Why the centralisers don't like history very much
Town & Country Planning, January 2007
History is important. Everyone seems to say so these days, even devoted members of our present government, whose ignorance of history seems to be almost their most defining attribute.
Perhaps if they had more of a sense of history – if they had fallen less hopelessly for the spurious version of ‘efficiency’ and ‘modernisation’ pedalled by one brand of management consultants – they might not have plunged headlong into the Iraq disaster, but that is beside the point.
The point about history is that everywhere has a slightly different one. That is why everywhere is different, has different challenges, problems and brilliant attributes. It is because history is different that the method of centralised one-size-fits-all policy-making, that Whitehall has clung to for half a century, is so hideously inefficient.
Places are different, and they did not suddenly become different yesterday.
I wonder occasionally whether this is why the centralisers in government and business are so keen to destroy all traces of it. The accepted national history prescribed by the national curriculum is one thing. But local history is a challenge to their basic world view.
At the very least, it is inconvenient; at worst, it is a downright insult to their idea of sovereignty. Build over it. Replace it with a ubiquitous shopping centre and an information board to say what used to be there.
I have been reminded of this by the peculiar goings-on in the north of Croydon, where government and business alike seem determined to erase the history of one neighbourhood. Or to be precise, one name.
The name is William Stanley, Croydon’s greatest business philanthropist.
By the time he had he died, a century ago, Stanley had endowed halls, community centres, schools, and much else besides. So popular was he in 1907, that the people of South Norwood put up their clock tower to commemorate his wedding anniversary.
He is, in short, an important name there, and a part of local history. He also left his old home, Cumberlow Lodge, to the borough, on the condition that it was used in perpetuity for needy children.
Admittedly, the name Stanley is primarily remembered in the area now as the name of the notorious Stanley Technical College, which is now in the process of being closed and re-opened as a foundation school, which will be called instead after Lord Harris, who is providing the customary £1 million seedcorn funding for such institutions.
And Lord Harris wants the new school named to carry his name alone. He was asked and refused to include the name ‘Stanley’.
As for Cumberlow Lodge, it has been a children’s home for nearly a century and was recently been sold by Croydon Council to the developers Fairview Homes.
The loss of this last link with Stanley has rankled with local people, and they applied to have the building included in the council’s own local list of buildings of architectural and historical interest. Another local resident applied formally to English Heritage to have it listed as Grade Two.
Early on Saturday morning, a few days before the council was due to decide, and before any planning application had gone in – and having assured the council that they would not do so – Fairview dashed in and demolished the building.
One local resident described Fairview as “a developer who deosn’t give a damn about anything.” I would have put it more strongly than that, though they have denied promising Croydon not to demolish the building.
Of course, the developer must have seen the chance of their lucrative 152 flats slipping away from them. But then, they must have known about the history before investing in the building in the first place.
But it isn’t just that. The remaining evidence of local history is becoming a potent symbol of everything that unnerves the centralisers in the public and private sectors who prefer us to be supplicants to centralised monoliths controlled by themselves.
Local history is evidence of local variation, and that implies local self-determination. It implies that streamlined, ubiquitous processes will not always apply. There will be local peculiarities, sensitivities and particularities: centralised business systems will not always hum the same way.
No wonder those in control of the powerful centralised systems that rule us, public and private, want to root it out.
