28 January 2015
Leaving It Alone
by J.R.Thomas
In two esoteric worlds last week there was fluttering and muttering as a philosophy of conservation, long the focus of academic contention, was debated yet again. Two very different worlds; one a country house of world architectural importance in Surrey; the other an obscure railway in central Wales. But both encapsulate the difficulties of conserving what we value, and making the old useful for the future.
The house is Clandon Park near Guildford, an early Georgian pile with fantastically ornate baroque interiors, designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Leoni for the Onslow family. The Onslow’s were not an especially rich or leading family, but they built a magnificent house and hung onto it for over two hundred years. In 1956, faced with huge running costs and a hostile tax regime, they gave their house and some of the contents to the National Trust. The Earl of Onslow retained most of his land and moved out to the bailiff’s house nearby. The National Trust was able to procure a generous donation of china, textiles, and crystal to refurnish the rooms, opened the house to the public, and life then continued into the better financial conditions of the twenty first century.
Until last April, when an accidental fire destroyed the entire interior of the house, except one room, and engulfed almost all the contents. It was a disaster for the Trust, for the Onslow family, and for Britain’s architectural heritage. It was apparent very quickly that the house, although the shell stood safe, was not capable of repair internally, the destruction being so complete that there was nothing much left to repair. The Trust’s insurance assessors now compute the likely pay-out (to cover “reinstatement” and replacement with similar contents) at over £60m. Last week the Trust announced that it would seek to “replicate” the main rooms of the house and to make new spaces for public uses on the less architecturally important upper floors.
Leaving Clandon for the moment, we move to the remote and unfashionable coast of mid Wales north of Aberystwyth. Now a minor retirement and holiday destination, many of the mountains behind were in the nineteenth century major centres of mining and quarrying; the brutal slate quarries which now seem a natural feature of the dramatic landscape provided the rooves to many Victorian red brick streets in northern cities. From the Bryn Eglwys quarry above Tywyn on that coast, slate went to a far more distinguished roof – that of Westminster Hall, when re-roofed in the 1870’s. The quarry and the Great Western station in Tywyn were linked by a six mile long narrow gauge line, the Talyllyn Railway, built in 1865. It had two engines, four carriages, and a lot of slate wagons. In 1911, the bankrupt quarry was bought by the local MP, Sir Haydn Jones, who kept the quarry operating and the railway line running to ensure local employment. So forgotten did all this become, hidden in its remote valley, that in 1947 the Department of Transport overlooked that the line existed and it was not nationalised. Yet it still staggered on, having never bought any more engines or rolling stock, the railway just two rusty lines in the grass.
In 1949 it was discovered by LTC (Tom) Rolt, probably the greatest, certainly the most romantic, British transport conservationist of recent times. He had previously been effectively the leader of the movement to save what was left of Britain’s canal network. One day he drove in his vintage Alvis over the Welsh mountains and discovered the Talyllyn Railway. Less than a year later Sir Haydn Jones died and the railway closed. But only for the winter. Rolt became utterly determined to save it. It was the most extraordinary time capsule that he had ever come across, the romantic railway, its ancient engines, limping carriages, decaying buildings, over grown track, and, not least, loyal rural Welsh passengers. Rolt and half a dozen friends were hooked, and moved to Tywyn to operate and preserve it.
They succeeded; now the Talyllyn is one of Wales’s leading tourist attractions, hauling endless loads of passengers up and down the line, with several extra engines added to the original two, and modern comfortable coaches. There is a museum, tea rooms, shops, lavatories, large car parks, workshops, sheds and sidings for the carriages.
The Talyllyn occupies a special place in the hearts of many steam railway enthusiasts, but it has also become quite controversial in the arcane, not to say eccentric, world of railway preservation, because to make it viable, much of the romantic decay was swept away. Now the controversy has been given a further stir. A new book “Talyllyn Pioneers”, on Rolt and his group of friends, by Michael Whitehouse, the son of one of them, has provoked an attack by Roy Link, a leading steam enthusiast and railway publisher. In his review of Whitehouse’s book Link ponders “if the term preservation is really correct for the Talyllyn Railway and other preserved railways. In order to keep them running, all sorts of alterations are required, [so much that] ….often the character that first attracted [the preservationists] is lost.”
You may think that is all hot steam in a smokebox; but how repair and reuse and preservation interlink is a difficult subject in many different conservation circles.
Which brings us back from the Welsh Mountains to the Surrey Hills. You might expect that the present Lord Onslow, the National Trust having announced that it intends to spend some £60 million pounds on repairing the seat of his ancestors, would be pleased and grateful. But far from it, and using Roy Link’s same logic: “Clandon is lost. It’s a ruin now. It decayed instantly. This sad site should be left in peace and tranquillity.” He advocates spending the insurance money on helping another house, or several, which need assistance with repair, or the creation of long-term support funds. His point is that whatever is built will be just a modern copy, with bought-in contents which have no connection to the facsimile house. The National Trust are keeping a diplomatic silence at the moment and promising to consult widely but anonymous officials have pointed to various positive angles of creating reproductions of the interiors – that it keeps alive the various highly specialist skills needed for such works, and that the Trust is a conservationist organisation whose moral duty is to put back, if at all possible, what was.
This was an argument used with great force by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, after the IRA Bishopsgate bomb completely demolished the medieval church of St Ethelburga’s. So little was left, and the destruction around it so great (and the land value of the site so high) that most people involved in the aftermath, both in the City and the Church of England, assumed the site would be sold for development. (With, no doubt, a small plaque to commemorate the history of its former use.) The Bishop was having none of that; nobody, he said, would have proposed the demolition of such a beautiful and historic church; and the only correct response was to put it back. That is what was done, albeit with some minor internal amendments, and St Ethelburga’s sits in Bishopsgate as though nothing had ever happened.
We live in an era when our wealth, especially in south east England, and the enormous inflation that that has produced in land and building values, means that we must use buildings to their greatest economic efficiency. The human species is very good at finding philosophical and rational reasons, often sub-consciously, as to why what we want to do, is also the right thing to do. Justification may follow need, and often does. So, from that spirit of the 1980’s, when careful repair and reinstatement, and indeed new work in the style of the old, was the thing, through Richard Chartres’ determination not to be beat, we have now reverted to the conservationist philosophies of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
The great twentieth century Venetian conservationist architect, Carlo Scarpa, is now the exemplar for many modern architects. He believed in a clear reordering of buildings that no longer worked for their original purpose, in schemes that displayed the history of structures, often (literally) cut away to reveal historical layers, but where the modern form was clearly displayed, of the utmost quality, and formatted so that it made the building suitable for its modern use. That is effectively what has happened at the Talyllyn Railway (though, one suspects, without much academic deliberation among the preservationists); and a model the National Trust might want to consider at Clandon.
As the electronic digital flexible age swirls ever faster into view the way we use land and buildings is likely to evolve ever faster too. Let us hope that we have no more disasters like Clandon; but how we use buildings, and how we modify them to ensure maximum utility is likely to become more controversial, and the battles between those who would conserve by adaption, and those who wish to change as little as possible will intensify. “For things to remain the same, everything must change” mused the Prince of Lampedusa in his great novel, The Leopard. He was talking about society, but he might just as well have meant building conservation (and steam railways).
