Heritage Custodians Behaving Badly

National Trust’s Heritage Custodians have some quite off the wall ideas about bringing history to life.

According to Wikipedia: The term Custodian may refer to:

• Janitor,  a person who cleans, maintains, provides security and initiates repairs or makes minor repairs to buildings;


Under Wikipedia’s reference for “Custodian” the above is as near it gets to a definition of the National Trust’s job. It’s not surprising then that the National Trust may feel they have an image problem and are looking to reinvent themselves as a creative, edgy, risk taking breed. I have to confess that some of the comments I have made on this blog about the role of the NT heritage custodians may not have been helpful in this respect: I have hinted that NT properties have a fossilized feel about them when compared to owner occupied mansions. I have likened the NT to Canute figures engaged in the impossible task of trying to halt the eroding seas of time.

In the light of these remarks I was fascinated to read the January edition of the NT’s “Arts Buildings and Collections Bulletin” (or “ABC” for short. See here ). The lead article of this edition is entitled “The Curator: No-Sayer, Custodian, Interpreter, Impresario or Host?” In the article the current chairman of the NT converses with a district curator and they discuss the role of the Trust. The chairman affirms that their “baseline” is preservation of heritage, but goes on to say that the NT’s PR calls for creative and dynamic thinking. To this end the two interlocutors bandy radical ideas about the work of the NT, and we hear talk of it as an interpreter of history, a creative story teller of history, the presenter of historical theatre, and the “Jim’ll fixit” for visitors wanting to play at being invited guests at prestigious historical venues. In order to get away from that fossilized feel of NT sites they even moot the idea of giving some of their houses the cluttered homely look of a truly lived in mansion. Here are a few comments I have extracted from the article:

You’ve described various aspects of curatorship. You’re suggesting that the curator has a mediating role, and even that the curator is almost an impresario…… I see the curator of the future as having a more creative task, to unlock the spirit of a place, to tell its story, to hold a microphone up to it and let it speak….The genius of the curatorial profession is not to impose the dead hand, but the opposite: to find what is unique in a property and bring it to the fore. …. Only the curator can release their stories. I suppose my concern—and again this is controversial —is whether the peculiar skills that the Trust curator brings to this task are sufficiently broad ……It seems, then, that a curator should take risks and stick his or her neck out; a curator should say: ‘This is my creation, it’s my doing, and I take responsibility for it’.

This is curatorship with attitude – preferably a dynamic creative attitude. The ideas being submitted here promote the notion of a proactive NT – and don’t we all want to look proactive. Today’s NT doesn’t want to just bring history to a halt in the resin blocks and cabinets of the museum, but also sees itself as bringing history to life, even a maker of history and not merely a passive preserver of it. To this end the article tells of some idiosyncratic redecoration and interpretation that took place in a property during the 60s that is now part of the history of that particular property. One curator’s creative work of interpretation is another’s object of iconoclasm and so history ever moves on in incremental steps, even under NT “conservation”.

Particularly intriguing, I thought, was the acknowledgment that managed decay may be one of the stories the NT would like to tell and reference was made to the ephemeral nature of some fragile artifacts and buildings owned by the NT that are now crumbling to dust. Thus, the NT invites the visitor to see the irreversible processes of decay at work, processes that ultimately entail the loss beyond recovery of both buildings and artifacts, providing all the more reason to value them.

Under the current chairman, the NT is an organization that, whilst it has no chance of rivaling Disneyland, would nevertheless like to move away from the stuffy tranquility associated with the work of the heritage custodian. However, like the organic bleached specimens one finds in preservation jars one has to say that there is an inevitable air of unreality about a preserved heritage site: The fact is such sites have no chance of looking as they did in their halcyon days when they probably looked at once both newer and yet older than they do under the auspices of a heritage custodian: Newer because time was yet to have its way with them and older because clutter, grime and damage were more likely to accumulate in a real work-a-day environment. The heritage custodian is thus caught between the preservation jar and the creation of a bogus show of clutter, grime and damage. It seems that authenticity at heritage sites is an in principle impossibility. In the final analysis we must accept them for what they are - museum pieces.

(I have commented on some of the above issues in previous postings – see here, here and here)

The Riddle of the Sphinx

King Canute has been misinterpreted. The true story is, I believe, that Canute was a wise king whose apparently quixotic act was intended as an acted parable demonstrating that no matter how powerful a man may be there are things over which he has no control. Likewise, there is no human way to stop history and we are all destined to be ephemeral players who are very much trapped inside it, whoever we are. The Canutian message may be an important lesson the heritage custodian can teach us. The players inside history may be tempted to believe that history has ended with them. That history creeps forward slowly and imperceptibly like the hands of clock, even in a museum. Moreover, people of the pre-industrial era lived in times far more technologically stable than our own; decades, even hundreds of years could pass with little change and yet history eventually passed them by: One must always be mindful of the nonlinear processes of chaos.

Museums, old halls, and gardens cluttered with decaying stone ornamentation will forever be associated in my mind with H.G. Wells’ book “The Time Machine”. In that book Wells’ Time Traveler happens upon a museum of the future. The museum’s custodians have long since departed and now the museum, along with its surrounding disheveled garden setting, are slowly starting to suffer the ravages of time; their short day of quasi-stasis has ended. When the Time Traveler comes across the fossil bones of a megatherium eroding under the leaky roof of the museum we are reminded of the depths of time and repeated cycles of deposition and erosion this fossil has already witnessed and which are now slowly restarting. Accordingly, our attention is drawn to the outermost frame of human history:

Wells' time traveler .. has to learn to accept his limitations as a human being and to become perceptive to the cosmic perspective, the view of human reality that an impartial external judge might have. (Benison, “The Time Machine”, Cideb Reading classics, 1994 Page XXXVIII).

There is a sense in which we all find ourselves in a position similar to Wells’ time traveler in as much as we inevitably inhabit somebody’s future, surrounded by their defunct and decaying artifacts. Moreover, in the absence of a specialist’s acquaintance with history, we, like the Time Traveler see these artifacts uninitiated by an historian’s knowledge. We therefore experience the full force of their mystery and enigma. They were not put there to pique our curiosity or to provide intelligible clues as to their story. Therefore like Wells’ Time Traveler we must find within ourselves the curiosity and native wit needed to unlock their history, and above all their meaning. As so often is the case when we happen across the legacies of the past there is, as there was for Wells’ Time Traveler, no kindly NT interpreter waiting to explain it all to us; instead we are thrown on our own resources and thus have to make our best guess as to the story, meaning and purpose of what we see. In "The Time Machine" the mystery of story and meaning is symbolised by a stone sphinx set in the garden world of the future.

The Riddle of The Sphinx: Answer the riddle and the sphinx will let you pass.

The adventure in which we find ourselves is no less exciting than that of H.G. Wells’ Time Traveler who was faced with almost impenetrable riddles of history and meaning. A mood of deep mystery pervades all historical sites. For the insatiably curious problem solver whose daily bread is enigma, it is great comfort to know that the supply of mystery is all but inexhaustible.

Stuff the sphinx, I had better get back to my job.