THE ENVIRONMENT

To conserve—or to plan?

LIONEL BRETT

It has become conventional for the boom- ing conservation movement to take on board the preservation of old buildings, even though the motivations of rural and urban conservation are different and even conflicting. The first is impeccably sound economics even though its aesthetic effects are sometimes questionable. The second is aesthetically delightful, but its economics are often suspect, much disputed and in fact not at all easy to quantify. It is also worth noting that while the first, as a discipline, is a bit of an exotic in this country, which for centuries pursued rural conservationist policies (like many others) without realising it was doing so, the second has an honotir- able history here, dating well beyond William Morris's foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. For example the City Fathers of York voted to preserve Clifford's Tower as a building of historical and architectural interest in 1596.

All the same, there has been a remarkable change recently, and here the two move- ments have certainly influenced each other. Ten years ago, the preservation of ancient buildings was mainly, and naturally, of interest to ancient people. As people grow older, their childhood world seems to them more beautiful and more stable than it really was, they feel the brutality of change more than its creativity, and they see re- flected in the homogeneity of mediaeval artifacts or of Georgian towns a lost order, a lost hierarchy, which age, rather than Youth, must always feel the need of. Yet it was the students or young graduates who struggled at the eleventh hour to protect old Woburn Square from a new building by a first-rate modern architect, who planned a sit-down to boost the York Conservation Report, and who wrote in my Landscape in Distress: 'there was t ot anything exciting in our area that hadn't been there for centuries: The superficial, obvious explanation is that 'modernism', with its contempt for preservationists and its blinkered belief in Its tidy Welfare state, happened to be their Parents' hang-up. This was reinforced by the general disillusion with the achievements of post-war architecture and planning, so sound by the book and so dull in practice. But I think it goes deeper, and that while it is the enfolding quality of an old town which appeals to the old, it is its casual, thrown-together quality which appells to the young. It is noticeable that it is the old town they go for, not the individual old building whose appreciation may need a bit of scholarship or visual expertise. They conspicuously do not go for the New Town. Anyhow, whatever the psychology, we now have a conservation movement that, while still obviously a minority in opinion poll terms, is more broadly-based in terms of age and class than any such before.

Government response has been threefold. First, the listing of historic buildings; second, discretionary grants for repairs or conversion, available from the central gov- ernment for buildings of the highest calibre and from local government (with luck) for others: third, the designation of urban conservation areas. The fact that the first is

a central government responsibility, the second mixed, the third local, indicates•

the importance officially attached to each activity, and the traditional but now some- what outmoded view that it is individual buildings we are concerned with rather than total (and continuously changing) environ- ments. Certainly it is on this last and newest of the three, the conservation areas, that thinking has been woolliest so far. Are they mere signposts, like 'areas of outstand- ing natural beauty' in the country, meaning: 'This is rather nice; we must try not to spoil it'? Or are they a kind of action area, meaning: 'Here we shall spend money and make it as perfect as we can"? Negative or positive?

To judge by the spate of designations, and the cautious, non-committal statements

accompanying them, the negative is the

prevailing, because the less demanding, view. If it prevails, conservation areas will turn out as disappointing as areas of out- standing natural beauty, not merely in the sense that they will have no noticeable effect on the processes of urban change, but also in the converse sense of implicitly down- grading the rest of the town—downgrading all sorts of places that are in fact much loved and in need of care and protection. It might have been better, in town as well as country, to have gone in for less general- ised signposting and cut down our protected areas to an acreage in which we could afford to do something dramatic and unmistakable.

For it is all a question of economics. If a conservation area has any meaning, it must mean an area where the market pres- sures which historically have shaped and re-shaped our towns and cities are to be denied their normal authority: where values are to be shifted around, those of existing buildings enhanced, those of sites de- preciated, redevelopment diverted. This makes economic sense in Belgrave Square or the Boltons, but does it make sense where you designate the whole commercial centre of a historic town? Only in a severely modified form, in which, of course, you do not kill the centre by banning all redevelop- ment: instead you keep the listed buildings and demand a high standard of the new ones. But this is nothing more than ordinary good planning, such as should be going on everywhere. The conservation area has ceased to mean anything.

What I believe it should mean is this: an area of such outstanding quality that no demolition will be allowed in it unless plans exist, and are published, for a replacement that is unquestionably an improvement: that if this is questioned by any amenity society, national or local, an appeal will lie to the Minister or to some other suitably constituted appeal body: that owners if consequently refused permission to rede- velop have an automatic right to repairs grants or. in cases where they can establish the impossibility of 'beneficial use' of the old building, to its purchase by the local authority; and that the local authority, in default of such repairs, has the duty and not merely the right to carry them out-itself.

This would concentrate the mind wonder- fully, and we would overnight find conser- vation areas much reduced, but meaningful —showpieces, museum pieces, no doubt. and why not? Chipping Campden and Ludlow are museums in this sense, and none the less likeable and livable. Their care for these treasures, and their willing- ness to make their protection a part of their

normal budgeting, would be a test of the quality of our future local authorities.

The equivalent in the landscape would be the protection of the parks at Blenheim and Petworth—just as important and just as arti- ficial as the great houses themselves—and not much to do with conservation, if by con- servation we mean, as we are this year ex- horted to mean, the enlightened management of the human habitat as a whole. And here we come back to the risky element in all this aesthetic grading, whether it be of buildings, towns or landscape, which is that this fairly simple exercise may be regarded as a sub- stitute for the great task of re-learning how to live in the world. It is so much easier to recite a catechism than to do the right thing.

The then Lord Mayor of Portsmouth, de- fying protocol, wrote in the local paper in March of this year: 'People who have been compelled to vacate houses where they have lived for years, and leave behind them friends they have known for a long time, have been forced to go into the country, where making new friendships is difficult be- cause of the openness of development. Long- ing to return to the city, they frequently write to complain . . . We all welcome higher standards, but the occupants frequently

affirm that they are quite prepared to stay in their houses, and dispute that because the houses are old they are thereby unfit for occupation. Many have lived in such houses happily for many years ... For the past three or four years we seem to have done little more than tear the city to pieces, and we are still busy at work demolishing far more than the Germans did during World War it.' The Government intends its stepped-up im- provement grants to bear on this situation, but the programme of demolition and pack- age-deal tower blocks has a heavy momen, turn which will take many years to reverse.

What is required of architects and planners in the meantime is a much more subtle, prag- matic and inquisitive approach to the urban fabric as a whole than in the bad old days when it offered just a set of 'sites' for fine architecture. We have to learn from the natural conservationists to analyse it as an ecological system, so that our interventions are deliberately designed either to clarify the structure and sweeten its running, or else to replace it progressively by a better one. In such a system, conservation areas would be pretty toys, good for trade and tourism and a delight to possess. Good planning takes conservation in its stride.