Protecting what is ordinarily glorious
Town & Country Planning, November 2006
One of the most unexpected bestsellers this summer has been a large tome by the two founders of the organisation Common Ground, Sue Clifford and Angela King, called England in particular.
It is written in the style of an encyclopaedia style, filled with unexpected vignettes, anecdotes, facts and line drawings of those aspects of life in England which, for the past couple of decades, one might have imagined had all been steamrollered in the name of progress.
There are orchards, wassailing, stone circles and wild flowers, but not nearly so many of them, and this is their celebration.
What did progress mean, incidentally? It didn’t mean better: much of the architecture that was hailed as inevitable, and impossible to stand in the way of, was considerably worse than what it replaced.
I have a feeling it only meant ‘change’, and although it is hard to stand in the way of change, next time we are told this is impossible, we might remember that change for the worse is not inevitable and never was.
Sue and Angela set up Common Ground in 1982, and coined the phrase ‘local distinctiveness’ two years later. It has taken its time to filter through into the consciousness of officials, but it has certainly arrived.
I know this because I have been involved in a consultancy project this summer to look at what makes a famous Welsh city distinctive, and very revealing it was.
But meanwhile, Common Ground’s achievements have included the introduction of Apple Day (which comes round again this month on 21 October), the innovative book Holding Your Ground, parish maps and much more.
Both were inspired to start the organisation by an encounter some years before with a conservation official from the then Scottish Development Department, carrying out a pioneer environmental impact analysis. It was he that used the immortal phase: “There’s nothing special here”, sweeping his arms towards a beautiful landscape of crofts and deep water sea lochs, and the Applecross peninsula opposite the Isle of Skye.
But then his duties were, as Sue and Angela put it, was “to the rare, the spectacular, the special”. What, then, about the ordinary?
This is a vital question for the emerging localism. Official conservation is all about preserving what is rare and extraordinary. What about the aspects of the environment – or anything else – which is life-enhancing and vital, yet is so common that it has no protection.
We have turned round, secure in our love of British orchards, for example, to find three quarters of them have been grubbed – when even Somerset cider makers import apple concentrate from abroad.
The terrible thing is that ordinary landscapes, in all their beauty and detail, are valued by the people who live there precisely because of their very ordinariness.
Nor is this just a phenomenon that is confined to the environment. You might say something similar about the experience of ordinary childhood, now under threat from a combination of IT, SATS, exams and high-pressure marketing, which have been ignored all this time because we thought childhood was so ubiquitous it required no effort to protect it.
It is tempting to suggest that this is a function of the economic system, and the way it gives value to what is scarce. Simply because loving, caring families are so common, they have no value under the economic system. Since we are constantly on the edge of finding that economics dictates all value, this is rather important.
So I’ve learned from England in Particular that we ought, perhaps, to be more vigilant about what is wonderfully ordinary, and what is ordinarily glorious, because we might wake up one morning and find it has gone.
And when we do, I expect the government agency responsible will be quite happy with its replacement by a laminated information board with an artists impression of what it was we lost. I don’t think I will.
