Curiouser and Curiouser

Among Europe’s oldest museums, those in university towns are also among the best. University museums can be as quirky and inspiring as national museums can be pompous and dull. They can be provocative in the better sense, of teasing out a response through scholarly presentation rather than through trying to offend and overthrow. Those like Uppsala’s Gustavianum and Oxford’s Ashmolean are still true to their 17th century origins as ‘cabinets of curiosities’, sparking connections as much as reducing knowledge to order.

The Ashmolean Museum started life in London, as the personal collection of the Tradescant family, who opened it to public viewing at their home in Lambeth. Fortunately, it got away when Elias Ashmole acquired the collection and presented it to Oxford University in 1677. Since the 19th century it has been housed in an imposing classical building just off St Giles. The galleries to the rear have recently undergone a massive rebuilding that was long overdue. I remember them as a warren of tiny rooms and twisting stairs loaded with treasures like some great-aunt’s attic, difficult to access and impossible to navigate or comprehend.

Rick Mather Associates have designed a white Modernist shell around an atrium that finally allows the Museum to display its collections as it would wish, in twice the former floorspace. The theme is ‘Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time’. Galleries flow out from introductory displays that emphasise contacts through trade and migration and are stacked above one another through time, like archæological stratigraphy, culminating in a rooftop restaurant with views out over Oxford. The basement floor addresses museology itself, housing displays on the collection’s origins and on cross-cutting themes like conservation and materials. These are not new ideas – the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery in the former King’s Library offers a precedent for the basement and the National Museum of Scotland for the stratigraphy – but the overall result is a constantly engaging museum that can be read and understood at a glance.

Can it be criticised? Of course. Where did all the money come from, and why? The atrium is not just an atrium; it is the ‘Zvi and Ofra Meitar Family Atrium’, in big letters. The retreat of the public sector offers immortality to any individual or corporation with enough to allow them the pretence of being cultured. There isn’t yet a Coca-Cola Wing or a McDonalds Gallery but the writing is clearly on the wall.

The Modernist look is just too crisply impartial to be fit for purpose. In the surviving older galleries, artworks appear in the period settings in which they were meant to appear. In the new galleries, clinically white, that sense of immersion is lost. The gallery devoted to the museum’s founders would gain immensely just from plain wood panelling on the walls to restore some of it. All the old favourites are there – Powhatan’s mantle, Guy Fawkes’ lantern – but some are tucked away so obscurely as to defeat the purpose of exhibiting them at all. John Bradshaw’s hat, worn by him at the trial of Charles I and iron-reinforced as a precaution against assassins, is in a case at foot level, with no indication higher up that it would be a good idea to kneel down and look for it. Some of the decisions on lighting too are perverse, with objects flooded and their captions in the shade.

The cross-cultural emphasis starts to verge on political correctness in presenting what is in effect a merchant’s-eye view of human history, in which it is the Silk Road that matters and not the political entities along it. A history of trade is one that conceals the reality for most people throughout most of time, which is that they spent their lives largely in one place. It is a difficult balance to get right. The gallery that presents the post-Roman Mediterranean in terms of the successor civilisations around its rim – Rome, Venice, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo – is thought-provoking but it’s as well that others enable specific blocks of culture to be explored, such as ‘England 400-1600’ or ‘India from AD 600’. A lot of thought has clearly gone into how best to tell the stories the collection’s range allows to be told. Objects remain, thankfully, central. There are no stories told that cannot be illustrated, which would be a misuse of the space. Could it have been arranged better? It may be too early to say but the layout is the very best layout one would expect of 2011.

The trip to Oxford was another enterprise of the Friends of Stroud District Museum and co-incided with an exhibition of grave goods from the Macedonian royal necropolis at Aegae, modern Vergina in northern Greece. I, and others, left puzzled that more was not widely known about these discoveries, made mostly in the late 70’s and at least as important as Tutankhamun’s tomb, which was then all the rage following the 1972 London exhibition. The objects included two intricate gold wreaths to be worn as head ornaments and numerous pieces of jewellery, such as gold discs bearing the distinctive multi-rayed stars or ‘Vergina suns’ that have now become, controversially, a Macedonian national emblem. Intricately carved ivories and some very modern-looking silver vessels recalled the legendary Macedonian banquets. There were reproductions too of the wall-paintings from the tombs. Classical Greek sculpture is renowned but here was a chance to acknowledge classical Greek painting and even suggest the artists’ names. You won’t see better before the Renaissance.

The tombs excavated include those of Alexander the Great’s father and son. Here is Macedonian history that is also the history of much of the world. Alexander’s name, from the word meaning ‘to defend’, survives in various forms right across his empire, from Aléxandros in Greece to Sikander in India. The learned Wessex princess, St Margaret, born in Hungary, took it into renewed exile in Scotland, where three mediæval kings have inspired every Alastair, Alec and Sandy since. From Byzantium, the name became a favourite in Russia. It was another Alexander, the 7th Marquess of Bath, who founded the Wessex Regionalist Party. There is no better place than the Ashmolean to reflect on the ripples of history that radiate from the actions of a single will.

Dramatic Interventions

Last month I joined a trip to Warwickshire organised by the Friends of Stroud District Museum. The first stop was Compton Verney, a country house in a Capability Brown landscape and since mediæval times the ancestral pile of the Lords Willoughby de Broke. Until 1921. Years of emptiness and neglect followed before the estate was rescued by Sir Peter Moores, of the Littlewoods empire. His vision was to create an art gallery, somewhere central, in a rural setting. The result is a good use for the house, albeit with the obligatory Modernist carbuncle added on one side, though the collection inevitably feels thrown together by a quick dash round the auction rooms to pick up whatever good stuff happened to be for sale.

Many of the galleries were shut for an event, so I cannot say whether the idea works or not. One group of galleries that certainly does is devoted to folk art, mostly British, mostly 18th and 19th centuries. There are wonderfully naïve paintings of people, street scenes and prize animals, examples of quilting, and of those three-dimensional painted wooden signs that would hang outside inns and shops in a less literate age to denote the name or the trade carried on.

One of two temporary exhibitions was devoted to Stanley Spencer. The most striking contrast in Spencer’s paintings is always between the landscapes and those who sometimes inhabit them. Buildings and gardens are observed in minute detail, every shadow and reflection captured perfectly. Into these scenes, Spencer’s people and animals intrude like balloons, unbelievably comic characters that also form the inspiration for Beryl Cook’s fat ladies (as she herself acknowledged). Their transience seems magnified by the style: the only question is whether they will burst first or float away.

The second exhibition explored Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s work in the area, remodelling the landscape for a galaxy of aristocratic patrons. Or, more precisely, to quote the title, it explored his work in ‘Middle England’. Not quite Mercia but a step up from the Midlands, presumably in an attempt to appeal to the international audience.

With other galleries closed, I was lucky enough largely to have missed what was billed as a series of artistic ‘interventions’, where ‘artists’ dress up or reposition others’ works to create new ones in a bid to be ‘provocative’ and ‘surprising’. It sounds insufferably like a bunch of satirical comedians whose fount of material is drying up, leaving only giggles and sniggers to keep the audience awake until the curtain comes down. Most folk would probably call it stretching a point at best, pointless vandalism at worst, but it does seem to be a coming trend. All the more reason to shut down the arts business altogether and get these narcissistic misfits to try doing a real job.

