspaper inches and their correspondingly defensive
ripostes, was an unlikely, but intensely passionate popular international
controversy. Chartres Cathedral, that great inspiration to sensitive
architectural romantics the world over, with its sublime interior gloom, its
scarred and stained piers and dark, mysterious vaults, was undergoing a major
project intended to insure its long-term preservation. As the scaffolding began
to come down in the first part of the nave to have work completed, visitors
were greeted not by the millennial patina, the layered material scars of time-passed
they had come to visit, but were instead confronted by a super-bright, brand-new
beige painted finish, complete with Colgate-white applied false mortar lines.
The interior suddenly more resembled a neon-luminous faux-medieval French
resort hotel than the awesome gloom to which visitors were accustomed.
The declared intention, it became clear, was not just to
preserve, but to restore, and to restore to an arbitrarily chosen point along
the timeline of the great building’s long and complex history. The decorative
scheme conformed to the earliest layer of paint that had been uncovered during
exploratory works, the custodians of the cathedral claimed, and so it was
‘authentic’. The “patina of time” that was so beloved by so many generations of
visitors was just the accumulated dirt of centuries combined with fire damage,
they maintained. This wear and damage had left the layers of paint looking like
real stone, which in fact it never had been, it was all just a distraction from
the original building’s true architectural clarity, apparently. Critics
responded that the accumulated traces of history, and the ability to experience
the passing of time as an atmosphere, as a composite of subsequent alterations,
transformations and events, as an intricately interwoven concatenation of
irreconcilable visions for the same space, was destroyed. The cathedral’s
chaotic chronology was eradicated in favour of an impossibly simple, and
reductively unitary (and archaeologically dubious), notion of the past, one
predicated on the idea of a “perfect moment” in which a building, or a place,
was the way it was meant to, that we can discern that moment, and that we
should always endeavour to return to it, no matter the “stuff” that stands in
the way.
Nostalgia is inherent to the development of modernity. The
more our society progresses along the path of economic and material
development, the faster change becomes, rendering even historical periods
immediately preceding our own -we are talking only a matter of decades- almost
incomprehensibly distant and strange. A pervading sense of frantically untethered,
abstract and uncontrollable velocity finds in a need for rootedness, a sense of
place, and a shared past, its antidote. In other words, Modernity is a form of
constant uprooting and travel, and it always and without fail produces a yearning
for home. The choice is not whether to be nostalgic, it is woven into the
fabric of our epoch, the choice is how we choose to engage with our nostalgia,
how we allow it to manifest itself.
In The Future of Nostalgia, the late Svetlana Boym posits two
forms. On the one hand is “Restorative Nostalgia”, the easiest, most common,
and most dangerous kind, in which a false, ideal past is imagined that must be
returned to, one which stands outside of history as the paragon of perfection
in the eyes of those who long for it. Anything that does not conform to this
necessarily imaginary arcadia is at best not worthy of valuing and is at worst
to be swept away. On the other hand there is “Reflective Nostalgia”, in which
the past is to be yearned after, grasped at, and preserved where possible, its
traces valued and meditated upon, but above all is an awareness of both the
impossibility of its return, as well as the impossibility of comprehending it
in its full richness and plenitude. The former abhors complexity, it wants to
freeze the process of change, to end history. The latter values the layered and
the ambiguous, it welcomes the continued effects of time, it is aware of its own
position in a continuum and embraces history as something that progresses into
the future.
In the instance of Chartres Cathedral, French authorities
decided upon a restorative approach, while those (it seems) with a romantic
persuasion, erred towards a Reflective position. The eerie,
plastic-surgery-gone-wrong results of the reconstructive approach are now clear
for all to see on the building’s interior. The restorative mentality, the
desire to freeze, to wind-back history towards a perfect moment that never
actually existed, is seeping into our consciousness in far less obvious, and
far more destructive ways than the occasional heavy-handed preservation
project.
Before the second world war there was almost no protection
for buildings that today we would consider to be of historic importance. The
notions of preservation and heritage were mostly understood as applying to
objects of art, and the intangible cultural assets of regional and national
traditions. With regards to buildings, the city, and the physical fabric of the
nation’s environment, it was individual property rights that trumped all, with
a landowner’s right to develop his property as he saw fit, and the protection
of this right being the primary motivator of the law. Imagine if Prince Charles
decided he wanted to build a whole new façade for Buckingham Palace, completely
obscuring the now historic frontage behind (this is exactly what happened
twice, in the 1850s, and the 1910s), if Nash’s terraces facing Regents Park
were demolished en-masse the way his Regents St was between 1895 and 1927, or if
GE Street’s High Courts were demolished to make way for a large office building
as Soane’s incomparable Bank of England was in the 20s. This kind of
development at the loss of historical buildings was commonplace prior to the
1940s.
The idea that the government, or the public, should deign to
restrict what a person could do with their own property, let alone stop them
from doing anything to it at all, was extremely problematic. It would take the
trauma of the war, and the consequentially massive loss of historic buildings, together
with a reorientation of the national political sentiment away from the strictly
interpreted primacy of individual rights in general, and towards the custodian’s
care of a benevolent state on the behalf of all citizens, to introduce the
Listing system that designates which buildings are of special importance to the
nation’s collective memory, and should have their preservation enforced by the
power of the law.
The post-war period was one of profound national
metamorphosis, of large scale construction and the reordering of the country’s existing
urban centres, as well as of the creation of numerous -entirely new-
metropolitan areas through the New Towns Act. The Listing system was
complementary to this national project of modernisation and development. It was
intended to pinpoint key projects, important markers in the country’s
architectural and social trajectory, whose preservation would benefit the
population overall, acting as officially-recognised anchors to a shared and
state-sanctioned past, whose presence would actively aid the transition to a
new and different future by providing a sense of security that the past was not
being completely lost. Not only was the preservation of heritage not mutually
exclusive to radical redevelopment, it was intrinsic to it. This was a
reflective relationship to Notsalgia writ large. There was a mutual
understanding between the past and the present, in which the best of the past
was retained under the tacit agreement that it would not prejudice the future.
