forargument’ssake opposing views aired


1. Ruins: adapt for new use – or preserve as they are? Sir Simon Jenkins and Jeremy Musson


fortification as not just security but “central to the character of residence and social identity”. While on the continent castles continued fit for purpose into the 19th century, in England they had mostly followed monasteries into collapse by the middle of the 17th. England thus started early on ruination.


Simon Jenkins


furiously walking, digging and rescuing relics of the past. The British Museum recalls the venues of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and, perhaps, whatever the RAF leaves standing of Libya. Meanwhile, publishers are chiselling ever more tomes from the walls of castles and abbeys. No self-respecting coffee table is without a leg-buckling volume of ruination. The architectural writers Jeremy Musson and


A


John Goodall are the latest priests of the cult to celebrate its mysteries. Musson’s English Ruins exults in such shrines as Glastonbury, Fountains, Dunstanburgh, Bodiam, Cowdray and even Battersea power station. England to him“is a landscape of ruins”. Not a town is without some clump of tumbled stone, telling of “the rise and fall of dynasties… of great follies and long-forgotten certainties”. It does notmatter if the original is a Norman keep or the boarded-up houses of Yvette Cooper’s “Pathfinder” northern ghost towns. They are grist to Musson’s mill of fossilised history. John Goodall has produced amajestic survey,


The English Castle, from themottes of William the Conqueror to the follies of the Stuarts; from the Tower of London to the effete fantasies of Hardwick and Bolsover. To Goodall the castle is a symbol of an ancient aristocracy that saw


74 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 2 2011


bad omen is at hand. The cult of the ruin is back. Imean not just the return of such modern “ruins” as the Great Depression, Liberal coalitions or royal weddings, but ancient ones too. Television is


It bequeathed the Georgians an astonishing collection of gaunt and gutted structures, ready for the Romantics to swoon over and the Ministry of Works to grasp to its bosom and timidly surround with nationalised grass. While old cathedrals and churches were vigorously restored by the Victorians, to be repaired and updated ever since, most abbeys and castles were frozen in time. They were for the delight of scholars, but their mounds of stone were largely meaningless to the public. England’s ruins are a collective memorial to the unknown archaeologist. Since both authors are acolytes of the cult,


neither dares challenge this state of affairs, though Musson hints that “ruins may yet have a future of revival and new purpose”. He does not elaborate on what we should do with them. There must be tens of thousands of wrecked properties in England, fixed in the “untouchability” convention of themid-20th century.Are they to remain unvisited by restoration or reuse for all time? When a modern building is blasted by bombs


or gutted by fire it is restored, give or take help from the insurers. It is not seized by English Heritage and declared ruinous for ever. Some have luckily escaped the frigid grasp, as when Hampton Court, Windsor and Castle Howard were ravaged by fire and restored before anyone could declare thema ruin. Bury St Edmunds Cathedral was even given a new gothic tower for themillennium. Mostmedieval buildings leave us numb. We take one look and reach for the rule book.


LOOKAND REACH FOR THE RULE BOOK’


BUILDINGS LEAVE US NUMB.WE TAKE ONE


‘MOSTMEDIEVAL


Masonry and rubble must be “stabilised”. Puddles ofmortar are all that may indicate the location of naves, cloisters and towers.Around everything should be mown grass, its edges three inches from any stonework. All seem the same, with the same bareness, the same notices, the same lawns, the same health-and-safety railings. Goodall’s castles and Musson’s abbeys are rendered soulless, their past and their purpose evoked only in artist’s impressions. The unschooled imagination must be stirred by wind, trees, surrounding fields and cawing rooks. England’s past is rented out to spooks and necromancers. To themore confidentVictorians, ruins had


none of today’s cold ideology. They studied the past not as relic-worshippers and object fetishists but to stimulate the present. They restored medieval buildings, where they could, for reuse. Infused with the boldness and sense of drama of the middle ages, they adapted ruins to adorn the most go-ahead civilisation on earth and imitated its style to their glory. To theVictorians, modern architecture meant Big Ben, St Pancras, Manchester town hall, Cardiff Castle and a new WestminsterAbbey. Nor was this confidence confined to England.


Most of “medieval” Europe is a 19th-century restoration, and much that is “ruined” is reconstructed, from Mussolini’sAgrigento to Rose Macaulay’s Palmyra and its “golden ochre colonnades…of broken daffodils”. Fromthe Sainte Chapelle to Gaudí’s Barcelona, fromthe Kremlin to Carcasonne, from Cologne Cathedral to Ottawa’s parliament, 19th-century architects gloried in themedieval past and adopted it for a no less glorious future. Having wandered most of the ruins described


by Goodall and Musson I have no doubt of the care with which they are protected. Compared with the degeneration often seen in France and especially Italy, where Pompeii is a disaster area, we can be thankful we have the expertise and money to guard what survives. But we seemto have exhausted all imagination in what to do with them. There are glimmerings of a new approach in English Heritage’s bold reconstruction of the Dover Castle interiors. But for the most part English ruins are stuck in a marriage of


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