The other stop on the tour was another intervention, architectural this time. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon is an inter-war classic, the work of Elisabeth Scott, cousin of the Scott who designed the red telephone kiosk. During the Second World War, plans were made to evacuate Parliament to Stratford in the event of invasion, the theatre housing debates and nearby Charlecote earmarked as accommodation for Mr Speaker.

The big problem with Scott’s design was that it never worked as a theatre. The acoustics were awful and attempts to cram in extra seating made it more and more uncomfortable. I sat through Coriolanus in 1981 and while I remember little of the play I do remember the experience of sitting with my knees under my chin gazing down at some tiny figures on a stage badly obscured by the proscenium arch.

At last the Scott auditorium has been scooped out and replaced by one that works. It has been done with great respect for the historic building, though patched brickwork is patched brickwork and little can conceal the fact. The new observation tower, like a long neck paying homage to the Swan of Avon, is an inspired touch. The building’s complex history is best viewed from the other side, where neo-Gothic, Art Deco, Postmodernism or the latest dash of Brick Expressionism all vie for attention. It would have been simpler to demolish and start again. Much simpler. But instead Stratford has created a textbook example of conservation in practice, showing how to ‘preserve the best and improve the rest’. Look and learn.

Holy Men, Holy Books

Minehead has three fine churches. St Peter, on the quay, was converted from a 17th century former salt store in 1910. St Andrew, in the lower town, is an elegant Victorian design by G.E. Street (left). St Michael, on the hillside (where else?), is 14th century with an elaborate 15th century tower and serves the thatched village that crawls up to meet it. One of its treasures is an oak hutch-chest, carved with heraldry and a quaint calvary, given to the church by one of its vicars, Richard Fitzjames (1440-1522). Another is the 14th century illuminated Sarum rite missal he owned. This, after many wanderings, was presented in 1949 to the church and is now displayed in an illuminable wall-safe, right next to the oak chest that still serves as a piece of furniture.

Richard Fytz Jamys – as the board of former incumbents on the wall spells it – was a remarkable churchman. His father was from Redlynch in Somerset, his mother from East Lulworth in Dorset. He and his brother founded the Free School at Bruton. He became Prebendary of Taunton, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, Rector of Aller and Vicar of Minehead, and then like other Wessex folk before him (Dunstan springs to mind) went east. He was successively bishop of Rochester, Chichester and finally London and was buried in Old St Paul’s. As Bishop of Rochester, he helped welcome Catherine of Aragon to England in 1501 for her marriage to Prince Arthur.

The Fitzjames Missal was bequeathed to his successor at St Paul’s, Cuthbert Tunstall (1474-1559), whose handwriting is probably that to be found on the last page. Here was a man whose roots lay at the opposite end of the kingdom. Tunstall is a village in north Lancashire, Cuthbert the name of Northumbria’s greatest saint, whose shrine is nothing less than Durham Cathedral. (It is recorded that St Cuthbert appeared to King Alfred in a dream, a legend recalled at Wells, where the main parish church and a paper mill both take his name.) Cuthbert Tunstall was born in Yorkshire of a Lancashire family and travelled widely before taking up his London see. Not long afterwards, he exchanged it for the more important see of Durham, also becoming the first President of the revived Council of the North.

At Durham were preserved the treasures of St Cuthbert, a unique collection of items associated with the saint, who died in 687. It is difficult to think of any other figure from so early a date who can be understood through so many personal objects. Still to be seen at Durham are his portable altar and his pectoral cross, set with garnets, and an ivory comb that may also have been Cuddy’s own. His corporax, a linen cloth used in celebrating the Eucharist, was long cherished as the Holy Banner of St Cuthbert, carried into battle against the Scots and by those pilgrims of grace in 1536 who by querying the dissolution of the northern abbeys so incurred King Henry’s wrath. A framed account in St Cuthbert’s at Wells tells of the banner’s end when Dean Whittingham’s wife, the sister of Calvin, “did most despitefully burn the robe in the fire”.

One other item survives, not in Durham but in London. What may well be St Cuthbert’s own copy of the Gospel of St John. It is a small item, pocket-sized, and not to be confused with the great Lindisfarne Gospels, made after Cuthbert’s death and in his honour, which have also found their way to the wen. The book is still in its original 7th century decorated red goatskin binding, making it the oldest intact book of European origin. And now it’s for sale.

The sellers are the Jesuits, based at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, who have owned the book since 1769. Since 1979 it has been on loan to the British Library, who are now trying to find the £9 million asking price. To raise interest among the Northumbrians, they have even conceded that they will lend the book to Durham for six months in the year. Not an ideal solution. A 1,300-year-old book deserves some rest if it’s not to deteriorate. Rest in Durham, with the rest of the treasures.

Just what does it have to do with London? And how did it get separated in the first place? Legally, or illegally? Now that digital copies can be made of all the great manuscripts, the case for gathering them together in one place has gone. It’s time to think again about context, about where such things fit as historical objects that tell a stirring tale. And that way, we may hope, subject to the right conditions for conservation and security, many, many communities will get the chance to provide their greatest past with a greater future.

Dis-traction

The West Somerset Railway is England’s longest heritage line, linking the busy resort of Minehead to the big trains at Taunton. Or almost. The track is intact to Taunton, which is how rail vehicles join and leave the WSR. But passengers have to find some other way to get to the start of the service at Bishops Lydeard (left), 6 miles north of Taunton by road. Daft. Absolutely. The WSR carries many more passengers today as a heritage line than it did under British Rail. But it could so easily be making a contribution to the real transport needs of the area. Who is responsible for this colossal lack of vision and why are they still in a job?

Back at the start of the month, I travelled on the line to Minehead, admiring the vast amount of work put in by the volunteers since the last train under BR auspices ran in 1971. Stations are themed to represent various GWR and BR period styles and a number house small museums. There’s even a Southern station at Washford – reactions from Paddington unprintable – accounted for by the presence of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust. There’ll be an opportunity for them to relocate to the real S&D in due course, naturally. Minehead was in a world of its own – the island of Sodor – as it played host to a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ day. I could have filled in my Junior Engineer’s Certificate and had it signed by the Fat Controller himself (above). But I can’t really spare the wall space.

Castles That Never Were

Last weekend I was in Wiltshire with the Glastonbury Antiquarian Society, visiting the two Wardour Castles, neither of which is a castle in the true sense of the word.

Old Wardour Castle (left) is an English Heritage property. It was built in the late 14th century as a showy fortified house rather than a fortress with real military potential; later additional comforts like larger windows made it less defensible still. Despite this it was besieged and captured in the Civil War. The owner then besieged it again in an attempt to get it back but the gunpowder went off at the wrong moment. He got his home back. Or rather, what was left of it.

The master mason at Wardour was William Wynford, who also worked on Windsor Castle and the cathedrals at Wells and Winchester. (We do do ‘W’s in Wessex.) In this case inspiration was drawn from contemporary French hexagonal castles, a fashion import that resulted from the Hundred Years War and which in this precise form is unique in Britain. The Elizabethan alterations appear to have been the work of Robert Smythson, designer of Longleat for the neighbouring Thynne family.

The owners of Wardour from the 16th century until modern times were an old Cornish family, the intensely Catholic Arundells. (Sir Humphrey Arundell was the leader of the Cornish forces in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549; Anne Arundell was the wife of Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland.) Their other estates were at Lanherne in Cornwall; my great-great-grandparents were married there in 1833, theirs being the only Catholic marriage among my recent ancestors. Wardour, like Lanherne, was an estate populated by Catholics, following the example of the squire. On a small scale, cuius regio, eius religio. By the late 18th century, this part of Wiltshire was reported to have the largest Catholic population outside London.

