Broken Propylaeums Heritage! The Battle for Britain's Past

The Second World War had been a fight for the nation's

survival against the Nazi war machine.

Aerial bombardment on a scale never before known, had killed huge

numbers of civilians on the Home Front.

It had also destroyed much of Britain's architectural heritage.

But out of the ruins was born the modern listing system that signalled

a new, hopefully safer,

future for the best old buildings of Britain.

But as the Victory cheers faded for Winston Churchill

and he was booted out in the general election of 1945,

so the war-weary British turned their backs on the past.

Surely it was time for a new and brighter future?

Before the war, only a few fashionable followers

of "Continental Chic",

and, of course, the penguins at London Zoo, had flirted with

modernity and modernism. Now it would become the popular mood

of a nation embarking on a 30 year love affair with the future.

History was in for a rough time.

It was even called The Rape of Britain.

But heritage laws and organisations had never been stronger.

And the personalities of the movement

would become national figures,

egging the public on to fight back as modernism became discredited.

Heritage would make an astonishing come-back,

as it adapted to survive in the modern world.

In 1945, Clement Attlee's Labour Party

swept to power in a landslide victory.

Armed with the slogan "Let Us Face The Future",

Attlee promised the nation a new start

and the people wanted to see it happen, fast.

The Labour Party's great victory shows that the country

is ready for a new policy to face new world conditions.

Welfare reform was top of the Attlee agenda.

The creation of a National Health Service that would work for the health of everybody.

But even more pressing after the war,

was the provision of new housing.

A new generation of architects was ready. Architects with

a bolder vision than any doctor for how the nation's health

and happiness could be achieved.

They believed modern architecture would solve all modern ills.

Waiting in the wings was the new man of the moment - the town planner.

History was dead, long live the future!

In all devastated cities, there are some people who long for the past.

They would like to see their town rebuilt exactly as it used to be.

But of course where there has been

so much destruction, that's out of the question.

Now would somebody switch off the lights, please,

and we'll have some pictures.

The new visionaries would re-invent our towns and cities.

And as post-war Germany and Poland rebuilt

lost historic streets, Britain embraced ring roads

and zoning. The car would be king, the city would be a machine.

A new world was rolled out.

And nothing must stand in the way.

Because post-war construction went hand in hand in England with

the notion of modernisation that

meant clearing out the old world all too often,

so city centres would be rebuilt, we would have

inner city ring roads, we would build motorways. Everything that

was old and fusty and dirty and war-damaged really ought to go,

to usher in this clean new world,

which went alongside national health spectacles,

nice filled, clean teeth and clean hair, free of nits,

and all good things, But the level of

destruction was absolutely extraordinary.

So often it's said of course that more damage was

done by developers than the Luftwaffe achieved, and there's

a great deal of truth in that.

Often you find when you look into the history of places

that a lot of the destruction took place AFTER the bombing.

Buildings that could have been restored were then swept away.

There was a huge programme of demolition. A determination

to rebuild town centres along modernist lines of re-planning.

There was a huge plan to re-arrange the whole of Whitehall.

They were just going to leave Westminster Abbey

and the Houses of Parliament but the whole of the rest was going to go.

And many towns and cities were re-planned in a very aggressive way.

Well that's the plan the architects have drawn up

for the London of the future. What a grand opportunity it is.

If we miss this chance to rebuild London,

we shall have missed one of the great moments of history.

We shall have shown ourselves unworthy of our victory.

The war, it turned out,

had been a style war as well as a fight against the Nazis.

Final victory would only be assured in modernity.

Old buildings were seen as part of the problem for society,

rather than part of the solution to creating a sort of

new identity for a new Britain.

And I think that the massive demolition of housing,

of Georgian terraces, of Victorian terraces,

the huge destruction of public buildings, of churches,

of country houses, all those things,

were seen as a way of transforming society,

getting rid of the sort of detritus, the stuff that was holding us back.

And it was into this confusion that the first peacetime army

of government listing inspectors advanced.

They set off enthusiastically around the country to mount

a counter-attack on behalf of history.

The new system was impressively well thought-out

with grades one to three

categorising the historic built environment of Britain.

But, as ever, it didn't go far enough.

Georgian buildings remained under-rated.

Humble buildings often slipped through the system

and Victorian buildings were positively dismissed.

It was also the age of the filthy city.

In 1950s Britain, any urban building more than 50 years old

was covered in the soot and grime of industry.

It consigned so much Victorian exuberance to the demolition gang.

