Heritage Culture: The Latest
Battle(s)
Last lecture
• A preoccupation with heritage culture is not new
but has been a characteristic of the making of
British identity since the 19th century
• It takes an interest in history outside of the
academic arena into debate about preservation
of the landscape, of buildings, and of things
• New BBC series indicates that it could entail
challenging property rights (not conservative)
• 1970s/80s argument that Britain was politically
obsessed by heritage culture: symbol but also
symptom and cause of backwardness and
decline, and is generally conservative, elitist, and
depoliticising (explaining failure of
left/Thatcherism)
• Yet historical geographers indicate that interest in
heritage culture is related to much broader
features of modernisation
• Raphael Samuel indicates that heritage history
could be democratic and radical
Today’s lecture
1. The End of Heritage Britain?
2. The British Empire and Commonwealth
Museum
3. The History Boom
4. The Battle over teaching history
5. The Spirit of ‘45
The End of Heritage Britain?
• Dying away of the rancour
of the heritage debate of
the 80s
• Rhetoric of New Labour,
‘Cool Britannia’ and New
Britain (‘young country’) in
late 1990s.
• Linked to Britain’s response
to death of Dianna
• Symbolised by ‘Brit-Pop’
bands such Oasis taking US
by storm and new national
confidence
The British Empire and
Commonwealth Museum
• Opens in Bristol, 2002
• Symbol of a new multicultural, post-colonial
Britain: use of heritage to
reinvent itself in progressive
fashion
• But closes by 2008; can’t
survive on private funding;
controversy over sale of
items
• Serious engagement with
Empire lacks the appeal of
imagining life as Vikings
The History Boom on TV
• August 2002, the British historian Simon Schama signs
£3m deal with publishers and BBC
• David Starkey £2m deal for Channel 4 series
• Audiences for Starkey’s Elizabeth and The Six Wives of
Henry VIII reached 4 million
• Audiences for Schama’s A History of Britain reached
4.4m
• History suddenly popular television: why; and what
does this tell us about changing national identity in
Britain?
• Often ‘Drum and trumpet’ style and narrative history;
though runs alongside social history of eg 1900 house
Traditionally historians suspicious of
popular media
• Isolation of historians satirised in 1954
Kingsley Amis novel Lucky Jim
• AJP Taylor begins famous TV lectures 1957,
but attracts controversy and damages career
at Oxford
• 1980s critique of heritage culture reflects
academic suspicion of popular culture
• What changes?
The New Battle over History in Schools
• Echoes of the debate over the 1988 Education
Reform Act’s introduction of a National
Curriculum
• An indication of the perceived importance of
history with national culture and identity
• Controversy again over the politicisation of
history
• Michael Gove support for teaching of sequential
British history; draws on historians like Simon
Schama, David Starkey, Niall Ferguson
• One of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has
been the sundering of our society from its past. … Children
are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories
I know – the history of our United Kingdom. Our history has
moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully
understand the struggles of the past we will not properly
value the liberties of the present. The current approach we
have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our
island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a
cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary and
many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the
vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative.
Well, this trashing of our past has to stop. (Michael Gove,
Conservative Party Conference (2010)
• ‘At a moment fraught with the possibility of
social and cultural division’ (Simon Schama
wrote in the Guardian (November 2010), we
need citizens ‘who grow up with a sense of
our shared memory as a living, urgently
present body of knowledge’.
• ‘right across the secondary school system our
children are being short-changed of the
patrimony of their story’
Historians as TV stars
Remember these?
Criticisms
• Is a sequential history of Britain still our history,
when we are so varied and interconnected
internationally?
• Do we need a more global than local history to
equip us for the world today?
• Is it more important that we equip the next
generation to understand the problems of eg the
war on terror, the Arab Spring, the rise of China …
• Problems of a celebratory / whig history
• History involves the critical interrogation of
memory and myth
The Spirit of ‘45
• New film by radical British film-maker Ken Loach,
previews at Warwick on March 17th.
• Reminder that the left as well as the right has a
history of turning to national history to save the
present.
• http://www.thespiritof45.com/Watch-The-Trailer
• Historian Steve Fielding suggests this is more a
myth of 45 than reality:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013
/mar/08/ken-loach-the-spirit-of-45-fantasy