The true meaning and significance of heritage is that it gives people and communities a genuine sense of connection with the past. Obviously, we feel connected to our personal heritage – usually, we know who and what our grandparents were, and we will have heard stories about how they lived. But, beyond that, there is a wider basic need to learn about our past, in order to help us understand and interpret our individual and national futures. Heritage represents a fundamental desire for continuity – assurance about the past goes a long way to assuring our future. It is through this continuity that we achieve our own place in history, our own ‘immortality’.
In the same way that you inherit your genes, you also inherit a culture which has been passed down through many generations. There are aspects of your national heritage that you may not like or condone, but it is yours, and it is reassuring to feel a part of something.
Heritage has a phenomenal amount to teach us and, I would say, is imperative for our well being. It affects everything from customs to material culture. Traditionally, our link with the past was through the stories and legends passed down by our ancestors. But, because Western industrial society broke up communities and families, much of that oral tradition has already been lost. Instead, places and architectural ‘memories’ give us clues to our past. It is vitally important to conserve and restore these links as a testament to our ancestors’ identity.
Some while ago I began a novel, Waterland, in which, though I did not know it then, the landscape of that part of England known as the Fens was to play a major part. Since the novel was published I have often been asked why, as an ignorant and perhaps presumptuous Londoner, I chose to write about a part of the country with which I have no personal connection. The short answer is that I chose the Fens because of their apparent unobtrusiveness – a flat and empty stage on which to set the drama of my book. This, as I learnt, was merely theory. The Fens, once one’s imagination has got to grips with them, are neither flat nor empty. What I discovered was that the Fens, while as richly English as any other part of England, are also compellingly and hauntingly strange. It is remarkable that there should still exist in the middle of England a region which most English people find peculiarly foreign, especially when so many other distinctive (and remoter) areas of Britain have been ingested into the nation’s cultural and literary heritage. The Fens are both empty and brimming, both cultivated and tenaciously wild, apparently ‘open’ and ‘obvious’ yet profoundly mysterious.
My own physical researches while writing my novel were in fact not so extensive. I have never been, yet, to Wisbech or Prickwillow. As a writer of fiction I am interested in imagined worlds, and I would much rather hazard an inspired guess at some point of authenticity than go for documentary proof. Yet this very attempt to ‘imagine’ the Fens has its special logic, for, as the pages of Edward Storey’s scholarly book abundantly show, the Fens are, peculiarly, not just a landscape but a state of mind.
Museums must make their collections accessible. In the past, this simply meant packing them into display cases, often with wordy labels that made little concession to the lay person. Nowadays, accessibility should demand more than this. Displays can be lively and interesting, making the best use of theatrical or architectural techniques to capture visitors’ attention and perhaps stimulate emotional response. But museums should be about more than their displays. They should make their collections accessible to the widest possible community. The provision of loan boxes of objects for class teachers is one known example of this and, recently, this principle has been extended by some museums so that similar material is made available for use in treating elderly people who are losing their memory.
Museums concern themselves with ‘artefacts and specimens’ – not replicas. They exist to facilitate an encounter with authenticity. They present items that actually existed – were used – had meaning – at some historical time. This is their great strength, and is what distinguishes them from heritage centres and theme parks, books and CD-ROMs. Museums which rise to the challenge which this distinction implies and provide exciting and accessible displays, catalogues and outreach programmes, will find that their apparent competitor in ‘virtual history’ are in fact their allies, stimulating an appetite for the ‘real thing’ that museums are uniquely placed to satisfy.
The desire to preserve things is not new, but now change in our towns comes with such speed and on such a scale that most of us are affected by it in some way. It turns some people into rabid preservationists and it encourages others to think more closely about the nature of towns as we know them today and their future.
It may be quite reasonably argued that the generations who have lived through events such as world wars and the like are more inclined to preservation than their predecessors – anything which expresses stability becomes important. If there is a psychological need for preservation it is part of the planner’s job to take account of it.
Change is no enemy if we learn how to handle it. Physical change, in other words, change in the environment provided by our towns, reflects social change – change in our numbers, in our welfare and in our demands.
In modern times – more and more over the course of the last two hundred years – we have come to speak as though every artist had to rebel against the art of his contemporaries. Art is praised in terms of being unique, revolutionary, shocking even. We feel good about admiring the artist whose work no one appreciated a hundred years ago. But when we get to the art of our own day, we get cold feet and say that an artist has gone too far, that what he does can no longer be called art. Or, rather, the media say it for us. And, on the whole, we agree because we expect to be puzzled by art’s insistent newness – so much so that we do not notice the old themes, methods and also virtues that the art of our own time is full of.
We require artists to be separate from the rest of us, figures with special talents and drive, so vigorous that conventions cannot contain them. Previous ages went to artists with commissions: people needed art for specific purposes, and it was part of their ordinary life. Today we leave artists to their own devices and get rather cross with them if they want to come down out of the clouds.
I am going to describe a situation, and then ask a crucial question about it. I hope it doesn’t strike you as unduly gnomic. But if it does, that’s modern art for you.
Here’s the situation. An artist chooses a piece of text in an art book. The text considers the diversity of pictures. ‘What are they all about?’ it asks dumbly, before deciding, even more dumbly: ‘There is no end, in fact, to the number of different kinds of pictures.’ Okay, this is kiddy-language, and so far all it has betrayed is kiddy-thinking. But stick with me, all you adults out there. The situation is about to complicate itself.
Having settled on his text, the man then asks someone else to make a canvas for him, to stretch it and prime it, and then to take it along to a sign painter. He asks the sign painter to write the chosen text on the canvas. And he gives the sign painter specific instructions not to attempt anything flashy or charming with the lettering. The sign painter does all this. On a white canvas, in simple black letters, he writes the chosen text. So my crucial question is this: is the finished product a painting?
It is an unspoken rule of commercial success as a painter that once you have
developed a profitable line in one genre, you stick to it. Collectors expect an artist to diligently mine the same seam, and attempts to strike out in a new direction are usually met at best with indignation and the feeling that the artist has let the public down.
Why this should be I’m not entirely sure. Gallery owners obviously prefer safe bets, and perhaps the art-buying public is insecure and needs the comfort of continuity. A few artists break the mould and get away with it. Picasso and Hockney are two prime examples. Eric Rimmington is another artist who is now gamely running contrary to form, and it remains to be seen if he can pull it off. His new show takes the daring step of swapping the pristine still lifes which have made his name for paintings of the world of the London Underground.
Railways hold a peculiar charm for Rimmington. From drawings made in the 1980s of the railway land of London’s Kings Cross Station, it was a logical step to go beneath the ground and look at what was happening below. The sketches have provided the material for Underground Encounters, an exhibition of 40 paintings and drawings which convey the curious magic of this sunken world designed for a population in transit.
I have escaped to this island with a few books. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way.
Apart from the wrinkled old peasant who comes from the village on her mule each day to clean the house, I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. I spoke of the uselessness of art but added nothing truthful about its consolations. The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this – that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of- gold – the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential – the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another?