The Spectator's Notes

22 July 2006

Rural Yorkshire offers many more of the elements that compose the ideal village than does most of the south. One is the tendency of a stream to run through the high street. Another is the fact that even quite small villages are built rather like towns, with a sense of the total relationship of the buildings to each other, with a square, and substantial public monuments. A third is that houses tend to be set well back from the road so that there is a common stretch of grass and trees running parallel to the highway. The feeling of unity and amplitude is like the prosperous parts of France. These sights confirm my growing belief that our restrictive planning system, which is supposed to protect rural beauty, actually does the opposite. What you see in Yorkshire is a readiness to use space quite prodigally instead of trying to cram everything in — a readiness that the law nowadays forbids. No one would mind more country being ‘swallowed up’ if the result were places like Masham or Easingwold or Helmsley. They wouldn’t be like that, comes the rejoinder. But how do we know? People build badly nowadays partly because they have no confidence that building can be good, a feeling which is self-fulfilling. We visited Castle Howard as well –— a gigantic, magnificent expression of belief in architecture and its capacity to transform a whole landscape. All conservation bodies would move heaven and earth to save it (if it needed saving), yet all would scream in horror if anyone tried to build anything on that scale today. Surely it is time to recognise that, thanks to the greatly increased wealth of the past 25 years, we have moved out of the period when the task in rural England was simply somehow to preserve lovely things which were falling down. Now it is to build new lovely things as well.

To Whitby Museum which is unreformed in its miscellany. ‘Pair of tongs for removing dogs from church’ is my favourite exhibit.

Private Eye parody often makes its victims sadly self-conscious, so I was delighted to see an unembarrassed poster (in another part of rural England) for a local newspaper’s coverage of the heatwave ‘PHEW, WHAT A SCORCHER –— picture special’.