48 C O N T E X T 1 3 0 : J U LY 2 0 1 3 Full member Ben Eley (LO) Affiliate members Gill Allmond (NI) Adrian Attwood (LO) Jamie Barnes (SW) Dayle Bayliss (EA) John Hugh Beattie (NI) Ranald Dods (SC) Michael Faulkner (EM) Rebecca Ferguson (WM) Andrew Graham (YO) Roger Gransmore (SW) Kate Hannelly (EM) Steve Harding (SO) Tim Jordan (SE) Kathryn Jukes (YO) Jen Marriott (NO) Thomas Marston (EA) Tarnia McAlester (WM) Amy McAuley (OV) Frank Muir (LO) Steve Newman (SO) Emma Nock (WM) Emma Ousbey (EA) Terry Pearce (SW) Helene Petersen (RI) Brian Quinn (NI) Nick Shepherd (SE) Andrew Stevens (SC) Samuel Thornton (SO) Elisabetta Tonazzi (SE) Scott Waldon (LO) AngelaWeate (NW) MikeWilliams (WA) Rachel Williams (SW) Welcome to new members The following members were voted in at the June 2013 council meeting.Welcome to you all. ‘significant’. In that case, it is not quite ‘everything everywhere’. Surprisingly, perhaps, ‘valuing’ the historic environment in terms of identifying what people consider to be ‘significant’ is not the most difficult part of the process suggested by the NPPF. Determining heritage significance across the billions of people today might seem at first logistically impossible, as there are so many perspectives on values that need to be recognised.Yet with model algorithms now able to use twitterbased crowd-sourcing to anticipate panic or epidemics (potentially, anyway), assessing significance across a population at least seems feasible. And we can of course use historical perspectives to assess past significance and value that accordingly. But even before the aim to include ‘everything everywhere’ is undermined by the realities of policy or practice, the cultural considerations have already ended its ambition to encompass both the boundless and the timeless. Cultural values change through time. That which a culture values in one era is almost certainly not going to be valued in the same way at a different time. For example, as little as a generation ago it would have been inconceivable that mainstream heritage ‘assets’, such as a Grade I or Category A listed house, might be valued for something like ‘embodied energy’. Yet today ‘embodied energy’ it is a fundamental part of the conservation armoury, regardless of designation. So ‘significance’ changes, and if we are managing change in terms of managing significance, the one thing we can not do is anticipate the significance ascribed by future generations to their heritage. Once again the infinite historic environment affirmed by a definition is confined by the temporal: ‘Everything everywhere? Maybe, but never always’. In the end, the EE approach that the NPPF takes to the historic environment is just as time-limited as the Scottish, precisely because the values it uses to lift the definition outside time – ‘significance’ – change with time. As they can never be anticipated for the future, the future is again excluded. In each definition, just as we move beyond its apparent universality towards understanding just what it means, we are immediately confronted with the fact that any description of the historic environment as ‘everything everywhere’ should be qualified by the recognition that it is also ‘never always’. These logical problems are accompanied by further logistical problems rooted in their very attempts to purvey the EE-value-free approach, as it tries to encompass both the quotidian and the unique equally. In that open definition of the world over which management control is sought, such definitions fail to recognise the critical matter that should concern them most: describing what is to be managed is meaningless if there is no meaningful management. Even more important in such definitions, however, is that conservation, as the interface that establishes a future for the past, is barely registered. If our response to the historic environment is focused on preserving ‘evidence’, as implied in Scotland, or extracting ‘significance’, as implied in England, we are reduced to choosing between academic protectionism or abstract conceptualisation. In either case the process seems more like a personal quest than an exercise in conservation. In contrast, conservation balances what exists from the past – including, critically, both fabric and values together – with that which can contribute usefully to the future. Conservation begins not with the definition of a universal ‘everything everywhere’, but with managing the inevitable change that fabric and place are subjected to as the very hosts of value or significance. That is why the IHBC’s skills sets – our areas of competence and the underlying competences – are structured as they are, ensuring that we look forward just as much as we look back. That is why, too, the very starting point for conservation is: ‘Never always’. The IHBC’s own Areas of Competence evolved within public service conservation practice in the 1990s. But historic environment conservation had already began to leave behind the simple universal materialism suggested by time-confined ‘everything everywhere’-style definitions as early as the 19th century, not least with the ‘do-or-die’ of William Morris’s Manifesto: ‘… if it has become inconvenient for its present use… raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one… ’. More measured, and for that reason more forceful, was Sir Patrick Geddes’ genuinely comprehensive understanding of how conservation should work: ‘a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’. Responding to the ‘when?’ challenge to the ‘everything everywhere’ definition of the historic environment, Geddes responds, as does the world of conservation as a whole, more substantially and emphatically than ever, agreeing with the words: ‘Everything everywhere? Maybe, but never always’. Seán O’Reilly, [email protected]
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