Heritage: A History of How We Conserve Our Past
James Stourton
Head of Zeus, £40, 496 pages
James Stourton chooses a quotation on the theme of loss to begin this excellent and companionable tour of the British heritage movement: from its Victorian origins, through the cris du coeur of the post-war era, to today when the National Trust and English Heritage (with the Historic Houses Association on their heels) have turned heritage into a national post-leisure religion.
The achievement of this book is to show how heritage today has been radically re- invented by the heritage lobby into something that “belongs to everyone”. No other nation has anything approaching such a cult-like devotion to its architectural history (sorry: “built heritage”). The story of England is also the story of our buildings, and nobody could be a better guide than Stourton: biographer of Kenneth “Civilisation” Clark and a former chairman of Sotheby’s.
