C O N T E X T 1 3 0 : J U LY 2 0 1 3 47 Director’s cut Everything everywhere? Maybe, but never always This particular column originates in an idea formed at the launch last year of Historic Scotland’s initiative, delivered through its National Conservation Centre in Stirling, to develop a programme for repair and maintenance of traditional buildings, inspired by the famous Monumentenwacht programme in the Netherlands. The programme’s director, Jacques Akerboom, spoke at the launch about how, in one example, a modern sculpted angel, produced as part of a cathedral repair, was presented in an assertively modern pose of using a mobile phone. This feature inspired much local interest about how the angel was ‘on the mobile’ to God. As a thread throughout the Stirling discussions was, appropriately, the matter of fiscal realism in heritage projects – in particular the need to produce a viable business model for the heritage repair programme under discussion – I thought to myself that there was a great opportunity for the mobile-equipped angel to generate income though sponsorship from the new mobile phone provider Everything Everywhere, or EE. Having learned long ago that my humour often is best left untested in public, I did not offer it up to the delegates. I did mention the idea later to two astute judges, our president, Trefor Thorpe, and our communications secretary, Charles Strang. Neither was much impressed, and I concluded that this was just another one of a long list of my ideas best consigned to history. Thoughts linked to EE did soon come to mind again, however, as I became aware of how my own mobile provider, Orange, was transmogrifying its services on to the EE platform, apparently determined to continue the same erratic coverage under a title that could match the arrogance of its earlier profile. But I quickly came to appreciate the shrewdness of the new title. The omnipresence suggested by the Everything Everywhere tag could not be challenged properly as it excluded the critical consideration for mobile users: ‘when?’ EE may suggest Everything Everywhere coverage, but if trying to make or receive a call, what counts most is the ‘when?’ of the service. If we can not rely on the time at which the all-encompassing signal might be available, then the EE tag is irrelevant, however impressive the title.While if a user does ask of the EE service ‘when?’, the only proper response is the very one that renders those assertions meaningless: ‘never always!’. Curiously, many of our definitions of the historic environment possess remarkably similar holistic ambitions that are then fatally dogged by the same time-based limitations evident in the Everything Everywhere service. Scotland’s historic environment policy, currently under consultation, offers ‘Scotland’s historic environment is the evidence for human activity that connects people with place, and includes the associations we can see, feel and understand’. The unfortunate consequence of this approach is its dependence on an evidential base. Until something becomes ‘evidence’, it must be excluded from historic environment considerations, while if it is not evidence – say, for example, because it is something that will happen, such as a new development – it can be argued that it lies outwith the concerns of the historic environment. That case has already been offered at a public inquiry. If the Scottish definition can exclude matters of future development from the historic environment, and we ask the ‘when?’ question of that EverythingEverywhere-styled definition, the fairest response might be: ‘Everything everywhere? Maybe, but never always’. England’s current National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) definition seems at first more able to respond to the matter of ‘when?’. For the NPPF the historic environment consists of: ‘All aspects of the environment resulting from the interaction between people and places through time’. The ‘when?’ question is apparently resolved by its reference to time. It seems to cover both ‘everything everywhere’ as well as ‘always’. However, the more you try to make that work, the more problems arise. First, that ‘everything everywhere’ aspect of the historic environment in the NPPF is so inclusive that, for practical policy purposes, it must be more selective. In the NPPF’s characteristically policy-lite mode, it operates a simple hierarchy using values, here determined by ‘significance’. That valuing immediately begins to chip at the EE approach, as some of that does not count. We should not forget too that ‘significance’ is so fundamental to the NPPF’s approach to the historic environment that even its definition of conservation is written in terms of managing ‘significance’. So just as the historic environment is about to be ‘everything everywhere’ and ‘always’, the EE tag is circumscribed by operational considerations that sideline that which is not A statue of an angel with a mobile phone recently installed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Church of St John in ’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (Photo:Ton Mooy)
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