‘Basically, we’re stuffed’

You might expect a chief executive of English Heritage to look quite English, and Simon Thurley certainly does. He has the pale eyes, and fine bones, of the English upper classes. He has the clipped vowels of the English upper classes, too. In his nice pink shirt, in his nice white office, in a nice big Victorian building near Chancery Lane, he has the air of a man who lives a nice, quiet, clean, ordered life.

He also has a very big job. He looks after, or at least the organisation he runs looks after, more than 400 historical sites. He advises the government on ‘England’s historic environment’, which must mean he has to give an awful lot of advice. And he writes books. He has written books on Hampton Court, and Whitehall Palace, and Oatlands Palace, and now he’s written a book about the men – and yes they were all men — who ‘saved’ Britain’s heritage.

‘Not many eight-year-olds want to be an inspector of ancient monuments,’ he admits, when I ask when he decided that he wanted to be one of those men, too. It started, apparently, with the discovery of Roman remains in the back garden of the house he grew up in. Which, I’m guessing, wasn’t a Sixties box, like mine. ‘Baptist manse,’ he says. ‘In a central plot of land, with a big wall all around.’ An old Baptist manse, perhaps? ‘Regency.’

He reminds me, I tell him, of a character in a novel I’ve just read. The character is, like Thurley — or Dr Thurley, as his website keeps calling him — a TV historian. (His website says that he ‘believes that television is a very important medium for architectural history’, which does rather make you think of someone telling you that there’s a great new invention called the internet.)