| |
Indignation! - A Book Review
Indignation! The Campaign For Conservation
by Mavis Batey, David Lambert and Ken Wilkie Kit Kat Books, Price
£6.50
The unusual title of this small book is a
result of the involvement of its three authors in the Thames
Landscape Strategy - a comprehensive survey of the river from
Hampton to Kew, which now forms part of Supplementary Planning
Guidance for the London boroughs concerned. In the course of
their work, they came across frequent references to the "indignation
meetings" held by Richmond residents at the dawn of the
last century as part of their campaign to secure statutory protection
for the historic view of the Thames from Richmond Hill. The word
seemed to sum up everything the three authors wanted to say about
conservation, so they made it their battlecry.
The 63-page paperback has an enthusiastic
foreword by Alan Baxter, a generous landlord and a good friend
to several amenity groups, including the London Forum. It also
has two appendices a chronology of key events in the amenity
movement and a useful list of addresses.
The main body of the book comprises an Introduction
and three other short chapters headed Ruskin, Morris and the
early campaigns, Indignation today and Indignation tomorrow.
The first two chapters deliver broadly what
they promise. Did you know that Ruskin provided one of the earliest
and best definitions of sustainability, that Britain' s grassroots
approach to conservation is the envy of Europe, or that Ruskin,
an inspiration to the early Labour movement, called himself a
Tory, whilst Morris the ardent conservationist was a revolutionary
Marxist and a close friend of Friedrich Engels?
But the next two chapters are less predictable
and the book concludes somewhat anticlimactically with a suggestion
that the Thames Landscape Strategy could provide a model for
the future. The longest and most intellectually challenging chapter,
however, is David Lambert' s on Indignation Today. This repays
careful reading and I can only single out a few of his most striking
points here.
He sees the rapid growth of amenity societies since the founding
of the Civic Trust in 1957 as expressing a sense of legitimate
public interest in private property something which seems to
be unique to Britain, perhaps because we are such a small, crowded
island. He also sees as crucial, albeit surprising, the use of
the word "cherished" in PPG15, which runs counter to
all traditional notions of rational objective values and introduces
into conservation the powerful irrational element of emotion.
This is where the amenity societies come in to express the community'
s sense of indignation at the threat to what is familiar and
cherished, which need not be and usually is not great architecture.
Conservation then ceases to be a minority academic interest in
recording the past and becomes a deep-rooted, inherently radical
instinct with a strongly populist strain.
Conservation, urges Lambert, should not be
"dosh for toffs" Brideshead style, but should go hand
in hand with development to create a modern environment and a
just society as envisaged by Ruskin and Morris. This, however,
requires Government action, which could conflict both with the
Thatcherite wish to "lift the burden" and with the
Blairite project to "modernise" planning. But action
is needed now, even more than in the thirties, to constrain global
market forces by strong planning policies which will "imagine
the future" than merely preserve the past. Perhaps Local
Agenda 21 provides one of the areas in which a start could be
made.
George Parish
|