At the Dissolution, Sir Thomas Arundell obtained several of the estates of Shaftesbury Abbey, possibly to hold in trust for a restoration of the old order that never came. In 1873, the family owned about 182 acres (plus manorial rights) in Cornwall and 6,037 in Wiltshire. After the destruction of Old Wardour Castle they had settled nearby at Breamore in Hampshire, before returning in the 18th century to build the ‘new’ Wardour Castle, a severe Palladian mansion with grounds by ‘Capability’ Brown. In fact, a most unlikely building to which to give the name of ‘Wardour Castle’. The choice reveals a traditionalism that runs very deep.

The house is now flats but its chapel in the west wing survives in all its finery. It was designed by James Paine and extended by the young John (later Sir John) Soane (after whom the extraordinary London museum is named). The multi-marbled altar (left) was designed by Giacomo Quarenghi, who later worked on St Petersburg for Catherine the Great. The sarcophagus enclosed by the altar contains bones from the Roman catacombs. These were a gift to the Arundells from Pope Alexander VII, rather unconvincingly identified as those of the martyrs Primus and Secundus. The whole edifice is a reminder that while Catholicism was frowned upon in 18th century Britain, and its adherents subjected to a wide range of disabilities, it was far from being actively persecuted. Indeed, in 1780 the Gordon Riots occurred in London in protest against increased leniency. The date falls between Paine’s work at Wardour and Soane’s.

The chapel possesses an exceptional collection of vestments, including the so-called Westminster Chasuble (left), parts of which are 15th century Flemish work and bear the arms of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (encircled with the collar of the Golden Fleece) and those of his wife, Margaret of York. The couple were married at Westminster Abbey in 1468 by Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury and the original chasuble is thought to have been their gift to the Abbey.

Other features are later ornamentation – the lily of France, the Tudor rose, the portcullis of the Beauforts and, giving the date away, the pomegranate, the badge of Catherine of Aragon. The word ‘pomegranate’ comes from the Latin for ‘seeded apple’ but the fruit was also used as a heraldic pun, the ‘apple of Granada’ and appears today in the royal arms of Spain. In Greek myth, the pomegranate is a symbol of the indissolubility of marriage. With that precedent held in mind, that Catherine was never going to leave quietly.

Glastonbury Rediscovered

Post-excavation reporting is the Achilles’ heel of archæology. While the data recovered remain in private hands, or inside the diggers’ brains, the risk of loss is such that you might wish it had all been left in the ground for later. When Dr C.A. Ralegh Radford excavated Tintagel in the 1930's, he made careful notes but most were destroyed, still unpublished, in the Exeter blitz. After the war, he led several seasons of digging at Glastonbury Abbey but was still writing-up his findings in his nineties and died in 1999 with the work unfinished.

Fortunately, the papers were rescued for the National Monuments Record in Swindon and are now the subject of a trans-Wessex research project led by Reading University that will see the report published at last and placed on-line for all to view. Last week, the Abbey trustees hosted a symposium to report on progress. Experts gave guided tours of the ruins before those attending – several hundred people – crammed in to the Town Hall to be treated to presentations both scholarly and entertaining.

Sorting out the mess left by the 20th century diggers is only one part of the project. Complementary studies are also underway that will enable future excavations to be far more focused in their objectives. A surprising amount can be learnt from the stones themselves, both standing and fallen. Geology reveals economic relations with specific quarries, sculptural style links with other areas, while unexpected changes of pattern in the masonry can enable distinct campaigns of building to be highlighted. The pottery finds – tens of thousands of fragments – have been analysed and dated, some to the Roman/Saxon transition and earlier. Where the products of known kilns across the region can be identified, it is possible to reconstruct and map Glastonbury’s bulk-buying policies through the centuries leading up to dissolution.

Glastonbury is a geophysicist’s nightmare, with layer upon layer of building and rebuilding, punctuated with inaccessible areas where trees get in the way or ferrous objects like the visitor information plaques cast magnetic ‘shadows’ up to 7 metres wide. The best results from the recent survey are therefore obtainable away from the abbey church and among the domestic quarters. Some clearly indicate the ghostly outlines of features previously unsuspected and which will give plenty of food for thought for generations to come.

It is to be hoped that this project will mark the beginning and not the end of research into this precious and complex site. If so, then Glastonbury may acquire a reputation for serious scholarship to match its more dubious association with ‘New Age’ fantasy.

Aldhelm in South Dorset

This year’s Wessex Society tour, led by Jim Gunter, was of sites on the Isle of Purbeck and took place on 22nd May, the Sunday before St Aldhelm’s Day. It began at Wareham, a burial place of Wessex kings and one of the towns fortified by Alfred against the Danes. The earthen ramparts (left) remain spectacular, even after a thousand years of erosion. An 1897 guide to the town described them as “a relic unique in the kingdom, and of which the town is justly proud”. The same booklet says of Wareham that “lately it is becoming more appreciated by those who have retired from business and are looking for a healthy spot with good communication to London in which to settle down”. Nothing new there then.

Two churches claim to be the one founded here by Aldhelm. Lady St Mary is the town’s largest church, with some surviving features of Saxon date within, but it was closed for repairs. The ‘Lady’ prefix is thought to be unique. St Martin-on-the-Wall (left) dates from about 1020. Today, perhaps rather incongruously, it is most famous for housing Eric Kennington’s stone effigy of Lawrence of Arabia, who is buried at Moreton. The effigy ended up here after St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral had all rejected it. It had to go somewhere.

Lunch was at the Bankes Arms at Corfe Castle, named after the family who defended the castle against Parliament in 1646. Defeated, Lady Bankes got to keep the castle keys, which are preserved to this day at the family’s later home, Kingston Lacy, near Wimborne, where they are hung on the wall in the library.

Corfe Castle itself was not on the programme, though the beer garden provided an excellent view of the ruins (above) and of the steam traction on the Swanage Railway. The village has an unusual memorial (below) to King Edward the Martyr, murdered here in 978 by his step-mother. (And so the throne passed to her son, Ethelred, ready or not, and things were never so good again.)

Thence to the idyllic village of Worth Matravers, from where we walked to St Aldhelm’s Head. The chapel here (below) is Norman and may have replaced an earlier building. Oddly for a chapel, it is the angles, not the walls, that are oriented to the cardinal points. The walls are 7.77 metres long. Now I know that Aldhelm was very keen on the number seven, but to get the figures right in the metric system a thousand years before its invention is a pretty clever trick.

The chapel is St Aldhelm’s, and so, locally, is the headland. There is a St Aldhelm’s Quarry along the way. The coastal lookout thinks itself to be at “St Alban’s Head”, the name which Admiralty charts and those ignorant of Aldhelm have used for centuries, substituting for the truth a better-known Roman legionary martyred in 304. We look forward to the maritime authorities correcting this error, one that is now widespread but an error nonetheless. Some simple leadership from the top would get it sorted. (And then we might think about spelling it ‘St Ealdhelm’, as they do in Sherborne.)

