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Thursday 4 December 2008

The advantages of living in a tip

There is a great deal to be said for living in a tip

A celebration of British mess and muddle

Neatness and tidiness, what’s more, tend to destroy a sense of time. That is the nub of the complaint by proponents of the picturesque against the tidying up of old buildings. John Ruskin and William Morris expended large quantities of ink while attempting to prevent their contemporaries from cleaning up, smartening, straightening and generally rebuilding the ancient edifices of Europe. They had some success. Without Ruskin’s protests, St Mark’s would have been completely reconstructed as a neater, duller, newer version of itself.

A few years ago I was a little disappointed on visiting the town of Meissen which, unlike nearby Dresden, was not razed to the ground and incinerated by the RAF. It is a perfectly preserved old German town, untouched during the neglectful years of the GDR. Since then, so much refurbishing and repainting has taken place that it no longer looks old. I missed an occasional whisker of vegetation on a roof, or smoke-stained wall.

Ecologically, also, we learn that knee-jerk tidiness is not necessarily beneficial. A few months ago, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds issued a warning about the damaging effect on wildlife of such orderly new garden features as decking and gravel. The ultimate neat-person’s horticultural move, perhaps, is to pave over the space in the front of the house and park a car on it — so much trimmer than leaving it in the road. In contrast, a spokesman for the RSPB told the Daily Telegraph, ‘Weeds can be good. Untidy gardening is not a bad thing. Nettles are excellent for caterpillars and butterflies. Traditional cottage gardens stay the same for 100 years.’

Quite so. Our luxuriantly overgrown, and quite small urban plot is home to half a dozen species of birds, several mammals — including squirrels and a hedgehog — plus frogs and toads. In contrast, many of the fields in the countryside around — hedgerows torn out, ponds filled it, insects exterminated — are virtually sterile. In his great History of the Countryside, Oliver Rackham inveighs against the pointless tidying up that farmers go in for, not for any sound agricultural reason, but just to make the land look neater. ‘The blight of tidiness,’ he writes, ‘every year sweeps away something of beauty or meaning.’

More articles from: Martin Gayford | this section

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