Archive for Heritage & History

‘Television producers sometimes speak of the ‘golden hour’ – that time in the late afternoon, when the sinking sun casts even routine landscapes into brilliant relief. But the early twentieth century photographers who interest Hauser had a different interest in such tricks of the light…’

About Kitty Hauser’s book Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology & the British Landscape 1927-1955, Oxford University Press, £65. This is the ‘pre-print version of a review published in the journal Twentieth Century British History.

A note on Agatha Christie’s novel, At Bertram’s Hotel.

Some reflections on history and heritage in East London and the Thames estuary. I refer to ‘Millennium Mills’, an old flour mill standing opposite the Millennium Dome, and the Richard Montgomery, a sunken US Liberty ship loaded with explosives that lies not far offshore from Sheerness - whence it was memorably described by the resident German novelist Uwe Johnson.

This article takes the launch of BBC2’s series ‘Restoration’ as an occasion, or an excuse, to suggest that a critical perspective on heritage has actually emerged from within the conservation movement, and not just from the derision of metropolitan literary snobs. Published in the Guardian, 13 September 2003.

A review of Raphael Samuel’s book Theatres of Memory (Verso, 1995), published in the Guardian 4 February 1995. For more recent thoughts on this argument see ‘Who do you think you are . . . ?’ under ‘Conversations’.

On a new kind of French institution. Written for the Guardian in the summer of 1992. Previously unpublished.

A conversation between Tim Putnam and Patrick Wright about the ‘Heritage Industry’, and the kind of critical discussion it might require. Published in Block, No.15, Spring 1989.

In the late 1980s, just before the triumph of mobile phone technology, a heated debate took place about privatization and its effect on Britain’s red telephone boxes. The first version of this argument was published as ‘On a ring and a prayer’, New Statesman and Society, 5 August 1988. A revised version was incorporated into A Journey Through Ruins (1991). It later underwent further slight modifications to appear as ‘How Privatization turned Britain’s Red Telephone Kiosk into an Archive of the Welfare State’ in Francis X Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (eds.), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, pp. 207-14.

A review of Witold Rybcyzinski’s book Home: A Short History of an Idea, which makes a wider argument about the rise of the English country house as a polemically-powered symbol of superior culture during the post-war period. I later incorporated much of this material into ‘Brideshead Relocated’, a chapter of A Journey Through Ruins (1991). Published in the London Review of Books, 2 June 1988.

On the National Trust and its management, or otherwise, of Sutton House in Hackney. This article was written as part of a local campaign to shame the National Trust into taking better care of a property that is not actually in the ‘East End’ of London, although we placed it there for rhetorical effect. The Trust responded briskly under its Chairman Dame Jennifer Jenkins, and was soon displaying a lavishly restored Sutton House as proof of what could be done with inner city properties. Having employed my analysis of the post-war rise of the country house to this practical purpose within the conservation movement, I would be irritated when it was later suggested that the critique of country house ‘heritage’ was sourced in misogynist contempt for flowery decor and lavendar bags (see my rather bad-tempered review of Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, also available in this strand). Published in the Guardian, 1 August 1987, p. 17. Thanks to Richard Gott for the title.