A great deal of prejudice had to be overcome. It's sad really,

it's a fact about human beings, that when buildings are dirty

and decrepit, people cannot see beyond the dirt to what's underneath.

People had long regarded Victorian buildings as hideous

and worthless, when actually most of them were still standing

because they were so well-built.

By the middle of the 20th century, everything Victorian was just hated,

laughed at, despised.

The ignorance and the disdain

that the 20th century felt for the Victorians was

about like what the 17th century, on the whole, felt for the Middle Ages.

These things were thought to be old, crumbly, embarrassing, overdone.

And so everything that the Victorians represented,

solidity, permanence, detail, elaboration - were absolutely out.

But in 1958, in the comfortable streets of Kensington in London,

at her Victorian townhouse, the Countess of Rosse,

former society beauty and future mother-in-law of Princess Margaret,

summoned like-minded friends to her home.

The dirty figure of Victorian architecture

was about to be embraced.

There was a lot of gush about her,

but behind the gush, she was a very tough, capable lady.

I've just been coming across letters from her to me recently

and they all start, "Very dearest Mark."

But I'm sure all her letters started that way.

And she had this lovely house in Stafford Terrace where they used to

give frightfully good parties that were very glamorous and enjoyable.

Fuelled by hefty cocktails, mixed by the butler,

it was agreed a new society should be formed,

with a single mission in mind -

to ensure "the best Victorian buildings and their contents

"do not disappear before their merits are more generally appreciated."

It was fun, it was lively, we were pioneers, we were going to

save Victorian architecture. We got drunk in pubs together,

we went on outings

and it was all very enjoyable. I know there was someone

called Ivor Idris, who was the first treasurer, who was Idris Soft Drinks.

We were very impressed by him

because he was a businessman. Nikolaus Pevsner

of course a professional art historian, there was

Canon Mortlock who was an amusing person. Mrs Christiansen, who had

a lovely sort of tinkly voice like the tinkling of a bell. We were very

friendly, we didn't have rows at the committee meetings in those days.

And I never spoke at all, because I hate committees

and am very bad at them.

So John Betjeman said, "Dear little Mark,

"so good and never speaks a word."

But beyond the cocktails and the glossy banter,

the Victorian Society meant business.

And two of its members would come to define the post-war heritage world.

And, as ever, heritage seemed to attract opposites.

The romantic verses the academic.

Nicholas Pevsner and John Betjeman were colleagues -

and at times friends. They had a very different view of the world.

It was quite inevitable,

they came from such different backgrounds, one from Hampstead in

North London and one from Germany, and they couldn't be more different.

One, a professional art historian,

the other, a wilfully self-conscious amateur and dilettante.

Pevsner had studied History of Art at the universities of Leipzig, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt.

And while he was an ardent admirer of the supremacy of German Modernism,

he devoted his doctoral thesis to the German Baroque.

Stripped of his university lectureship by Nazi anti-Jewish laws,

he emigrated to Britain in 1933.

Pevsner was extraordinary, As chairman of the Victorian Society,

he gave the society seriousness and clout which he used to great effect.

He sort of transformed the society

from being a rather small, amateurish organisation

into something governments listened to and took note of.

And Pevsner's other astonishing achievement, of course,

is The Buildings Of England, which none of us could do without.

I mean, nobody else except I think Pevsner could have started

and finished The Buildings Of England.

Absolutely essential tool, because knowledge is power.

In his trusty Austen 1100, and taking 23 years to do it,

Pevsner methodically criss-crossed the country, cataloguing

England's most important buildings.

Well, now for Barrow. Mind that dog! Now for Barrow, we go straight...

The result was 46 volumes of The Buildings Of England,

followed up by series on Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

And these were not guide books, but each volume

an inventory of a county's architectural assets.

Buildings were dated and appraised with academic precision.

And up there, a type of capitol which is

unmistakable for the architectural historian

and which one can date around 1170, 1180, that sort of thing.

Now there are leaves on these capitols, broad rather fleshy

leaves, and those leaves turn at the tip inwards. They do this

sort of thing, the Ionic Greek Order, does that sort of thing.

Now, where you find these capitols, you can be sure you are about 1175

and that must be the time when all this was built, rather quickly.

Every building of importance was to be included, with Pevsner

the nation's self-appointed new arbiter of architectural quality.

And since Pevsner was as much at home with modernist architecture

as medieval, the range of building types was

greater even than for the government listing operation.

The evening before each day, my mother would sit down with

the map and plan the next day,

which places would be ticked off.

And they would set out at about nine o'clock in the morning,

and they would get to the first village or church

or house, and my father would jump out with a clipboard and paper,

and they would do the outside, then do the inside.

