Abusing our heritage

YORK'S De Grey rooms were a favourite venue during the years of the dance hall craze. But since unspeakable bingo and unsingable disco have replaced ballroom dancing as popular art forms, these rooms have shared the fate of the whole nation over the same period: they lost an empire and failed to find a role.

Now the splendour has returned as the De Grey rooms are being used for local arts events. Marvellous!

There is nothing like seeing a building being used for a purpose entirely suited to its design.

So many fine buildings in Britain are being used for kitsch and pseudo purposes, as if we are living permanently inside a museum, or as if the whole land had been designated a heritage theme park.

I have a practical question. York Minster has a treasurer. In the City of York there is an historic Treasurer's House. Why doesn't the Treasurer live in the Treasurer's House?

In Helmsley there is a tea shop called the Old Police Station. All over the country there are houses which seem regretfully and nostalgically to proclaim that nothing is as it was and millions of gawping tourists live sentimentally in the past.

I suppose the most blatant examples of this national penchant for a romanticised past and a museum culture are the thousands of houses in dingly dell villages named the Old Vicarage. This is because the Church of England decided years ago that they could no longer afford the upkeep of these draughty old mansions.

So they were sold off, often at rock bottom prices and the vicar was moved into a smaller, modern house a bit further from the church.

This policy was accompanied at the time by canting rhetoric to the effect that the parson should not inhabit a larger house than those of most of his parishioners.

Now, of course, even these new houses are not as new as they once were and they too are requiring money to be spent on their upkeep.

Meanwhile, a genuine, functional living heritage - that of the real vicar living in a real vicarage has been lost forever. This loss has coincided with the church's institutional decline - but it is no mere coincidence.

For institutions are embodied things and if, as it were, you reduce the size of the visible body, you thereby reduce the significance of the institution itself.

The medieval cathedral builders knew this to be true. Even today's banks and the insurance companies know it and so they construct their offices on prime sites and on the grand scale.

Behold the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.

BRAVO Carr Junior School, Acomb, for bringing back the school uniform! What a blessed change from the designer-scruffy - and ludicrously expensive - outfits so many of our youngsters feel obliged to wear.

This subject is closely related to what I have just been saying about buildings and their purposes. How you dress influences behaviour just as the design of a building affects its function. Manners maketh man.

If children dress in the grotesque garb of the American high school morons everywhere featured in TV series, then the tendency will be for them to adopt similar behaviour.

It all goes together: the trainers, baseball cap, baggy jeans, chewing gum, designer slouch, the spitting in the street, the raucous, slovenly accent and bad language. Whereas a simple, relatively inexpensive, uniform at once confers dignity, pride, honour, respect and institutional solidarity.

The yob clothes are also of course a kind of uniform and they confer precisely the opposite.

Just one sentence in the Evening Press report made me laugh out loud. "The school has had an optional uniform for several years ..." But an "optional uniform" is like being a bit pregnant or fairly dead! Congratulations to Carr for going the whole hog.

THE Home Secretary has announced targets by which he hopes to ensure that more people from the ethnic minorities will joint the police force. I have a friend in Bradford who has been a black policeman for many years.

I rang him up the other day to ask him what he thought of Jack Straw's scheme. He said: "It's not the alleged racial prejudice of the so-called canteen culture of the white-dominated police station. Young black men and women who let it be known they want to join the force suffer the worst discouragement and abuse from fellow blacks among many of whom there is a long tradition of regarding the police as their enemies."

Too true. For a generation, left wing propagandists in this country have sneered at the police as 'pigs', 'filth' and 'scum'.

Television drama has encouraged this denigratory attitude. Only this week, for example, there appeared on BBC2 the drama The Cops - yet another anti-police diatribe from Tony - 'chip on the shoulder' - Garnet.

Against all this ideological contempt and lying propaganda, Jack Straw can hardly hold out much hope that his targets will be hit.

23/10/98

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