The chapel, the coastal lookout and one-time coastguard cottages stand in a remote and very windswept spot about 3 miles from the village. Having followed a signpost that said it was 1½ miles, we eventually came to another telling us it was still 1½ miles. It does seem we can be imprecise about these things in Wessex. At other times, precision matters; the headland is home to a monument recording its pioneering role in radar research early in the Second World War. All trace of that presence has now gone, leaving the headland to nature and to history.

Purbeck is not in fact an island but a peninsula, crossed by a ridge with one broad gap in which stands the rocky stopper on which Corfe Castle is built. Returning from the coast the view of Corfe is one of the most dramatic in Wessex, but dangerous to photograph if you happen to be at the wheel. You’ll just have to experience it for yourself.

Landscapes of Power

In Wales’ 1000 Best Heritage Sites, Terry Breverton records that, in the 1980’s, the so-called ‘Roman Well’ at Barry Island was built over without proper excavation and then, in the 1990’s, the site of St Baruc’s Holy Well also disappeared under a modern housing estate. Wales has more castles per square mile than anywhere else in the world, he tells us. In the 19th century it also had the largest number of places of worship in the world, per head of population. And on the basis of Barry and Newport, I think Wales today can claim the highest proportion of philistines too.

It was rather different in the years around the First World War. Major Edgar Jones, the headmaster of Barry County School from 1899 to 1933, was an enthusiastic antiquarian with a special interest in the Tinkinswood Burial Chamber, which stands at the top of a field to the north of Barry and west of Cardiff. Excavated in 1914, Tinkinswood is a Neolithic burial chamber of the ‘Cotswold-Severn’ type, surrounded by other features of the period. The excavators found the remains of at least 50 people within. The massive capstone weighs around 40 tons and may be the largest in Europe. And it pre-dates Stonehenge by 1,000 years.

Major Jones passed on his enthusiasm for Tinkinswood to my father, one of his pupils. (Professor Glyn Daniel was another; so too was Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans.) As a youngster I was taken to see the site and this month I was back for a second glance. My mother could never remember the name and would refer to it as ‘Tinkerbell’s Tomb’. (The real origin of the name appears to be ‘Tinker’s Wood’, which is how it was known until the 1940’s.)

Graffiti show that the site is popular with ‘pagans’. Or, to put it bluntly, silly children who sit around making up stories about the prehistoric and getting angry with those who prefer a less lazy approach, like looking logically at the data. I can’t forget the picture I once saw, done in psychedelic colours, of a flying saucer arriving at the Rollright Stones. At least the ‘pagans’ can learn. Others appear incapable. Officialdom could maybe win more friends by not placing a pylon in the very next field. Is it meant to be a dramatic contrast? Post-modern irony? Or just sheer incompetence?

On down the road is Duffryn House, built in the 1890’s for the Cory family (coal and shipping, when such things were at their height). Vale of Glamorgan Council owns it now, and prefers to spell it ‘Dyffryn’. The house features a vast entrance hall with a stained glass window showing Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury. It is also famous for its gigantic chimneypieces, antiques that maybe came from the continent. First impressions demand a caption. Something like ‘Trains for Budapest depart from Platform…’? The gardens are open to the public but the house is used for conferences and there is no other way inside. The gardens are magnificent, but Hamlet without the prince.

The gardens were more magnificent still but maintenance has been neglected and lottery money is only now restoring their former glory. Dyffryn Gardens have a little of everything: an arboretum, a rockery, a croquet lawn, fountains, and a series of outdoor ‘rooms’, which pre-date the better-known examples at Hidcote and Sissinghurst. It all cost money and it all costs money. So what to do about that?

The Right will tell you not to bother yourself over the destruction of heritage; the next generation of robber barons will always produce something better. Or fool itself that that is what it’s doing, as long as the architect says so. The Left will defend heritage only if it is drained of authentic meaning and smothered in politically correct goo instead, and will also insist on adding to it, pointless palaces of culture and the like that create work for work’s sake. The East of England Regional Development Agency provided us with a prime example of such architectural exhibitionism in its completely freeform competition to find “a visionary plan for a landmark, or series of landmarks”, “an icon that will foster a sense of identity for the region as a whole”, which would be “a fantastic opportunity for us to come together as a region and decide how to present ourselves to the rest of the world”. Ozymandias no doubt thought the same. How’s that £2 million giant horse in Kent coming along? Maybe some giant droppings could be included?

A resource-constrained future will have to make choices. My guess is that it will continue to make the wrong ones. It will be keeping the tepid bathwater and throwing out the treasured baby, because nothing gives greater offence to the untalented than the persistent evidence of unapproachable genius. What is really needed is a moratorium on the new, or more especially on the outrageously, expensively new, on gesture art. ‘Progress’ was meant to rid us of spoilt egos casting their power and wealth in all directions in a riot of supremely detached uselessness. The conservation world has more than enough to be getting on with, without the 21st century adding its own grands projets to the burden. Tread lightly on the earth, and think responsibly, not least of the grandchildren’s fast-emptying pockets.

Mercia’s Mansion of Marvels

Charlecote Park, near Stratford, its front garden tumbling down to the Avon, tries hard not to be the average National Trust house. The deer park is marked by a wooden fence built to a mediæval design (left). The varying verticals make it impossible for deer to judge the true height of the fence and so whether it is safe to jump. Simple but effective. The deer have a special place in Charlecote’s history; young Will Shakespeare is alleged to have been caught poaching one and to have been tried on the premises by the unsympathetic owner, Sir Thomas Lucy, J.P. It's a plausible tale. Who else could be the inspiration for Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor? And for the words of King Lear, ‘change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’

The Lucy ancestry marches round the ground floor windows in heraldic stained glass, tracing the family’s descent from the Royal House of Wessex. The glass is 19th century, as is much of the Tudor-looking house. Yes, it’s a fake but it looks great. Rather better in fact than today’s warmed-up neo-Modernism, pretending to be a 1960’s copy of a 1920’s idea but still somehow ‘contemporary’. The best fakers are honest about it. Charlecote does indeed have its Victorian date stones set in the mellow red brickwork. Stables and coach houses (below) have the look of engine sheds on the railways. And which inspired which?

At the foot of the stairs, a case displays the summons of Richard Lucy to Barebone's Parliament in 1653. It is signed by Oliver Cromwell. Of anything so vulgar and unnecessary as an election there is no mention. In the antlered Great Hall, one of the genuinely Tudor rooms, stands the vast pietre dure table that once graced King Edward’s Gallery in Fonthill Abbey, William Beckford’s jerry-built jewel box in Wiltshire. Beckford commissioned the wooden base for the table top, which he acquired in France, brought there from the Borghese Palace in Rome by Napoleon Bonaparte. Other furniture and objets d’art from Beckford’s collection are to be found in other rooms. Whose taste today, I wonder, will set the standard for houses that come to the Trust in 200 years time? The ageing rock star, or the footballer’s wife? Obviously not the business tycoon, not in the first generation. Too busy making the money to buy any posh tat.

Almost the only purchase I made was in the second-hand bookshop. Here I could pick up a copy of The Birmingham Post Year Book and Who’s Who 1958-59. I have been collecting almanacks of various kinds for over 30 years, with back issues reaching into Queen Vic’s reign. Each is a treasure trove of information on how things really were. Not the smooth generalisations of journalists and agenda-pushing historians. Just the unself-conscious nuts and bolts of who did what and what was essential to know.