They would stop briefly for a picnic lunch, which my mother had prepared

the previous evening. And they would go on till about six o'clock,

and at about six o'clock they would reach where they were

going to spend the night, and they would have supper.

And then my father would sit down and he would write, from his notes,

of all the things that had been seen that day, until about midnight.

That was seven days a week for a month.

The programme was to do a county in a month,

each of those journeys was one month.

And while Pevsner travelled by car, Betjeman went by train.

At Oxford, his tutor declared Betjeman an "idle prig."

And indeed he fell effortlessly into the country house weekend

arty set in pursuit of upper-class girls.

But Betjeman needed to work, describing himself

as "a poet and a hack."

The combination would make him a natural on television.

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station

Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam

City of London! Before the next desecration

Let your steepled forest of churches be my theme

Sunday silence! With every street a dead street

Alley and courtyard empty

And cobbled mews

Till tingle tang the bells of St Mildred's Bread Street

Summoned the sermon taster to high box pews

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station

Toiling and doomed from Moorgate Street puffs the train

For us of the steam and the gaslight

The lost generation

The new white cliffs of the city are built in vain.

What inspired him, what he cared deeply about was the indeterminate

beauty of England,

the beauty that can't be labelled, the ordinary streets,

the brick terraces, places that give character,

that aren't famously beautiful,

but are ordinary and characterful England.

He saw buildings very much belonging in landscapes.

They were never divorced objects. That's why telly was so good

at showing that, that you could do a pull shot away

and see the surroundings and how important it was.

He was a natural show-off.

And he was a real pro,

because a lot of people in those days

were quite stiff and embarrassed.

So that was a very good platform for him to campaign on.

I can remember when where we are now was the Manchester Hotel

and where this bracken and rosebay grows, once, down in the passages

which are tiled, you can still see the tiles,

once people hurried along with trays of tea.

And now all that remains is this.

And the bombed ruins there of Aldersgate Street station.

From the earliest days of antiquarianism,

and the study of ancient monuments, there had been a tension between

different approaches to history - the romantic versus the academic.

Now the antipathy seemed to surface once again.

This time, in the modern figures of Pevsner and Betjeman.

They were not friends, but I never heard my father say

to anybody or in any circumstances

anything other than that he and John Betjeman

did different things.

Pevsner versus my dad war, which was fanned by various academics

into a ridiculous bonfire of trouble,

um... wasn't there at all really.

I mean, they didn't loathe each other, they got on fine.

He was critical of the fact that there was not the rigorous

discipline of history of art

and history of art education in this country that he had grown up with

in Germany, that history of art was a...

..much more amateur in England.

My father was romantic about buildings, and I think that's

because he had emotional reactions rather than academic reactions.

I mean, he never, ever said a date to me

in my whole life, I don't think, it was just, "Isn't this beautiful?"

He thought what John Betjeman did, I suppose,

- not meant derogatorily - but he added cosiness

to the idea of conservation,

especially of Victorian conservation.

And my father's approach to that was different.

They both, in their own way, brought the value of the fabric

of England to the public, so what does it matter

if they did it in different ways - my dad through his gut

and Pevsner through his knowledge, his academic knowledge?

It doesn't matter.

Because they've both done a bloody good job.

Betjeman and Pevsner - together with the Victorian Society -

would lead to the most important heritage campaign of the era.

The fight to save The Euston Arch from demolition.

The biggest Doric arch ever built in Britain,

completed in 1837 in the Greek Revival style as the entrance

to London's first big railway station.

It is more correctly called a "propylaeum" - the classical term

for a free-standing arch leading to somewhere of great importance.

No-one, alas, seemed too sorry to say goodbye to the old station.

But the arch, with its heroic scale and romantic scale,

rallied the public to its defence.

It seemed to have qualities lacking in the post-war world.

The Victorians built to last.

They built this gateway to Birmingham in granite,

now, 125 years later, it's to come down.

But who is this pushing his way to the foot of the gallows

with a last message of hope?

Who but Mr John Betjeman of the Victorian Society?

Why should we bother with this arch?

It was the first arch, the first bit of railway architecture,

in the world of any size.

It's very grand scale. Fine stone, granite.

And if it were moved forward,

in front of the new Euston Station,

it would be the most magnificent public monument in London.

Moving the arch forward would have been a simple operation.

But in a Britain craving modernity and functionality,

a symbol to a bygone age had no meaning.

Even the ageing Prime Minister

seemed to have forgotten his history.

