Designed to preserve the UK’s architectural heritage, the modern listed building system has its 70th birthday this year. A massive amount of redevelopment was foreseen in 1947, and no one wanted to finish what the German bombers had started and demolish even more historically important buildings.
And so a list was compiled to determine what was worth keeping and what could happily be knocked down – a list that is still maintained, these days by Historic England, formerly part of English Heritage. But how do we know we’re preserving the right things? Who are we to determine what will and won’t be valued by posterity?
While the listing of older buildings is uncontroversial (almost everything built before 1840 is listed), modern architecture is a different story, and both inclusion and exclusion have provoked ire.
What to one eye might be a concrete abomination is a modernist masterpiece to someone else. Postwar architecture in particular forms only a tiny fraction of the list – about 0.2% – and fights for listing are often also fights against demolition. In 2004, Portsmouth lost the Tricorn centre – a “pile of elephant droppings” or a brutalist classic, depending on whether you’re Prince Charles or not – after a final attempt to get an official stamp of historic importance was rejected and the bulldozers moved in.
And tastes do change – the heritage charity the Twentieth Century Society was established in 1979 to protest against Lloyds of London replacing its City of London headquarters with one designed by Richard Rogers. Rogers’ building was itself listed in 2011 – becoming the youngest building to receive Grade I listing, partly at the urging of the same society that had opposed its construction in the first place.
If you’re going to keep building interesting stuff, sooner or later you’re probably going to have to decide whether or not to knock down something else to make way for it, unless we just want to preserve the entire country in aspic.
Even if we accept that there must be an arbiter of “important architecture”, there are things on the list that no one considers of any particular architectural interest: a fairly ordinary house on Northmoor Road in Oxford, for instance, is listed just because JRR Tolkien wrote his novels there.
While this is no reason to immediately demolish the place either, it’s not like he carved the original draft into the walls, or rebuilt the roof to look like a dragon. Is there really that much to be learned from observing the outside of a house where someone imagined a thing that everyone may have lost all interest in a hundred years hence? Tolkien’s former house has certainly got nothing on one of the listings announced for the 70th birthday of the system – Underhill, an underground home in West Yorkshire that does actually look very much like something from The Hobbit.
So how do we avoid the ire of our theoretical descendants, sick to the back teeth of all these lovingly preserved Georgian farmhouses and pining for a nice 1970s shopping centre? Even putting it to a public vote gives too much weight to the aesthetic whims of the day: plenty of Parisians would have been happy to knock down the Eiffel Tower in its early years.
Perhaps we could institute a “listing lottery” in which each year a number of properties are picked at random out of a hat – that way architectural preservation can’t be influenced by anyone’s aesthetic opinions. If we’re going to be arbitrary about this, let’s be truly arbitrary.