A year book like Birmingham’s reveals a world poised to leap from 50’s austerity into the environmental exterminism of the 60’s. In a special article, Sir Herbert Manzoni, City Engineer & Surveyor, enthuses over plans for comprehensive redevelopment of 2½ square miles of property as the inner and middle ring roads are rolled-out. His authority, Birmingham Corporation, proudly listing in detail its civic plate, is organised into over 30 committees of aldermen and councillors, managing everything from its smallholdings in Staffordshire to its waterworks in Wales. Birmingham was the only municipality to run its own savings bank. About the only thing it didn’t run was the telephone network. Hull Corporation even managed that, with cream-coloured kiosks in place of Post Office red.

It may have been a world still grinding along in the grooves of war, unquestioning in its obedience, armed to the teeth for Armageddon. And as predictable as clockwork, with big cogs and little cogs allotted their turns. But a dip into how it used to be done, this interlocking, self-supporting sense of community, rooted in local identity, can reveal just how far we have allowed our collective mainspring to unwind.

The Pearl of Flanders

St Pancras (left) was built for trains to Mercia and Northumbria, not for those going the other way. Sandwiched between Euston and King’s Cross, it offers continentals easy connections to the most parts, though Wessex understandably comes off worse. Barlow’s red bricks, white mortar and sky blue roof provide a thrilling front door to modern Britain.

The Gare de Lille-Europe is another story, a steel and concrete cave of desolation that could double as a film-set for 1984. Only the rats are missing. The cult of maniacal ugliness that began with Le Corbusier is thriving in France. It is propelled into the future through being taught as dogma in schools of architecture worldwide. But what of its past? Where does it come from, this notion that humanity has ‘done’ beauty and cannot be allowed to return to it?

The best antidote is a weekend in Bruges, where horrors do exist but are mercifully few. Belgium is as British as it can be without ceasing to be Belgian. It has pubs. And chips. Red pillar boxes. Quirky eccentricities. Tintin. Considering how many times the map of Europe has been redrawn, we in Britain may think that our institutions of State provide us with an unequalled continuity. In fact, in many parts of the continent, that continuity is provided by other, local traditions that we have neglected. Bruges, with its almshouses and ancient fraternities, can be reminiscent of Salisbury or Winchester, though like both it faces a constant battle against developers and modernisers. I suspect that its guilds and processions do have more life in them than ours and are not maintained just for the tourists.

One of the fraternities is the Noble Brotherhood of the Holy Blood, formed to protect and promote a relic, supposedly of the blood of Jesus, brought back from the Crusades. The relic rests in a rock crystal container, inside a gold and glass one dated 1388, inside an ornate shrine, in an upstairs chapel next to the Town Hall. There are very few places in England where it is possible to get as close to the Middle Ages as this, even if the gilded bronze statues outside (above) were made in 1893. The relic has been well-guarded, surviving the Calvinists, the Jacobins and two world wars.

Wessex had its own such relic, the Holy Blood of Hayles, a gift to Hayles Abbey near Winchcombe from Edmund, the son of its founder, Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans. Edmund had bought it from the Count of Holland, complete with certificate of authenticity. Come the Reformation, the relic did not even outlast the abbey. It was suspected that the blood was actually that of a duck, regularly renewed. The offending piece of quackery was taken to London in 1539 and examination concluded that it was “honey clarified and coloured with saffron”. It was then burnt at Paul’s Cross after a suitably fiery sermon against idolatry.

On BBC4 in 2008, Jonathan Meades presented ‘Magnetic North’, a brilliant evocation of that seaboard region stretching from the northern tip of France to wrap around the shores of the Baltic, taking in all those cities so influenced by the trading links of the Hansa. Look at the stepped gables, the canalside warehouses, the market squares and pinnacled public buildings, towering above all the Gothic in soaring brick and try to guess the country. Not a chance. This is generic northern European, as ubiquitous as the herring.

The wealth of Flanders came from woollen cloth, a fact not lost on Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who founded the Order of the Golden Fleece at Bruges in 1430. Two of the city’s many churches – mostly the size of small cathedrals – were venues for later meetings of the knights during that century. In both cases the event was marked by placing above the choir stalls painted boards bearing their coats of arms. Those of King Edward IV – France’s lilies quartered with England’s lions – are included. Edward’s host at his installation was Louis de Gruuthuse, known as Lewis de Bruges, whom the king made Earl of Winchester for his troubles.

More ancestral heraldry is to be found on the tombs of Charles the Bold, the last of the Dukes, and his daughter Mary of Burgundy, in the Church of Our Lady (left). Mary’s step-mother was Margaret of York, sister of that Edward IV. William Caxton was Margaret’s secretary. Burgundian trade depended on good relations with England, relations that King Louis XI of France did all he could to poison, including undermining Edward's credit with the international bankers in a bid to render him unable to fund Margaret's dowry. Clearly, Edward could have done with that treasure chest from Passport to Pimlico.

Our Lady’s Church was founded to house relics of St Boniface, one of the most successful of Wessex exports, whose silver reliquary is displayed in the choir. Others with Wessex connections followed him to Bruges, including his niece St Walburga (745); Emma, the widow of King Cnut (1037-40); Gunhilda, the sister of King Harold (1067-87); John Wycliffe (1374); the exiled King Charles II (1656-59); and the Bristolian poet Robert Southey (1816). And so should everyone who wishes to see Europe at its best.

Brum: a Gem

The Birmingham back-to-backs – Court 15, Inge Street to give them their proper name – are one of the more unusual properties of the National Trust. They are among the few survivors of a type of cheap housing once common in the industrial cities of Mercia and Northumbria. Spruced up by the Trust and furnished to show life in the 1840’s, 1870’s, 1930’s and 1970’s, they appear today as a cosy close just a short walk from the Bull Ring. Originally part of a larger court, when they were home to families with 10 children all sharing the rudimentary sanitation they would have been a much less attractive place. Imagination strains to grasp a reality still within living memory but which is fading fast. Conservation cannot simply convey the prettier parts of the past: critics who would have eradicated every last slum must learn to leave something behind to explain what all the fuss was about.

Normally, visiting is by guided tour but yesterday the back-to-backs were having an open day, themed on the Second World War, complete with Vera Lynn on the concealed CD player, bunting, and ration books, to use at the temporary canteen in the courtyard and the sweet shop on the corner. Court 15 was originally part of the city’s Jewish district and is now in the midst of Chinatown, surrounded by modern office blocks, covered car parks and numerous Chinese restaurants. The last tenant before restoration, a bespoke tailor who shut up shop in 2002, came from the Caribbean and his shop is preserved as he knew it.

Uphill lies Birmingham’s forum, the swirling paving of Victoria Square and Chamberlain Square, dominated by the Town Hall and the Council House, and round the side the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. The ensemble remains as exuberant an expression of civic pride as any and puts to shame the modern efforts that embrace and attempt pitifully to compete with it. Here can be seen some of the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including those of Birmingham boy Edward Burne-Jones. Today’s brotherhood and sisterhood of daubers, flickers and makers of unmade beds could usefully look and learn. One small painting in the collection shows a fairy-tale image of Sleep, trailing poppies through the sky, symbols of narcotic oblivion. It was painted in 1912, just before the conflict that turned the poppies of Flanders into a symbol of monumental stupidity. It's a fascinating reminder both of the role played by drugs in Victorian and Edwardian society and of how one generation's perceptions mould another's in ways neither expects to find. It was most likely the chaos of a much earlier war that gave rise to the Staffordshire Hoard, many pieces from which were on display. They are surprisingly, even disappointingly, tiny. Many are scraps of gold and garnet no more than an inch long. Most images show them magnified hugely to bring out the intricate detail. Clearly, the painstaking skill of the craftsmen must have been matched by piercingly good eyesight.

