A passion for pastiche: China’s Potemkin villages

Closely inspect No. 23 Leinster Terrace, Bayswater and you might notice the house has no letter box. Push at the door and you might find it stuck; force your way in and you might find you plummet 40 feet through open space down an obsolete ventilation shaft on to the tracks of the District Line. The house is a fake; a five-storey façade; an architectural trompe l’oeil disguising a disused steam outlet on the London Underground. (Or, as the estate agent might yell down to you, the property combines an airy open-plan design with excellent transport links right on the doorstep.)

Flaws notwithstanding, the white stucco frontage — owned and pristinely maintained by TfL— is, like its neighbours, Grade II listed. And the chameleon-like No. 23 certainly fools passersby, who, one assumes, have no idea that the entire exterior could at any moment come crashing, Buster-Keaton-style, down upon them where they stand. The building is a successful item of ‘fake heritage’ — the broad and heterogenous category of objects upon which John Darlington attempts to impose some order in his new book.

Formerly of the National Trust, Darlington now directs the World Monuments Fund Britain, and at times Fake Heritage manifests something of the breathless pace and glossy, impersonal authority of a handsomely illustrated museum guidebook. ‘Welcome to the Paleo-ironic era,’ he writes, beginning the tour.

In this era, the evaluative categories of ‘authentic’ and ‘fake’ are increasingly unstable, our perceptions of the verisimilitude of the built environment found to be in a terminal, very 21st-century state of slippage. In his conclusion, Darlington makes some rather mandatory remarks about the declining respect for expertise and the rise of the internet. Actually the book is much more stimulating than those reflections suggest.