There is no doubt that Prince Charles has learned patience as he waits for the highest office. He’s definitely a solid hand in playing the long game. His campaign against modern architecture began with a 1984 speech at London’s historic Hampton Court in which he rejected a proposed extension of the National Gallery as a “brutal ember”. The scheme was immediately dropped. As heir to the throne, he said, with no apparent self-awareness, he saw it as a problem for the vanguard to become the institution. He continued to build Poundbury, his classic-style village outside the town of Dorset in Dorchester. Charles also established his Institute of Architecture which among his six founding principles was “Build Beautifully”.
Besides Prince there were traditionalists such as Tweed culture warrior Sir Roger Scruton, who blamed social decay in the 1960s and believed, against all evidence, that beauty is not only immutable and eternal but linked to morality. This was in the midst of the culture wars of the 1980s that pitted Thatcherism against the so-called political correction of local councils.
Culture wars are in full swing
Three decades later, the culture wars are back in full swing. The stroke with which governments have responded to calls to overthrow monuments since the death of George Floyd in May 2020 is not surprising but it should be seen in the same context – a struggle for cultural hegemony.
This time, the traditional lunatics succeeded in taking over the asylum. Reactionary anti-global ideas, modernity and modernity itself are on the rise. Conservative appointees (generally men) have been appointed to the boards of cultural institutions such as the British Museum and the BBC. The National Middle Class Trust is quite under attack as an “awakened” to exploring colonialism (a similar report by English Heritage several years ago did nothing like outrage itself). Laws have been proposed that would issue longer sentences for destroying a statue for rape. The government’s policy of “preserving and interpreting antiquities” essentially amounts to keeping everything and not interpreting anything.
This is not unique to Britain, of course – just look at Viktor Orban in Hungary or the wars of history in Poland, or the artificial anger by Macron’s government over Islamism, Joshism, mosques or other visual expressions of Islam. Other countries with a phobia of minarets include Switzerland, Spain and Denmark. In Germany and Eastern Europe, modern city centers are being rebuilt after the war replacing Historic neighborhoods full of fake traditional architecture. The same was happening under Donald Trump, who issued an executive order requiring all new Federal buildings to be in the Classical style. Beauty and tradition have become whistle-blower words for drunken white supremacists over the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that sees the cultural annihilation of Christian Europe at the hands of immigrants. Classicism is not by its nature right-wing but traditional architecture has become a preferred medium for the right and the far right.
Ideas of traditional city-making have been brewing for some time, now propelled by right-wing think tanks such as Policy Exchange and Legatum Institute, who are hostile to both public housing and market shackles, and now their followers in government. Policy exchange reports inspired the government’s “Build Better, Build Beautiful Commission”, chaired by the late Sir Roger, which pushed a traditional architectural agenda. Among the findings are proposed design codes for areas that would make it difficult for board planners to resist developers checking code boxes. One of the main characters is Scruton’s assistant Nicholas Boyce Smith, a former financier and advisor to former British Prime Minister David Cameron, who succeeded Scruton on the Better Build Committee. He set up Create Streets, which champions the creation of traditional towns, and is now England’s Historic Commissioner as well as chairing the new Government Office for the place.
Although it is expressly intended to enhance beauty, the opposite is more likely because it is intertwined with a torch of planning controls. This makes it easier, for example, to convert homes and offices into substandard housing without planning permission and reduces the public’s right to object to bids. A schematic white paper would turn the post-war order on its head and create streamlined areas to encourage development. It is as if a Georgian speculative originator pattern book could be applied to the twenty-first century.
For the time being at least, the worst excesses of the traditional style have been thwarted: for example, the “fast track” proposal by planning development deemed beautiful as unworkable. The white paper is being reviewed after the Conservative Party lost the Chesham and Amersham by-elections last year, in part due to voter fears that the countryside is tangible. The direction of travel, however, remains.
Monuments, where historical values and narratives meet, is simply the obvious end of this culture war. In many ways, they are a distraction. In Britain at least, the pernicious iceberg is tradition combined with free-market bents to give developers free rein.
• Robert Bevan He is a member of the Public Kingdom Diversity Committee in London, which is holding a roundtable on contested heritage this month. He writes in his personal capacity. writing, Huge Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth of the Past, to be published later this year by Verso