The Inscription Stone in the foyer, unveiled by Richard Chamberlain, Mayor, in 1881 describes the building’s purposes as ‘the Free Public Art Gallery and the Offices of the Corporation Gas Department’. Beneath is the motto, By the gains of Industry we promote Art. Taken together, those two lines encapsulate the public enterprise of late Victorian Birmingham. Gas-and-water socialism long pre-dated the Labour Party. It was the work of Liberal administrations dominated by business men, investing for the ratepayers in municipal monopolies that made money, money that was ploughed back into the development of services or used to lower charges to the barest minimum.

By 1890, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine was describing Birmingham as “the best governed city in the world”. By 1990 there was little left to show for all that effort. Last week, Labour’s Lord Adonis told the Lunar Society that Birmingham needs an elected mayor to drive forward the privatisation of the city’s schools, and no doubt other elements of the common wealth too. It was a Wolverhampton MP, Enoch Powell, who declared in 1964 that “In the end, the Labour Party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that.” Like him or loathe him, the unintended accuracy of Powell’s predictive powers is unfailingly unnerving. Historians can look forward to much fun discovering who sold Labour out. And how much they got for it.

The rooms at BM&AG that tell the city’s story are closed for redevelopment but the story is also told at another attraction – Thinktank, the Birmingham science museum – on the opposite side of the city centre. Thinktank is part of Millennium Point, one of those nationally-funded regeneration schemes to mark the turn of the century, a clone in fact of At-Bristol. The business model is broadly the same – futuristic architecture, planetarium, IMAX cinema, hands-on science for kids – and though Birmingham’s has fared better than Bristol’s both are depressingly formulaic.

The ground floor of Thinktank re-houses the old Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry and if that’s all you’ve come to see it’s not much to justify the admission charge of £12.25 per adult. It’s not much to justify the huge public investment either. Large exhibits are crammed into tiny spaces that no zoo would tolerate, and which school parties must find infuriating. James Watt’s Smethwick Engine of 1779 – the oldest working steam engine in the world – needs to be in a replica engine house beside a canal for its function to be truly understood. Instead it stands in a frame of girders packed in by other devices and displays. The LMS locomotive City of Birmingham gazes forlornly out of its glass box towards the listed Curzon Street station building (below).

This, the ‘other end’ of the Euston Arch, is itself now marooned in a swathe of land awaiting redevelopment around it. Curzon Street is planned to be the terminus of High Speed Two, a £32 billion project propelling the rich to and from London, pointless at a time when re-opening old lines should take priority. On arrival in Birmingham, passengers will have a half-mile walk to the chronically congested New Street station for their onward journeys, but £400 million has already been committed to a cosmetic redevelopment of New Street that will provide no additional capacity for trains. Far-sighted proposals for a 'Birmingham Grand Central' at Curzon Street have been spiked by city councillors, minding the interests of that same class of penny-pinching, myopic shopkeepers who once stood in Joseph Chamberlain's way. For Adonis, Birmingham is a city living in the past. Perhaps it is. But just now that seems a better place to look for inspiration than among the pygmy politicians of the present day.

Tides of the March

This morning I was at Blaise Castle House Museum in Bristol, a neo-classical mansion set in a splendid park by Humphry Repton, not far from Blaise Hamlet, the famous Regency assortment of mock-rustic cottages. Bristol’s museums are still run by Bristol, in contrast to many places where the assembled evidence of a common identity is no longer seen as anything to do with the expression of a common voice and will.

One room is hung with pictures, mostly landscapes, including several early 19th century views of Bristol by W.J. Müller. They repay close study, identifying the still-familiar landmarks. There’s the cathedral; there’s the Arnolfini; St. Peter’s, St. Mary-le-Port, Temple Church. St. Mary Redcliffe, before the spire was finished off.

My reason for being there was a talk by Toby Jones, the man from Oregon, in charge of conserving the Newport Mediæval Ship. A story he knows well and tells compellingly. Older than the Vasa, older than the Mary Rose, this is Wales’ own triumph of maritime archæology. She remains nameless but dates from the mid-15th century, a time from which shipping records start to survive and so research is continuing. Warwick the Kingmaker, no less, is thought to have owned such a ship and to have sent her to Newport for repairs. The dendrochronology is clear that she was not originally from the Bristol Channel area; there is some evidence she may have been built at Bayonne in Aquitaine.

Pulled up a pill beside the River Usk, she slipped into the mud and stayed there until 2002, eventually seven metres below ground level. Newport City Council has now built a theatre and arts centre on the site. It was in the final stages of rescue archæology during those building works that the ship was discovered. And nearly lost. Worried about rising costs, the Council thought of abandoning her. Protesters held a vigil on site until minds were changed. The ship was to be excavated and recorded but not preserved. At last the Welsh Assembly Government stepped in with the funds to enable her to be lifted and for conservation work to begin.

Here some practical issues intervened. The concrete piles for the building had already been driven, 13 of them through the ship, nailing her to the bedrock. Lifting her whole being impossible, the only option left was to disassemble her, sawing through countless oak pegs swollen for five centuries. Still digging its heels in, the Council refused to excavate the stern as too difficult a job. Building a “cultural” centre that requires the loss of real, irreplaceable culture is the sort of thing one expects of such folk. Spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar.

Now the task for conservators is to put back together again the 95% of the surviving timbers recovered – all 1,700 of them. Newport, the council who also managed to demolish half their castle for a road junction and now also deny the public access to the rest, seem at last to be waking up to the huge tourism asset they have done their best to destroy. Should she have taken them by surprise? Core samples were taken ahead of piling – the proof is visible on the ship – and cores with huge quantities of oak in them should have alerted somebody. Surely the Taffia could not have had a hand in maintaining the silence? Honourable men, in Newport, all honourable men…

Spa Gazy

My mother recalls when Cheltenham was home to retired Indian Army officers and colonial civil servants. Sikh attendants in turbans. Ayahs wheeling perambulators. Connaught Place, New Delhi, dropped into colder climes.

Connaught Place has been spruced up, for the Commonwealth Games last year, after decades of post-imperial decline. Cheltenham remains shabby. No-one seems that bothered to uphold good taste in its environment. It lacks the badge of World Heritage status that keeps Bath finely balanced between commerce and conservation. Commerce has not had everything entirely its own way; much of central Cheltenham was designated a Conservation Area in 1973 but sadly the horse had already bolted. The concrete cage of the Quadrangle sits brooding on one corner of Imperial Square, while across it the 13 storeys of the Eagle Star building loom over the rooftops like the uncouth guest at a wedding. Among the cream-painted, grey-slated villas and terraces festooned with ironwork, modern blocks of flats poke up like weeds in a once-elegant border. The insensitivities of one generation will take centuries to mend.

In places, small-scale mistakes are being undone. One terrace (left) is a mixture of genuine Georgian and recent replica. One of the tallest houses was the home of Dr Edward Jenner, the pioneer of vaccination, stupidly demolished in 1969 and rebuilt 25 years later. The block to its right carries the date ‘2008’. If it has the advocates of brutal minimalism crying into their beer, so much the better.

