Rack and Ruin
Submitted by coldrum on Tuesday, 28 June 2005 Page Views: 2320
Site WatchCountry: England "Starved of support, imprisoned by political correctness, bullied into acquiescence, the people tasked to preserve Britain's historic sites are fighting a losing battle against the deputy prime minister's wrecking ball. Why should we trust Two Jags with our heritage?" asks Richard Girling in The Times:"It is 10 years since English Heritage last had a grant increase: 10 years in which costs have escalated and the demands of government have grown ever more clamorous and tangential, veering further and further towards social inclusion, outreach, fairness, and all the rest of new Labour’s elastically undefinable “core values”, and further and further from English Heritage’s own mission to identify, understand and maintain historic buildings. It has been like watching a grand old kitchen turn into a political fast-food joint.
In a century obsessed with novelty, “heritage” faces an uphill slog. Professionals eschew the word, preferring the plain but anodyne “historic environment”, while envying the French their beloved and beautiful patrimoine. There is a metropolitan elite in whose craw the word might stick, but “heritage” is not just a historical comfort blanket for those unable to face the future. Sir Neil Cossons spoke of the nation’s soul. This, too, is an uncomfortable word for some, but no better one comes to mind. Think of Stonehenge, Fountains Abbey, Lindisfarne Priory – of any historic house or unspoilt corner of an ancient town – and you know where it touches you. That is why it matters.
Why, when the precise point of “heritage” is that it has an aesthetic and cultural value that transcends the bean-counters, English Heritage should have come up with a “property prioritisation programme” that focuses its investment on “properties with the greatest commercial potential”. Or why it needed to develop a hospitality business offering top-drawer venues for weddings and corporate functions. You may wonder, too, why it fired a generation of young archeologists and architectural historians, and why 80 staff responded to Dr Thurley’s invitation to English Heritage’s 21st-anniversary party in June 2004 with a curt rejection: “I wish to inform you that I will not be attending and want you to put the money saved into the pay budget”; and why staff in May this year voted for industrial action.
The answers are all the same – a degree of governmental apathy to what is now called “the historic environment sector” that is difficult to distinguish from enmity. In early March, senior aides of the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, let it be known that she was thinking of dismantling English Heritage (an official body) and transferring responsibility for historic buildings to the National Trust (a charity). Jowell denied this in a letter to the quango’s chairman, Sir Neil Cossons, in which she professed to have been “astounded and infuriated” by the Sunday Times report, but significantly, she made no complaint to the paper itself.
Cossons makes no secret of his unease. In the March issue of the English Heritage members’ magazine, Heritage Today, he put it bluntly: “There is no point in pretending that we were anything but bitterly disappointed when the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) cut our budget... If you sideline our heritage, you sideline the nation’s soul.”
In the agenda of Jowell’s DCMS, obsessed with the Olympics, UK super-casinos and the BBC, the historic environment hardly merited a Post-it note. In October 2004, when the Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell asked how many English Heritage sites the secretary of state had visited in the previous 12 months, he received the answer “none”. She “has not had an opportunity”, explained the sports minister Richard Caborn.
This was like saying the secretary of state for defence had not had an opportunity to visit an airfield. Tony Burton, director of policy at the National Trust, was not surprised. “She doesn’t really care about heritage issues,” he said. Neither was Catherine Craig, negotiations officer for the Public and Commercial Services Union that represents many of English Heritage’s beleaguered, insecure and increasingly poorly paid staff: “You always got the feeling she wasn’t interested.”
The crunch year was 2002. English Heritage had a new director, Simon Thurley, recruited from the Museum of London, who had walked straight into the “bruising experience” of a government review. Sunk into a sofa in his office overlooking Savile Row, he now looks back on it ruefully, though with the not wholly dissatisfied air of a man who has walked through fire without losing his shoelaces.
“What the review said was, you’re meant to be the body that shows the best sites in England, but you’re not. You’re meant to be a body that has a clear role in the planning system, but we can’t quite work out what your role is. You’re meant to be the lead body in research into the historic environment, but we can’t see what you’re trying to do. I was employed directly to address those criticisms.”
The chairman Sir Neil Cossons’s welcoming remarks had made it very clear which way the wind was blowing. Under Thurley’s direction, he said, English Heritage would transform itself into “a more open, inclusive, customer-focused organisation”. The new chief executive would “help us to drive forward our modernising agenda and make the most of the many skills and talents we have in English Heritage”. Anyone who has ever worked in an organisation under new management will recognise the coded language. “Make the most of” and “modernising agenda” taken together mean only one thing.
“We had to lose staff,” says Thurley. “Overall, we had to cut about 11% of our posts because, basically, we haven’t had a proper increase in our grant for 10 years. And we were employing all these people who we simply couldn’t afford. We were employing people who hadn’t got budgets to enable them to do the jobs they were employed to do.” The axe came down on administrators (the organisation’s nine administrative regions were cut down to four monolithic “territories”) and, “after lots of heartache”, on the “junior archeologists and architectural historians” in the research unit. “Junior,” of course, meant they were the ones who had actually done the legwork. “They had been out in the field surveying castles, surveying walls of historic buildings,” says Thurley. But their skills were not unique. They were duplicated in the private sector and could be bought in when needed.
To archaeologists it all looks very much like Back not forward. “It’s increasingly difficult to get money for proactive research,” says the CBA’s Mike Heyworth. “Despite what the government says, English Heritage clearly has had a significant shortfall in its funding. As a result, the historic environment sector doesn’t have the resources it needs to protect and conserve the heritage of the country.”
The sense of being undervalued and under-rewarded trickles down through the organisation like oil into sand. Staff salaries used to be linked to civil-service pay grades, but have been decoupled and have fallen far behind. Some staff with managerial responsibilities are working for as little as £17,000 a year, and just before this magazine went to press, the failure to honour an agreed 1% annual pay increase had brought the promise of a one-day strike."
Full report can be seen here
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