Conservationists like John Betjeman took the issue right up

to top levels - the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

Harold Macmillan, who just dismissed it,

was a classical scholar.

When he had been wounded as a young officer in the First World War,

he lay in a shell hole on the Western Front waiting

to be rescued by the stretcher bearers and he sat,

you know what he did there? He sat reading Aeschylus in Greek.

And then he happily dismissed the Euston Arch,

one of the greatest pieces of Greek Revival architecture in England.

The great villain, of course, is Harold Macmillan.

Dreadful man who couldn't care a damn, cynical old Whig that he was.

But the arch could have been dismantled or moved,

as people showed at the time. It wouldn't have cost that much.

One editorial in the Victorian Society annual,

I think, said that the cost of moving the arch was less

than that of buying two rather indifferent Renoirs,

which had just been acquired by the nation, which nobody was threatening to destroy.

Demolition work began in December 1961.

It was brutal, but at least the arch was spared explosives

because of the danger to adjacent buildings.

The Victorian Society mournfully reported,

"With regret, we must accept the reduction of the Euston Portico

"to rubble as a total defeat, but not without the satisfaction

"of having fought inch by inch

to the last ditch for its preservation."

The lorries bore away the bones of the arch -

according to rumour to become hardcore for an airport runway.

It was our first battle, it was a great defeat

but at the same time, it was a noisy defeat.

DRILLING

This campaign brought many, many people together

to preserve the arch. And the important thing about the campaign

is that it lost.

And so there was a kind of feeling of, "Never again."

So, the heritage movement made new alliances, gained new friends

and adapted to fight in the modern world.

Plans by British Rail to demolish the Victorian masterpiece

of St Pancras station were successfully resisted.

But there were more defeats, too.

London's great Coal Exchange was demolished.

The Beeching Report took an axe to the rail network,

closing Victorian rural stations up and down the country.

And in 1964, the demolition gang came for Jardine Hall

in Dumfriesshire, the family home of Captain Ronnie Cunningham-Jardine.

Yes, it was a very happy place.

One was spoilt most damnably, looking back on it.

Everything was big, had to be big.

The staircase, you could have marched an army up and down it,

you know, all abreast.

And me being a little fella used to swank to my friends that our house

was really big, compared with theirs

which was probably just as big!

Built in 1818 by Scottish architect Gillespie Graham, who had worked

on the Classical glories of Edinburgh New Town,

the house was handed over to Captain Ronnie by his mother in 1962.

It was handed to me, and then I suddenly realised, "Help.

"What am I going to do with it?"

I didn't think it was old enough to be a visitor attraction.

It was a just...a mausoleum

So I eventually said to my mother,

"I really think I want to get rid of this place."

She said, "Well, I can understand, Ronnie, but are you sure

"you're doing the right thing?"

And I'm afraid I said, "Yes, I think I am."

And very upset she was.

And so then I got on to a firm of demolishers in Glasgow.

And they said, "We'll just have four sticks of gelignite in each corner

"of the house, and away she'll go."

Come on, boys. Come on, boys.

Come. Come on. Come on.

Now, Captain Ronnie lives in the estate Dower House.

But the big house still casts a shadow.

1964 I blew it up.

1964. I can't remember the month.

But this is about the place where my mother and I stood

to watch the blowing up. Of course, in those days there wasn't

this line of trees here, so you saw the whole house standing

completely bare, and a very good view.

And hopefully no rocks

and things were going to come this far from the house.

So here we stood, and we waited.

And I remember holding my mother's hand, and this is where she went up,

but it did take us, I told you, four times before she actually went up.

A big boom. Like, solid boom.

My mother, she was upset, she was indeed.

But she'd had a good life here the whole time

and this was her home, destroyed.

There we go. Very moving.

And then we went away and had a cup of tea, I think.

That's what I think it was.

Anyhow, it was a bad moment, but it had to be done, in my opinion.

The demise of Jardine Hall was echoed all over Britain.

By the mid-'60s, hundreds of great country houses were in trouble.

The trickle of owners bringing their sorry stories to

the National Trust had turned into a torrent.

But it was clear no single organisation,

no single tax arrangement, could hope to deal with the problem.

It would usher in a new age of entrepreneurial experiment.

ROARING

For good or ill, the lions of Longleat re-invented the country house.

And if a marquess was there to take your money at the gate,

so much the better!

If you don't see any lions, I'll pay you your money back.

That's a guarantee. Let me know, I'm the boss here.

People will drive through with their windows open,

and they put their elbows out.

They must not do that. If they do it, it's their own fault.