What is ‘contemporary’ architecture? Any architecture that happens now, whatever its derivation. Never to copy is never to learn. To see the Strozzi Palace for real it is necessary to go to Florence. Cheltenham has its own (left), a copy in smooth industrial brick that dates from 1900 and started life as an electricity sub-station. It could have been so much less charming.

Regency Cheltenham is overlain on an older town with a mediæval, monastic past. Around the parish church, tall narrow buildings (left) hint at ancient burgage plots. A painting in the town’s museum shows it with timber-framed houses and a coaching inn (long before it became the 20th century’s great coaching interchange). Today's conjunction is a curious one: the orderly regularity of the neo-classical dictates the proportions of windows, doors and roof-lines, yet the buildings must conform to plots defined by the winding back lanes of an Anglo-Saxon ham. Such fragments of townscape are tiny in the context of the town but they need to be treasured. Is it too much to ask that where they have been lost a far-sighted council might make plans to put them back – as an education for architects and a delight for the eye?

Lucre for Lucifer

Driving home from Yorkshire yesterday, I listened to Sir Ronald Cohen explaining the Big Society to Eddie Mair. The idea is one he claimed to have invented, long before it occurred to the war crimes suspect in Number 10. The banks, dear things, are going to be funding most of it, for one obvious reason. The State is maxed out on its credit card. So too are businesses and individuals. That only leaves the voluntary sector to be dragged into the mire of debt.

York’s heritage is cared for by a plethora of voluntary organisations. There is the York Civic Trust, sponsors of those elegant enamelled plaques (left) that adorn historic buildings. There is the York Conservation Trust, whose ownership of many historic properties in the shopping streets protects them from unthinking alteration in the name of commercial progress. There is also the York Museums Trust, latest addition to the constellation, which now manages the municipal attractions.

The idea that councils should divest themselves of museums and galleries, libraries and archives, is gathering pace. For much of the 20th century the trend was the other way. The council as the representative body of the community was considered a safe pair of hands, in much the same way that the parish church has served as the obvious repository for a village’s collective past. The tide started to flow the other way with the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986. Now more and more we inhabit a post-democratic world where shadowy boards of trustees do deals with private philanthropists, whose very existence is a measure of the growing inequalities of wealth.

The war crimes suspect would have us believe that getting the State into debt is bad but getting volunteers into debt is not. Which is unsurprising. Social innovation is a fancy term for dreaming up ever more fiendish ways to extract surplus value. The core contradiction of capitalism is that wages must be kept down to protect profits but incomes must be kept up to fuel the profitable consumption of goods and services. Debt fills the gap.

Debt in turn is a source of profit for those endowed with the mathematical skills to manage it, society willing. Society usually is, even when the calculations go pear-shaped. Occasionally, folk are bright enough to see through the veil and the money-lenders are then punished, for being too clever by half.

One such reaction occurred in York in 1190 when the city’s Jews became the victims of a pogrom. Having taken refuge in the castle (today’s building, left, is later), they all ended up dead, some murdered by the besiegers, most dying in a suicide pact, an English Masada.

Europe’s Jews were hated as usurers but indispensable for that same reason. In the later Middle Ages, others got in on the act, initially by finding ways round the Christian prohibition on usury. Lenders first made money not through the charging of interest but through the manipulation of exchange rates. Out of their profits, the Italian bankers funded some of the world’s greatest art. What we do not see is the other side of the account, the suffering of those through the centuries whose lives have been ground down by debt. Often as not, and as now, the result of deliberate government policy.

Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Hun

"Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)

Coventry was a convenient point at which to break the journey home from Yorkshire. A pagan-inclined person might see in its name the tree at which the coven met. Scholars prefer to make up a man named Cofa, genitive Cofan. What is not in dispute is that at the city’s heart is a hill, one so sacred that the Christians built a church there in the name of St Michael the Archangel and all his heavenly host. They were taking no chances. Appropriately enough, St Michael is now an unofficial patron saint of the Royal Air Force.

The latest St Michael’s is the post-war cathedral designed by Sir Basil Spence, its portico reaching out to the ruins of its gutted Gothic predecessor. Coventry was mediæval England’s fourth largest city, after London, Bristol and York. The devastation of war has diminished but by no means extinguished its appeal. Alas, it is not the devastation of war alone that has created the modern city.

Every time I visit Coventry I discover another piece of the bigger picture. Last time, I visited its museum, into which many gorgeous relics of its past are gathered, relics that tell of a very different city from that which now exists. Here I learnt that when the Labour Party first took control of Coventry Corporation in the 1930’s it began to draw up plans for comprehensive redevelopment. Adolf Hitler was philosophical about RAF raids on Berlin, noting that they would ease the job of rebuilding, bigger and better, once the war was won. For Coventry councillors too there was no cloud without a silver lining.

So much of central Coventry is new that the easiest assumption is always to blame the bombs. It ain’t necessarily so. The guidebook to Coventry Cathedral includes two shots of the area to its east, as they were before the old streets were flattened in the 1960’s to build what is now Coventry University. It would be most instructive to take a map of pre-war Coventry, to mark on it (a) the buildings and streets that survive; (b) those destroyed by the Luftwaffe; and (c) those destroyed by Coventrians themselves; then to total the numbers and areas for each. Similarly instructive maps can be drawn up for Exeter, Plymouth and Swansea, to mention only those cities with which I am most familiar and which are most haunted by the memory of the Blitz.

The loss of life in all these places – tiny as it was compared to the torrential fire rained down on German cities – is what remains worthy of memory. Coventry does it subtly, with the tomb of the Unknown Civilian nestling, barely noticed, in the shadow of the old cathedral. As to the destruction of property, it is time for a more honest account of who did what to whom, and when and why, and what was lost and gained in the process. Coventrians and their politicians may elicit less sympathy when the full story has been told.

Northumbria’s Capital

A weekend away. In Yorkshire. My association with York goes back to a holiday in 1975 and when I lived up north I visited many times, twice as a member of the Yorkshire Ridings Society. Every year on Yorkshire Day – the first of August – members walk the city walls to read out at each of the mediæval gates or Bars a declaration that the historic Yorkshire and its Ridings continue to exist, whatever folk in London may decree to the contrary. The Yorkshire Declaration of Integrity is read four times at each Bar, in each of Yorkshire’s ruling languages down the centuries – Latin, Old English, Old Norse and modern English. Norman-French is missing, but no-one wants to talk about the Harrying of the North. The readings take place first outside Micklegate Bar, to the West Riding, then Bootham Bar to the North Riding, inside the walls at Monk Bar to the City & Ainsty, finishing beside Walmgate Bar with an address to the East Riding (except that now a further reading takes place in the city centre). The ceremony began in 1977, the 1100th anniversary of Yorkshire’s formation by the Vikings, and each year it starts one minute later to mark the onward march of time. So much imagination crammed into one expression of pride of place must be without equal. It would be good to see others try.

York does imagination. Its four major mediæval Bars now have five big siblings, the park-and-ride sites around the outer ring road that mark the modern points of arrival – Askham Bar, Grimston Bar and Rawcliffe Bar, plus two more with longer names that lack the Bar label. Masterpieces of modern design they are not but they are the product of careful thought nonetheless. The car park at Askham Bar is shared with a supermarket and a day nursery and with proper foresight is sited next to the East Coast Main Line. Trains in the livery of Northern Rail whizz by, a glorious provocation both to those who would have all trains run from London and to those whose imaginative powers fall short of visualising Northumbria Restituta.

