A Heritage Culture
Throughout the 20th century, British people understood themselves, their
communities & their nation in part through their beliefs about the past, & by
creatively & selectively extracting particular things from the past that suited
their purposes. Their motives, & for that matter our motives in doing this are
various: claiming authority over the past can give us meaning, power, comfort on
a host of different levels.
The purpose of this lecture is to examine a word that has become increasingly
central to this phenomenon: heritage.
Heritage vs History
- It could be argued that heritage is not history at all. It doesn’t enquire into past
but celebrates it for present-day purposes
- This is too simplistic: heritage is never wholly devoid of historical reality, & no
historian is wholly free of heritage bias
- Nonetheless, historian & heritage fashioner do have different intentions. The
historian, however entangled in the present, seeks to convey a past that is open
to inspection, revision & proof
- Heritage, however scrupulous, seeks to design a past that will fix & enhance the
identity of a chosen individual or people
- The purpose of heritage is to create a narrative, telling us who we are (or want
to be), where we came from, & to what we belong
- In the process it tends to reduce & simplify the past, & to downplay or erase
division, failure & conflict in favour of continuity, progress & achievement
- Heritage endows its select group with prestige & purpose
- History, at least in theory, is for all; heritage is tribal & essentially non-rational
- Heritage creates bonds within an in-group, & barriers between this group &
those it considers ‘other’
- Heritage is linked to the stresses communities experience in the present
- Most historians would dispute the notion that human nature is unchanging &
timeless (so much evidence exists to the contrary, that in different times & places
people have had radically different motivations & behaviours)
- But heritage erases these differences, it treats the past as comprehensible,
familiar and accessible, which makes it easier to use & apply to the present
- Consider the links between heritage and autobiography: both create a selective
& persuasive narrative designed to impact on the present
- Heritage is highly possessive. Disputes about who should own & interpret a
particular heritage tend to be bitterly fought
Monarchy
- 2nd half of the 20th century: British society faced a multitude of gradual or
abrupt challenges, from the loss of empire to new youth cultures
- In this context, heritage increasingly supplied the reassurance of continuity, &
the institution best placed to provide this was the monarchy
- Royal pomp and ceremonial in reality a modern innovation, but presented as a
timeless heritage, something stable & secure, special & distinctive
- The British used heritage, including the monarchy, to suggest that past
greatness continued to have some relevance and meaning in the present
- NB, History Channel vision of British history organised around Churchillian
leadership & wartime exploits
The stately home
- Peter Mandler sees further evidence of this late 20th century thirst for heritage
and continuity in the countryside and the country house
- As we have seen, during the interwar years the middle class in particular used
the countryside to define its values & assert its status
- In the postwar decades this cultural affiliation with the countryside if anything
grew broader & more democratized
- With modern architecture & traffic transforming urban life, nostalgia for a
rural arcadia & a desire to preserve rural heritage grew
- By the 1970s, the centrepiece of this rural heritage was the stately home
- The country mansion had not always enjoyed such popularity: frequently seen
before WW2 as socially & politically suspect, bastions of privilege & waste
- But by the 70s & 80s (with many now in the hands of the National Trust), they
were increasingly seen as the epitome of Englishness & England’s heritage
- The stately pile became seen as Englands’ greatest contribution to Western
civilization, the purest expression of the nation’s genius
- Their very recent unpopularity was forgotten, and instead they came to
symbolise centuries of harmonious & consensual continuity
- National Trust: 100,000 members in 1960; 200,000 by 1970; & by 1980 a mass
movement of over 1 million people; over 2 million by 1990; now even higher
- 1993: estimated that 1/3 – ½ of adult pop had visited a country house that
year, drawn by a very particular vision of English heritage
- Stately homes became the backdrops for film, period drama, fashion
The 1990s & beyond
- From early 1990s, though, this vision of British heritage became more plural
- National Trust, English Heritage etc now stress that they exist to protect
everyone’s past, not just an aristocratic legacy
- A new heritage portfolio of old textile mills, working-class terraces, Victorian
civic architecture & dockyards has been added. English Heritage’s website
captures this as follows: ‘English Heritage works to promote enjoyment of our
shared heritage to the widest possible audience…Everybody makes history. We
all have our own heritages. Everyone can have a part in enjoying, understanding
and caring for Englands's shared heritage.’
- Expert opinion has been joined by grassroots genealogical research & a more
democratized concern with heritage & family history (eg tv programmes like
‘Who Do You Think You Are’)
- Moreover, the job that heritage is increasingly being asked to do in the present
is to assert that diversity has always been at the core of Britishness. In the words
of English Heritage again: ‘As a nation, we have a very long tradition of diversity.
The heritage of different cultures has been woven into our shared history over
hundreds of years, through migration, trade, conquest and alliances’.
- And so, during the bicentenary of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 2007,
heritage bodies represented the 18th century country mansion as built on the
spoils of slavery and sugar plantations
- From one perspective, therefore, heritage is being used to construct a narrative
for a multicultural society
- Simultaneously, though, other visions of heritage – in which diversity,
feminism and the legacies of empire barely feature – have been constructed
around Churchill & WW2