It's a wonderful feeling that it's alive once again,

maybe it's not the same type of people for which it was built,

it doesn't matter to me. After all, these big houses

originally were built by ancestors to entertain their guests.

Now, these people aren't my guests, but they are in a sense guests,

except they have to pay 3 and 6 to be my guest!

Other houses such as Woburn, Beaulieu and Chatsworth proved money

could be made, but heritage needed a new look to attract big numbers.

At Woburn in 1967, The Festival Of Flower Children was the ultimate new look.

The National Trust was being left behind.

There was an enormous row in the National Trust,

a conflict between what you might loosely call the progressives,

who had an image of the trust becoming a very popular

organisation with mass support, and the more reactionary element

which said we're not in the business of bringing in millions of people

and having a mass membership. And that led to a great deal

of acrimony and difficulty and an Annual General Meeting when feelings

ran very high. And after that, a committee of taste was set up.

And the result of that was that they considered lots of things

which the National Trust might sell.

And the committee came to the conclusion

that every one of them was not worthy of the organisation.

And... that might have been the end of the story.

But actually, the chairman

and others were determined that progress should be made.

The Trust's timing was spot on.

In 1968, 20 million people a week for 26 episodes

tuned in to see the grumpy, money-grubbing, feuding Victorians

in the BBC's adaptation of The Forsyte Saga.

Heightened emotions set against period architecture

made gripping TV.

And suddenly every National Trust property seemed to have more of a story to tell.

Hello, Forsyte. Well, I've found the very place for your house.

Look here.

You may be clever, but this site will cost me half as much again.

Hang the cost, man. Look at the view!

The climate was in favour of a change at the Trust.

Perhaps, after all, you could have a tasteful bestseller.

It was the birth of tea towel heritage.

"Dear Miss Albeck, I venture to write to you as your name has been

"given to me by Mary Trevelyan.

"The Trust wants to commission one or two designs for tea towels

"incorporating subjects associated with the Trust -

"buildings, birds, flowers etc.

"I understand you have designed some attractive things of this sort."

This is the very first National Trust tea towel that I did,

which was for a house in Devon called Saltram.

And it's a design using copper pans,

a sort of pattern of the things that you'd find in the kitchen.

But these are specifically from that kitchen.

Copper is a nice thing to draw.

Particularly I like the shape of jelly moulds.

The other one is based on the Adam carpet

which I really did not want to do, because

I thought it was really sacrilege to dry up on a great designer's carpet.

But I did what I was told cos I had to, really.

From the Trust's founding symbol of the oak leaf

to the comfy aristo-cats of country house living,

even a well-stocked stately home larder,

it was the perfect middle-class souvenir.

By the late 1960s, the arrogant front of British Modernism

was beginning to look flimsy, increasingly low-grade, even cynical.

The ambition of the movement, always unrealistic, had been undermined

by a bankrupt post-war economy and local government corruption.

Indeed, from the start, corners had been cut.

The modern world had been built physically around

the National Health Service, education and beyond,

was largely in new forms of architecture that were at the time

fairly cheap, cold, dull, pretty uninteresting,

that many people have come to despise in England.

It wasn't our finest moment in architecture.

The modern movement in Britain, Modernism in Britain,

was adopted awkwardly, late and rather badly,

and cheaply, for the most part.

The end of Modernism - or at least, the beginning of the end -

had come in a spectacularly tragic fashion.

The collapse, after a gas explosion, of a substandard skyscraper

called Ronan Point in East London killed four people and injured 17.

But in spite of the demise of Modernism,

the attack on old buildings continued for several years.

By the early '70s it had reached unbelievable intensity.

There were plans to demolish Piccadilly Circus,

Carlton House terrace, the Foreign Office,

the whole area around Parliament Square...

I mean, the most appalling things were going to be done.

Covent Garden was going to be like Paternoster Square in the City,

it was going to be flattened. The Strand would become London Wall,

I mean, it was horrific.

And I think a general feeling that "Come on everybody, stop! What are we doing?" took over.

We have got to show physically, by demonstration,

even with marches, and standing outside of town halls,

this is what we have got to do, we've got to let them know we're here.

By 1975, according to the new pressure group

"Save Britain's Heritage," the country was losing a listed building every day to demolition.

Never a guarantee of protection,

the listing system was now being undermined by the get-rich-quick rewards of development and councils

after cheap and easy solutions.

The fight back united people all over the country.

Civilisation was at risk.

We can stop them. It isn't too late.

Campaign alliances crossed traditional class divides

and party politics to create a new force to be reckoned with.

It'll take all history away, they'll do away with it completely.