One of the city centre’s most delightful spots is Holy Trinity, Goodramgate, its leafy churchyard surrounded by the old high brick walls of buildings that front onto busy shopping streets. One such wall is formed by Our Lady Row, a terrace of timber-framed properties dating from 1316, their upper floors jettied over the pavement of Goodramgate. Inside the church, now redundant, are mediæval stained glass (above) and a fleet of Georgian box pews, bobbing on uneven floors. Every city needs somewhere like this. It makes a refreshing change from the usual litany of granite benches, concrete spheres and ill-placed fountains.

And so to the Minster (left). Rehearsals for a rock concert were underway. ‘Spawn of Satan’ or some such band. During the war, the glass was taken out of the windows in case it was shattered by blast. It might have been a wise precaution on Saturday, judging by the volume. High on the nave ceiling was pointed out to me the roof boss depicting the Ascension: the soles of two feet disappearing into a cloud. Easy for some. For mere mortals, there was no escape from the power of the amps, even below ground. And below ground is the most interesting part of the Minster.

The Undercroft is the result of engineering works 40 years ago to stabilise the tower. Winding its way between the concrete plinths run through with reinforcing rods is an archæological trail reaching back to the Roman headquarters building where Constantine was proclaimed emperor in 306. I remember when the Undercroft was new and I remember the impression it made upon me. Continental equivalents are numerous. Notre Dame and St Denis at Paris, the Duomo at Florence and the Vatican at Rome all attempt the same presentation of the history beneath our feet. Other English cathedrals must surely be capable of the same, the opportunity patiently awaited.

Foremost among the treasures displayed beneath the Minster is the Horn of Ulph. The man himself was an Anglo-Danish landowner, who gave his estates to the Minster shortly before 1066, reportedly to prevent his sons squabbling over them. The horn came with them as the ‘title deeds’. There are other examples of this custom from Wessex, the Pusey Horn and the Savernake Horn, both now detained in London museums, but the Horn of Ulph remains with its grateful recipient. It is documented only from the 14th century but the object itself dates without question from the 11th. It is actually a tusk of elephant ivory, carved at Salerno in Italy, possibly by Arab craftsmen since it carries Asian motifs. We may ponder what other treasures, now lost, a small world might have delivered to England’s largest county a millennium ago.

South Ken's Swag Bag

London’s story is told most directly in its churches, large and small. It is told too in its own museums, pre-eminently the Museum of London, at the Barbican, the London Transport Museum, in Covent Garden, and the Museum of London Docklands.

There are many other museums and galleries in London. Some are there not because they are especially relevant to London but because London is a capital city. Most capitals have a National Gallery. London and Edinburgh both have a National Portrait Gallery too and the former, commendably, has three regional outposts. Then there are the national museums that could be anywhere in England. London has those for science, natural history, the army, RAF and the sea, Yorkshire those for arms & armour, railways and the media. London has one on world wars, with an outpost on the edge of Manchester. In fact, we have quite a lot of museums about wars. Just one about peace and that’s in Yorkshire too. It was set up in Bradford in 1994, no thanks to the State.

Among the big game, what that leaves most conspicuously are Britain’s most controversial museums, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert. Controversial because they are the proud product of an imperial narrative that might is right. They ooze the abuse of wealth and power and I visit their galleries as I would a prisoner of conscience. On Saturday I was at the V&A – with the Friends of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives – and felt more alienated than ever by what goes on within its walls.

The first thing that strikes anyone who has visited both the major museums is the wasteful overlap. It is the legacy of a century and a half of collecting wars between their curators that in any sensible country would never have got started. Any sensible country would have one institution responsible for paintings owned by the nation, not the seven in London that I can think of without even trying. On what basis do the BM and the V&A both maintain equally outstanding collections of jewellery, prints & drawings, and Islamic, Indian and Chinese art?

Next to strike is the realisation that the museums’ curators must spend much time being sycophants. The evidence is the new and refurbished galleries and gardens that now bear the names of Far East corporate sponsors, ex-employees of Goldman Sachs and others with egos as big as their wallets. Philanthropy is a Victorian tradition now making a comeback as part of the Pig Society – children up chimneys will surely follow – but the best amongst the Victorian donors did the decent thing. They chose ‘no publicity’ for their acts of charity, citing 1 Corinthians 13:4. In William Morris’ News from Nowhere, the narrator, finding himself in London ‘after the Revolution’, learns that Westminster Abbey has been cleared of “beastly monuments to fools and knaves”. It looks like the revolutionaries must now add the national museums to their work programme. For if television without interruptions is worth paying for properly, in the shape of the BBC, then so is culture without the heavy hand of commerce and the market price of fame.

Last is the realisation that all this sound and fury signifies, what? What is the role of these self-serving imperial museums in a decent, co-operative world? Who benefits from having the Parthenon marbles split between London and Athens, or the Franks Casket between London and Florence? Or the treasures of St Cuthbert between London and Durham? Because this is not simply an international issue. What is the Gloucester Candlestick doing in the V&A when it clearly belongs in Gloucester? In niches on the stairs stand the four mediæval statues of kings from the Bristol High Cross, on loan from the National Trust, which substituted replicas on the High Cross itself, now at Stourhead in Wiltshire. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with substituting replicas where that will better protect the originals. Nor with lending the latter. But Bristol is about to open a new £27 million museum to tell the city’s story. It would be nice to think it could be allowed some evocative exhibits of real relevance and quality in place of the third-rate tat we can actually expect. And all because London has nabbed the best, just by being the biggest.

Beware the cry of reductio ad absurdum. Absolute dispersal would indeed be absurd, but no more so than absolute concentration. No-one is saying that every Italian painting has to go back to Italy, or that universal museums are wrong in principle. But a line can be drawn between the ordinary and the extraordinary and that line should be determined by whatever the dispossessed desire to display. It is in their own interests not to push for what they cannot. I support the restitution campaigns, subject to security concerns, where relevant, being satisfactorily addressed. Those curators who oppose the loss of their star attractions can continue to denounce as ‘cultural fascists’ the communities who want their treasures back. But I know and you know that the real cultural fascists are those who hide behind gunboat museology, preferring the letter of the law of property to the spirit of scholarship in context. The defence that a museum did good work in the past won’t hold in the present, let alone the future.

And the answer to what all this signifies? In the case of the V&A, it is an elusive answer. Its original purpose – to provide the best models from the past to improve standards in art and design – is long gone. Modern British artists and designers have either never visited or else learnt nothing. The BM at least has the strapline, ‘Illuminating World Cultures’. It’s an impressive description for torchlight shining on loot but at least it’s something. The V&A appears not to have a strapline – at least since the days of ‘an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’ – and no-one seems able to say what it’s for. What it does best are the temporary exhibitions of stuff from elsewhere. Currently running is one of imperial Chinese robes from the Forbidden City, case after case of incomparably exquisite embroidery on the finest silk, a breathtaking glimpse into the heart of oriental court culture. Several of the robes bear swastikas, a Chinese symbol for ten thousand and therefore of the emperor, the Lord of Ten Thousand Years. That exhibition alone was worth the visit. So too are the refreshment rooms decorated by Morris, Gamble and Poynter in their respective house styles, the first museum restaurant in the world when they opened in 1857. The V&A might, one day, make a very good home for a museum of the Victorian age. But right now, the chaotic jumble of the permanent collection, magnified by a chronically unhelpful layout, is truly an insult to the nation that paid for it.