I was set off by a radio programme; some worthy gent banging on about the lovely spot he lived in and how the developers were going to ruin it by gasp, building houses.
Listening to him go on about how he'd have to find somewhere else to live or else perhaps kill himself, I could feel my blood pressure rising. At what point does this man want history to stop? Right now, that's where. "This is as close to paradise as it gets," he intoned.
Most people would prefer an earlier date to call a halt at -- without, of course losing any of their own creature comforts. They want their village to look, say, mid-17th century, pre-Industrial Revolution, but they still want a TV, stereo, washer-drier, dishwasher, fridge-freezer. Bury the power lines and put the satellite dish under the roof tiles. And erect the mobile phone masts over near that ghastly council estate, thank you very much.
It's all down to taste, snobbery, a kind of middle-class fascism and my pet hate -- nostalgia. They yearn for "simpler times", these people, before the hedgerows were all ripped up, before the mucky moral dilemmas posed by genetic engineering, before traffic jams and mass tourism. They may trick it out as a concern for the environment, like the man on the radio programme, but it's not.
Is he living in a wattle-and-daub hut with no running water? I doubt it. Leaving aside the fact that the meadowed landscape he so admires was once thickly wooded. Charcoal burners laid waste to Britain's forests hundreds of years ago. What he objects to is people, people who won't share his "good taste", his appreciation of the beautiful landscape. He fears progress in his face. He wants a fridge, but he doesn't want to see the ugliness that produced the fridge.
I've seen this kind of poison working elsewhere too. Like in Zanzibar -- I spent a week there once in an idyllic spot, a guesthouse in a tiny village on a beach. No electricity, one standpipe providing all the water. A group of us tourists were invited to dinner by a local shopkeeper, who told us how they hoped to get a power supply soon.
One of my fellow tourists was most upset. "It will all be spoilt," she wailed later. For whom, exactly? She was going to go back to her flat in Frankfurt or Paris or wherever, with all mod cons; she wasn't going to have to cook her dinner over an open fire by the light of a hurricane lamp, walking half a mile to fetch water. She wanted the villagers to stay the way they were so that in a couple of years' time she could come back for another week of "paradise".
Nostalgia poisons architecture too, especially domestic architecture. The new houses being built up the road from me could date from the 1950s, or even earlier. Here it is 2002, but there's not a solar panel in sight. (The main thing that shows they're modern is that the sections are so small.) Stop history, we want to get off! cry the British. Maybe the failure of tower block living put them off Brave New World experimentation, I don't know. But I do miss the quirkiness of New Zealand homes -- you can tell when they were built so clearly, from the colonial weatherboard to goofy 70s and 80s round windows and taradiddles.
There are modern homes here, but they're rare and very daring. Modernity is mainly reserved for public and commercial buildings. Even there there's a lot of nostalgia-driven timidity. Prince Charles is at the forefront, tut-tutting at anything dramatically new. I bet he'd love to turn the clock back a few hundred years!
It is the nostalgic attempt to recreate the past and the dismissal of the achievements of the 20th century - apparent at Poundbury and in the prince's speeches - that has earned him enemies. Among them the architect Piers Gough, who says Poundbury would have been an interesting experiment in 1802 - but not 2002. 'He doesn't seem to be interested in culture,' Gough says. 'He doesn't seem to be interested in the world going forward. He wants it to go backward.' -- From Architecture Week
No comments:
Post a Comment