This is renowned and this should not change, certainly.

-Oh, no leave that.

-You'll ruin us.

-You'll ruin it, man.

-It's beautiful as it is.

Heritage undoubtedly enters the sort of mainstream of people's

consciousness, of people's concerns, in the 1970s

and it's a direct response to the destruction of historic places,

historic places that were beautiful

and more importantly historic places that people felt they owned.

The places where they lived,

the places where they worked were being crunched up and taken away and replaced with concrete,

and that was not something that people liked.

Nostalgia grew like Topsy, it was a fascinating moment if you look,

whether it was in fashion, in music, in design, in architecture,

you get this retro look, this heritage look starts to...

Starts to become dominant, whether it's Laura Ashley dresses

or neo-classical architects starting to get work again,

and now "let's hang on to what we know."

And what we know and what we've always been good at in this country

is craft and countryside and Cotswold cottages. Back they came.

They could have shouted in the streets "Modernism is dead, long live Heritage!"

And if the moment needed a headline, they got one

when 1975 was declared European Architectural Heritage Year.

Materially, it changed nothing.

Emotionally, it changed rather a lot!

It was a very imprecise term and still is a very imprecise term,

and can cover everything from our natural heritage to our built heritage,

to music, painting, all sort of things.

Heritage is a horrible word. I think we all hate it.

I much prefer history,

but that implies a sort of written, bookish history.

I always try not to use the word heritage,

and yet heritage is the word that means so much, that it's useful.

I think in the end heritage is whatever we really care about.

Heritage is so much more...

ideologically unstable an idea

than the idea of conservation or even restoration.

It's something which is more emotional and, in my view,

more ideological, because the question is, whose heritage is it?

But the word "heritage" seemed to open things up.

The upper class version of history, a mainstay of tourism and visitor attractions since the war,

would be challenged. The Heritage industry was expanding.

Although, as working class heritage stood to gain a voice,

so British working class industrial life - for real - died.

And it wasn't the only irony.

It is the supreme paradox

that most of the mainstream conservation bodies in Britain

came into being as a reaction against the horrors of

industrialisation and the effect of industrialisation on the landscape.

All of that makes one realise how radical an idea it was to propose

the preservation of industrial sites because there was no sentiment

amongst official conservation bodies that was sympathetic to that idea.

There's a lot more to architecture and the nation's history and our architectural heritage

than country houses, and always there has been a slight regrettable snobbery

about people who are particularly obsessed with country houses,

but there are many of us who are concerned about architecture, and we live in cities and

we care about urban building where perhaps different values operate.

The working classes of Britain, their history,

was best told through a study of industrial sites.

Industrial revolution had begun in this country,

enormous historic interest in the processes, in the products,

in the way of life of most of the people in this country.

And yet heritage had, it was felt, been fixated on ancient castles, earthworks,

smart, aristocratic houses. What about everyman's history?

The interesting aspect of it is that the official heritage bodies,

the Department Of The Environment, as it was to become,

and the National Trust didn't know how to cope at all.

It was entirely off their radar in terms of their ability to

appreciate its importance,

and certainly their capacity to handle it in a physical sense.

Industrial sites were a nightmare.

They were huge, they were very expensive, they were often

built out of materials that were designed to last

as long as that industrial process was being done and no longer,

so they were rapidly decaying.

And the scale of the problem that was faced in terms of industry

was so much greater, exponentially larger,

than country houses, than castles, than anything that had to be faced before.

A single coal mine, the amount of money that was needed to save it

was so much greater than any amount of money that had been

put forward in terms of saving heritage up until that point.

The Office Of Works, or as it had now become, the Department Of The Environment

bought its first industrial site in 1974.

It was a bobbin mill in Cumbria. Stott Park had been

producing bobbins for the cotton industry for 150 years

until its closure in 1971.

This was a real rescue mission to save the last factory

doing an activity which the industrial might of the nation was built on the back of,

and to keep it operational, which also was very, very important because most monuments that

had been taken on and opened to the public were, if you like dead.

They were places where things HAD happened, and where you

had to stand and say, "Well, this is where such and such used to happen."

It's the automatic bobbin machine which you're going to do

probably 9,000 a day on here.

Just feed them on, then you bore the hole through, take 'em off

and put another two on.

Then take them off, then put another two on.

Now, next stage is we're going to finish these and go round

and put on the finishing lathe.

To go to a place where the activity was actually going on

was a completely revolutionary experience both for the visitor,

but also for the Department of the Environment

when they actually took the place on.