Preservation was an integral driver of change, it was one of the main
ingredients that allowed for and fostered the spatial continuation of history.
What was intended as a limited tool for preserving key
buildings within a radically evolving spatial landscape, has since ballooned
into something quite different. 2% of the entire building stock of England is now
listed in one form or another, adding up to roughly 374,000 listed properties.
Added to this are Conservation Zones. Since 1967 whole city areas that are
deemed to be of special interest must have all new buildings or renovations
preserve or enhance the “special character” of the local area. These were
instituted in reaction to a prevailing tendency towards wholesale redevelopment
and large-scale infrastructure projects in the 1960s, which were sometimes
either endangering, or demolishing whole neighbourhoods. These preservation districts have however since spread
across the country (There are now 9,800 of them across England, with the number
constantly rising), preserving the “character” of any number of built-up areas
that are not in the least danger from anything other than their normal
evolution. Conservation Zones are too often simply areas that wistfully conjure
up the picturesque image of a previous historical era for which those with
political wherewithal are nostalgic. I mention political wherewithal, because
it is chiefly those with the time, the inclination, the financial resources,
and the know-how, who are able to push for an area they care for, or buildings
they care for, to be designated, leading to a disproportionate number of these
protections being in areas inhabited by the middle and upper classes.
During the intervening period, the scale of national
infrastructure development, and of planned new urban construction has been in
precipitous decline, in an inverse numerical relationship with the degree of
preservation that is being enforced. Whereas previously Listing and the
occasional, surgical use of Conservation Zones, were an ameliorating aspect of universal
progress and development, which affected everyone, development and preservation
are now in stark opposition, and it is a divide which is marked above all by
wealth, with the effects of both being divvied up with stark inequality. On the
one hand the wealthier a person is, the more likely -in England at least- they
are to live in a ‘historical’ neighbourhood, and on the other hand, due to
their access to specialist assistance and consultation, as well as the extra
time they are likely to have at their disposal, often combined with an
acquaintance towards bureaucratic and professional jargon, the more likely they
are to be successful in their campaigns to have their historical areas and
buildings protected. They themselves end up defining what is actually
considered historical. Many working class and less affluent areas are of
historical significance and could be argued to be of such through a new set of
heritage parameters, but it is rare for these areas to be looked at, let alone
recognised.
It is no coincidence that the value of real estate assets in
Conservation Zones is significantly higher than those outside. These areas, and
the enforcement of “in character” planning criteria that force all new
architecture to progressively reinforce a frozen historical image of the local
district in which they are built, effectively lock capital in through the
elimination of any future risk of change that might be detrimental to real
estate asset values. As each new project is added, and each property is
‘restored’ in idealised heritage form, these zones evolve into reconstructed
caricatures of perfectly faux “authentic” pasts, much as the French authorities
returned Chartres to its supposedly superior beginnings. In an urban-scale,
more drawn-out version of Chartres, the traces and architectures of intervening
periods are gradually replaced with buildings resembling (sometimes in abstract
form, other times in direct pastiche reconstructions) solely the alleged
perfect point in the past that residents and authorities deem valuable. 1950s
cosy-modern premises are replaced with brick townhouses, 1960s concrete is
replaced with painted stucco and code-stone. The rich get to live in their
dream past. Time is arrested, reversed, artificially reconstructed, and it is
all done at a profit almost entirely devoid of risk.
Development of course still occurs, less planned, less for
the communal benefit, but the economy churns, and flats are built, areas
demolished and redeveloped. Only this doesn’t happen in wealthy, preserved
areas. The burden of Modernity, which is first and foremost that of dramatic
change, now falls squarely on those unlucky enough to not live in reconstructed
zones of privileged preservation. The ultimate luxury in 21st
Century England is the luxury to live free of change, to live in an area that
is spatially static, in which the only possibly modification is that which goes
backwards towards the image of a comforting past, towards an ever more tasteful
and sanitised safety deposit box of authentic Britishness. Reconstructive
Nostalgia is fused with a form of spatialised economic ghettoization, in which
the right to maintain physical connections with shared memories of the past is
granted only to those who have gamed the system for their own benefit, while
everyone else is excluded even from the cathartic balm of Nostalgia, while
nonetheless bearing the full force of constant architectural and economic
instability, uncertainty, and perpetual change. What was once a restriction of
individual property rights for the benefit of the common good, has come full
circle to become a tool to increase the stature, wealth, and environment of
those with the most valuable property.
Over the past 35 years the culture of preservation has
metastasised from a positive participant in the flux and growth of England’s
spatial landscape, into a toxic blockage of the system that does not just
reflect the injustices of a late neoliberal country, it actively enables and
accelerates them, whilst providing a perfect cover for those benefitting from
it most. What is actually individuals taking care of their own, and ensuring
unceasing private gain and freedom from the stress of change, is dressed up as
a public good solely through the socially acceptable and heretofore
unassailable doctrine of ever-expanding Preservation (“look, we are preserving
this area, it is so special, who on earth could say that was a bad thing?!”).
We should protect the best from our past, no one nowadays
would disagree with that, but it is time that we profoundly question what is
protected, why, and by whose pressure, whilst disentangling the image of our
complex cities from the reductive, picture-postcard language of preservation,
to halt the precipitous rush towards a reconstructive tendency that has taken
hold since the 1970s. Nostalgia is fine, it is to be expected, but let’s
reflect on it, and lets once again ally the past with progress.
