Heritage Assets

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) on securing it. We can all agree that we have heard a wonderful history of Walthamstow’s inter-war cultural heritage, stretching from Clement Attlee to Keith Richards’s granny, via the dog track and the cinema. I can add to that oral history, because it is almost seven years to the day that I went to Walthamstow dog track in celebration of my forthcoming nuptials. I won successively and consecutively throughout the evening, so it was a very happy event.

It is good to have the Minister here. Over the past year, he has proved himself very open to the worlds of heritage and history. I pay tribute to the Government’s policy of returning to the lottery’s original causes and increasing funding to the Heritage Lottery Fund. Sadly, the Heritage Lottery Fund is now the only major funder in our heritage community, and although its resources are increasing, other resources are being cut. The achievement of putting money into the Heritage Lottery Fund is being undone by the terrible cuts to English Heritage, among others.

The Minister will travel south to Dover castle on Thursday to see the brilliant new installation exploring its role in the evacuation of the British expeditionary force from Dunkirk. Having had the privilege of seeing the installation yesterday, I can tell hon. Members that that work of scholarship, interaction and interpretation, which has been produced by Anna Keay and her team, is truly awe-inspiring. That shows what this country can do to manage its history and heritage.

However, English Heritage has had a 32% cut to its grant, which is higher than the cuts imposed on UK Sport, the Arts Council and Visit Britain. That leads Labour Members to question whether the Government share the enthusiasm and admiration that the Labour party has always shown for heritage. The Heritage Lottery Fund thinks that if we combine the cuts to English Heritage with the front-loaded cuts to local authorities, which often trickle down to conservation officers and heritage officers, we will see upwards of £600 million in funding extracted from the heritage sector, which could be very damaging.

However, we are here to talk about heritage assets. As my hon. Friend beautifully explained, it is important to recognise that buildings matter. There has been an interesting shift in heritage thinking over the past 15 to 20 years, with an extraordinary opening-up of the heritage vista and a reconceptualisation of what our past means, as we look beyond cathedrals, country houses and abbeys to the houses of the Beatles and even to public toilets in north London, although I might draw the line there.

As Britain has become a more complicated and diverse community, and with the success of television programmes such as “Who Do You Think You Are?”, the compulsion to look into our genealogy has accelerated. We have sought to explore ourselves, our histories and our identities. Although that is, in part, not connected to the built environment, I would suggest that it is often best explained through it.

As my hon. Friend said, the built environment is important for those of us on the left. We can point back to Hugh Dalton’s work with the national land fund, to the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and, of course, to William Morris, who lived in my hon. Friend’s constituency. As has been explained, he set up the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in response to what happened to Tewkesbury abbey.

For Morris, as for John Ruskin, progress meant going beyond the money-wage economy, spurning mass production and specialisation and rejecting some of the ethos of the industrial revolution. For Morris, old buildings—heritage—were signs of what freely given, unalienated labour could achieve. As Ruskin explained in “The Stones of Venice”, his wonderful account of the meaning of the buildings in Venice—you will remember, Mr Hollobone, his description of St Mark’s palace, which he compared to the Book Of Common Prayer—he was exploring history through the stones. Buildings were celebrations of work, faith and meaning—the very antithesis of a modern commodity—and protection was an act of defiance against commodification and capitalism; it was a defence of pleasure and humanity, a gesture of hope and possibly something of real, practical value for generations to come.

The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), will explain how, in our socialist future, historic buildings will be the germs from which socialist art will spring. In 1889, William Morris argued:

“It is degradation and not progress to destroy and lose these powerful aids to the happiness of human life for the sake of a whim or the greed of the passing hour.”

All of which makes the defence of our heritage assets so important. You will know, Mr Hollobone, that that is particularly the case in Stoke-on-Trent.

We have been greatly privileged to have had the publication of a wonderful book, which the Minister has no doubt thumbed conscientiously, entitled “The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent” by Matthew Rice, partner of the celebrated potter, Emma Bridgewater, and owner of the wonderful Meakin factory in Litchfield street, which, in case the Minister has forgotten, is in south Hanley. As my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow explored, it is a celebration of the sense of place—what Matthew Rice calls “cultural anchors”—to defend the urban environment and continue our connection with place and history. The work brings to mind the history written in the 1960s and 1970s as the city of Bath was being destroyed. Even as the heritage of Bath was being knocked down, people were crying out that it was a destruction of our link to the past and to history. What has changed since then is the understanding of our industrial heritage. Cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham have begun to lead the way.