But as industrial visitor sights

- railway stations, factories, disused mines - grew in popularity,

the country house - so infinitely re-inventable - fought back.

Suddenly, life "below-stairs" was more interesting

than all the fine fripperies of the drawing room.

BELL RINGS

One National Trust property in particular led the way.

Erddig in North Wales broke the mould.

Actually, the Trust, in a quite pioneering way, this was in the '70s, decided to present Erddig

as entirely from the servants' perspective.

And that was really exciting and visionary and new

and actually what we discovered was really, really obvious - people love hearing about the servants,

because they don't necessarily connect with the great families.

People connect when they think their great-great-grandmother might well have been a kitchen maid.

They don't think she would have been the Dowager Duchess.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street

with the biggest new broom since Clement Atlee.

Privatisation and increased profit was the order of the day

and heritage was not excused.

In spite of her embrace of Victorian values,

she would seek to reverse the work of John Lubbock

whose Ancient Monuments Act of 1882

had first committed the state to acquiring the nation's heritage.

Her first Secretary Of State For The Environment, Michael Heseltine,

had clear instructions.

Privatise the ruined abbeys and castles of Britain!

The National Trust was a very important part of the thinking

because here was a private sector organisation

running very important parts of Britain's heritage,

very successfully, and

depending on public subscription or access fees or whatever.

And my first option was to go to, I think it was Lord Gibson at the time who was chairman,

and say, "Look, why don't you take over the state-owned sector?

"Make it into one major operation?"

And I'll never forget his reply.

He said, "Not with your trade unions,"

because he would have inherited what, quite frankly,

was the quite unacceptable union approach to what we were trying to achieve.

So he turned it down as an idea, flat.

In the end, the Thatcher government opted for a series of quangos.

English Heritage was created in 1983, Cadw in Wales in '84

and Historic Scotland followed on.

Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who had commercialised his own home

so successfully in the 1960s, was the first chairman of English Heritage.

The mere appointment of someone like Lord Montagu,

as opposed to bureaucrats of whom people would not have heard,

was an indication of the new priorities

we wanted to establish, the new image we wanted to create.

It was about finding ways of commercialising

and running more cheaply, the vast number of historic buildings

that the government had collected since the 1880s,

and so a major brief that was given to Lord Montagu

was, "Make 'em exciting!"

Make those castles live and dance and sing for their money!

And that's what he set out to do, essentially.

And ever since the 1980s, the cut and thrust of the heritage market

has meant fancy dress is on the up.

And what's harmless fun for some is the unforgivable

compromise of authenticity and atmosphere for others.

There is of course great tension in the heritage world,

in how you, not only preserve, but present buildings. And I suppose

it's sometimes a form of snobbery that one rather objects to the

vulgarisation of houses with people dressing up. I mean, I don't care for it myself,

it's partly a matter of taste,

but it does mean sometimes you can't actually enjoy the building there

that you've gone to see.

And so the whole world of people dressing up I personally, erm,

don't care for. Obviously some people do like it.

Darling, good evening!

We have got to maintain our income.

We now have to do that in a very competitive climate.

Now, some people say, "You shouldn't go down that route,

"you're selling out, you're Disney-fying."

I just don't think we are.

We've plenty of things to learn from Disney, I've got great respect for the Disney organisation.

The competition for visitor attraction at weekends is intense.

We've got to keep up with the game.

In fact, today's approach to heritage is more mixed

than many reports would have you believe.

The tranquil, the studious authentic - even the untouched look -

still has a place and may even be making a comeback.

At Calke Abbey in Derbyshire,

not only is there no singing-and-dancing,

but the house is frozen at the critical point of its demise -

a through-the-keyhole glimpse of the life-or-death moment of a stately home.

Here, long-suffering cleaners must know the difference between

"heritage dirt" to be saved,

and "modern dust" to be vacuum cleaned away.

Commercial it isn't!

Calke came to us in 1985,

so anything that fell before 1985 is historic and it can stay.

Anything after that, which is probably created by our visitors

and our building works, has to go.

So we have got a nice sort of line about what becomes historic dirt

and what becomes dust.

I think our dirt and dust is Calke and it is our heritage

and it's something that we try and keep

and pass on for future generations.

At Stonehenge, as well, tranquillity is set for a comeback.

The prehistoric site, which has been a barometer of the heritage industry

since the days of Britain's first Inspector of Ancient Monuments,

is set to recapture some of its romance and mystery.

English Heritage plans will see the nearby section of the busy A344

wiped off the map later this year.

It's certainly been in recent times described as a national disgrace.

