Why are heritage enthusiasts so stubbornly hidebound?

Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by class, gender and race, there can be no civilised argument against the preservation and enjoyment of great architecture and art from the past. But ‘heritage’ is not quite that simple. There’s something else going on. A la recherche of what precisely?

Our troubled world accommodates, even embraces, heritage tomatoes and heritage paint. The former reaches back into agricultural history to find an uncontaminated source of perfect taste; the latter, chalk-dense, impure colours popularised by Farrow & Ball, elevates ordinary cottage woodwork to gentility. And these two poles of misplaced desire define the heritage sensibility.

It’s a malaise which uneasily mingles nostalgia with a distrust, verging on dislike creeping into phobia, of the new. When the future seems uncertain or even threatening, how nice to sit down to a feast of Cherokee Purple Heritage toms, in the light of a setting sun shining through window joinery painted Germolene or Mouse’s Back. This while dwelling on a Betjeman poem about cricket.

James Stourton is heritage’s articulate high priest. And it is tempting to see in his psychology a yearning for places ‘sanctified by memory and association’. His family, he tells us, has been in decline since the Reformation – but not so far down the tubes to prevent him becoming a popular chairman of Sotheby’s and the author of a magisterial biography of the art historian Kenneth Clark. 

Still, we can sympathise with him that his Georgian family home in Yorkshire was demolished and replaced by a Victorian horror (which now accommodates a caravan park). And soon after his grandmother sold her property to the University of York, they knocked it down.