Our hope in Stoke-on-Trent is that, having seen a swathe of devastation in the pottery industry—the loss of bottle kiln oven after bottle kiln oven—we are now beginning to think about the economic, social and cultural value of such heritage assets. If I may, I shall take a little bit of time to explore a few buildings—heritage assets—that illustrate the argument. The old Goss bottle ovens at the Falcon works are in Stoke town above the Portmeirion works, which now controls the Spode line of pottery. They are also known as the eagle works and have beautiful bottle oven brick kilns in front of a huge pot bank, which are falling into an advanced state of disrepair. They were sold by Portmeirion to a company called Connexa—no doubt, we shall not get to the bottom of how many companies are called Connex—in Crewe, which seems to have little connection with the commerce or history of Stoke-on-Trent or an understanding of the value of the asset to the area.

I have been in touch with Stoke-on-Trent city council to explore the possibility of an urgent repairs notice. As my hon. Friend suggested, such developments are expensive, but luckily we have a very good English Heritage team in the west midlands and there is some suggestion that the city council could apply for funding from English Heritage to support an application for a notice, but it is wary of going down that road, which is why my hon. Friend’s explanation of the reticence with which the laws are used is important. We need the laws to be used more regularly and more effectively, to make people unafraid of using them and to make them cheaper and more accessible, so that they become part of the armoury of defence for our heritage assets. We have lost so many kilns in Stoke-on-Trent; it would be a great crime to lose more. I hope that there will be action on that front. There are now trees growing out of them.

The old Spode site, which the city council has bought, is also in Stoke town. You, Mr Hollobone, will know the history of the kingdom of Spode and the great competition that it had with the Wedgwood family. Its huge, wonderful site, which went out of business only a few years ago, is in the middle of Stoke town. In one sense, it is not an at-risk site, in that to make such heritage assets work we must have a successful commercial model. The challenge in Stoke-on-Trent now is not simply about enveloping the buildings for their protection, but about working out how to use them. We are hopeful that with innovative thinking we will develop an economic model for the site, which will involve artists’ workshops, studios and second-hand shops. When the Minister comes to see the site, which I am convinced is only a matter of time, he will be excited by its new prospects.

What gives us hope is the recent success—we hope—of the Middleport pottery works, which are north of the city outside my constituency. If recent suggestions are to be believed, they may come within my constituency in future months, which would be a great boon, as we can imagine. The Middleport pottery works have received funding from the regional growth fund, the Prince’s Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund to revive the site and lease it back to a functioning ceramics company, Burleigh. That is a model of co-operation, local leadership and Government and quango action, all of which have come together to save an historic site. I am not enemy of quangos; indeed, I declare an interest as having served as a trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund. The results are absolutely vital for the economic regeneration of Stoke-on-Trent. As we build an economy based on our engineering businesses and ceramics sector, but also on tourism and heritage assets, having such cultural anchors and significant sites is important.

It would be remiss of me to stand here as an MP for Stoke-on-Trent talking about heritage assets and not mention the threat posed to the extraordinary asset that is the Wedgwood museum. A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the collection inside the building was now UNESCO designated and part of the Memory of World register. That shows an understanding that the extraordinary collection is of world-class significance. The Minister knows that the complicated issue of whether the collection is a permanent endowment held in trust comes to court on 13 September. There remains intense concern in north Staffordshire about its future. I hope that his Department is working night and day to have plans at the ready in case the judgment goes against us.

We need a sea change in thinking to begin to think about heritage assets not as obstacles to economic regeneration that need, in that great Glaswegian parlance, “to go on fire”, but as cultural anchors, vehicles for meaning and identity and economic assets for the community, which is why Matthew Rice’s book is so important. I agree 100% with my brilliant hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, who set out the policy options for the DCMS plan for the next four years on improvements to the at-risk register, the community right-to-challenge, local usage and restoration.

I shall end with the point that taking action on heritage assets should be more accessible and usable. We need to change the culture of use of heritage assets in the business world and in the community. We are enormously privileged to work in this environment. It is a make-believe environment, with which William Morris had certain problems because it was conjured up in the 1830s and 40s. Many of our constituents have had their connection to history, the past and their local communities taken away, sometimes for understandable reasons of economic growth, but we need to box slightly more clever when considering the value of heritage assets and what Government, business and communities can do collectively to preserve those things that matter to people.