Understanding and valuing rural heritage

Our understanding of what heritage is, and how it is valued, changes over time and place.

This idea is illustrated by Parkinson and Pendlebury [1] through the different values that have been placed on rural heritage in England and Ireland, and how this has manifested in each country’s planning regime – a restrictive system for rural development in England versus a more pro-development system in Ireland:

“England and Ireland both have rich, heterogeneous rural landscapes and rural built heritage, encompassing both aristocratic grandeur and humble vernacular. Whilst both countries have great variety encompassing distinct landscapes and typologies, not shared across the Irish Sea, there is a degree of shared history in the forces that formed the appearance of these places today and specifically in terms of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy. However, how these landscapes and their attendant buildings are understood is very different between England and Ireland due to profound differences in the cultural and political histories of these countries.” (pp.406-7)

This has led to very different values being assigned to rural heritage:

“In England, the landscape values produced have been normalised as something beautiful and important in constructions of national identity. These values have, in turn, fuelled a wider romanticisation of the rural and been important in the evolution of a planning approach of strict control in the open countryside. In Ireland the cultural context is very different. Whilst the notion of a Gaelic rural idyll was invoked prominently in nation-building efforts in the early years after Irish independence, a low value has often been placed on rural built heritage, aspects of which have traditionally been linked with collective memory of colonial domination. This, in tandem with a contemporary political and planning culture that tends to celebrate development, leads to a quite different approach to management of rural heritage.” (pp.398-9)

In recent decades, these approaches have resulted in ‘bungalow blight’ in Ireland and a lack of affordable homes in many rural communities in England. But if the value placed on heritage is culturally constructed rather than intrinsic, this suggests that it has the potential to develop alongside – and respond to – other social issues and concerns.

Indeed, the romanticization of rural England has changed over time, though its role in the country’s national identity has persisted, and this chapter charts its evolution: from nascent industrialization to modernity and rapid change; from the influence of well-known figures such as John Ruskin and William Morris to the foundation of the National Trust and then the planner-preservationism of the interwar years; and from the post-war 1947 Town and Country Planning Acts to the introduction of National Parks and AONBs (1949), green belts (1955), and further layers of heritage protection in the 1980s and 1990s. (pp.399-402)

The divide between urban and rural has led to the ongoing ‘preservationist paradox’ (whereby rural protection increases the desirability of certain rural locations, leading to migration from urban areas, with incomers then often fighting to preserve what brought them to that place [p.402]). Yet our urban areas have significantly changed over time, and in many ways there is far less of an urban-rural divide than there was.

If our understanding of what heritage is and how it is valued will continue to change over time and place, how might the current situation continue to evolve?

Parkinson and Pendlebury note that in Ireland attitudes are slowly changing, in part due to the importance of heritage for tourism (p.35). Change in England is slow, but perhaps we will see a convergence between these two positions, whereby both countries create a better balance between heritage and growth. In some places, heritage has been used to deliver change, and as a means of supporting development that is unique to that location. In others, heritage has long been used as a means of preventing change and maintaining the status quo, which gives rise to a number of questions:

• How do communities identify their local heritage and decide what is important?
• What needs to be preserved and what could be changed or adapted?
• How does an understanding of heritage help us to respond to challenges we are facing today?

[1] Parkinson, A., & Pendlebury, J. (2019). Conserving rural heritage: The cases of England and Ireland. In The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning (1st ed., pp. 398–409). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315102375-41

(Image on main news & blog page: Library, book, bookshelves. Photo by IdaT via Pixabay)