I'm feeling how much better it's going to be when we can get rid of

those fences - and the road is gone and it's all back to grass land.

And to really get a sense of what it would have

been like in ancient times to arrive at this fantastic monument.

So how does the future for heritage look in Britain today?

Inevitably, there are challenges ahead.

I think the National Trust has always been almost a paradox

but it's certainly, we're about many different things.

We're about muddy boots in the countryside,

we're about saving the uplands and the coast,

we're about nature conservation - moths, birds, bees and so on - and

we're about Chippendale furniture, Adam interiors and fine paintings.

It's not always easy to keep these things in tandem.

But they are in tandem. They all depend on one thing -

us having the money to do it.

For English Heritage, the biggest challenge is

the listing of modern buildings.

But now the process has caught up

with contemporary architecture, the bad old days of unappreciated

styles falling through the net, supposedly, are over - even though

the process can be hugely under pressure in times of recession.

Ever since the shock demolition of the Art Deco Firestone Factory

on the outskirts of London by a devious developer in 1980...

English Heritage has been empowered to list architecture

from between the wars.

Now, post-war architecture is covered as well, and even

a 10-year-old building at risk can be listed.

The youngest listed building is currently Lloyds in the City

of London, designed by Richard Rogers and completed

in 1986. And it can only be a matter of time before the Gherkin follows.

Other choices are more controversial.

Listing recent buildings is the single most difficult thing

that English Heritage has to do, because in the listing process

you're both following taste and you're leading it.

There are some people who already appreciate buildings that

were put up in the '70s and '80s. There are equally quite

a lot of people around who lived through the period when they were

put up and think they're diabolical, ugly blots on the landscape.

And so the job of the listing inspector is to steer

the way between those two lots of opinion to work out what is

really important for future generations. And those

judgments are extremely difficult and can be extremely controversial.

Imaginative re-use will be the mantra of the heritage movement in the future.

Two great examples show the way -

the resurrection of St Pancras Station in London as the nation's rail-link with the Continent

and the re-invention of Bankside Power station as Tate Modern, London's home of contemporary art.

And maybe, just maybe, a third is about to surface.

The Euston Arch, whose demolition triggered the modern heritage movement 50 years ago,

is set to rise again.

Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank located the remains of

the arch at the bottom of the River Ley in East London back in 1993.

The stones had been acquired by British Waterways from the

demolition contractor to plug a hole in the bed of the river.

Now many more stones have been raised from the river bed, and with

plans to redevelop Euston Station after the government's recent

go ahead of the new high-speed rail link between London and the north,

the chances of a resurrected arch have never looked better.

Dan is meeting with structural engineer, Alan Baxter.

This is one of the capitals of one of the Doric piers,

framing the columns on one of the corners.

We can see exactly where this stone was

on the measured drawings of the building we've got

- executed at the time in the 1950s by British Railways -

because they wanted to demolish it.

So it's a beautiful piece and it gives us a sense of the scale, the

precision, the Grecian architecture.

That's of course from demolition.

We can fill that in. Look how accurate that still is!

We worked out that of the stones of the arch,

the arch had about 4,400 tons of Bramley Ford grit stone used

to construct it in the late 1830s and there is certainly well over

60% down there, well over, and it's in incredibly good condition.

And this is fantastic, it's withstood 130 years of soot

at Euston and has enjoyed 50 or so years of a nice bath.

It's in incredibly good nick.

They have been really, wantonly demolished.

When it was destroyed, they could have been

taken down stone by stone and other arches, like Marble Arch, was moved.

It was really vandalism.

And you can see the damage that has been done,

but it's easy to repair it when we put the arch up again.

For Dan, who believes the Euston propylaeum is one of the greatest

structures ever made, there is one all important question.

Coming on to money. Huge areas of speculation,

not sure how many stones we can get back,

not sure how much repair is necessary and so on and so forth.

In current terms, in 2012, what do you reckon is the figure?

I know it's slightly plucking it from the air.

With your huge expertise and experience what do you reckon?

Well, I think we costed it at £12 million

and then the commercial value of the room at the top

and the basement might be a couple of million.

We just need £10 million, please,

and there is a collecting pot for the Euston Arch Trust!

This is a very hopeful moment for the arch,

but for a lot of other things, too. It's not that I'm an excessive

optimist but it's a much,

much better climate now for the care of cities, for the care of what

we have from the past - but also for creating really wonderful new things, too -

so it's a time for a really interesting fusion of new and old.

For more information about English Heritage's complementary exhibition to the series,

visit bbc.co.uk/battleforbritainspast

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd