Rising East Online

Editor’s Letter

The Heritage Gap

‘Heritage-free zone.’

Walking through Canary Wharf on a warm evening in July, having just left the Museum of Docklands where Patrick Wright [link] had lectured on the prescience of London’s past, one senior member of the London East Research Institute (LERI) was prompted to suggest that the Wharf is a world without the past, where all that is solid is built anew; moreover, that inside the museum the LERI debate about Heritage was miles away from the people on its very doorstep.

But look again at Canary Wharfers, and we’ll find their lifeworld imbued with lineage and its connotations; for every personal artefact, a heritage.

Take, for example, the unexceptional business suit, so worn because it is unexceptionable. Suppose it is a pinstripe. The first thing we might notice is that this year’s stripes are exceptionally wide; or even, in the last few months, noticeably narrower than before, but if the latter this is so as to be seen not to be wide. Either way, ‘the pinstripe’ is a take on the pinstripe, a reading of the suit and its heritage filtered not only through decades of corporate wear and tear but also refracted through the pinstripe’s appropriation in Bonnie and Clyde and again in Lock, Stock and Barrel, via the heritage-conscious ultra-Brit designs of suit and shirt makers Hackett, and in implicit recognition of widespread public concern about fat cats, City slickers and wide (striped) boys. Lineage-lite, perhaps; but nonetheless a kind of heritage.

From this vantage point, between the reputedly memoryless, modern world of the Wharf and the rest-of-the-world as Old Curiosity Shop, there is really no heritage gap: both realms relate to the past; hence they are also related to each other. We are all living in an old country.

There is yet another angle which highlights similarities rather than differences in psychogeography.

What is Heritage for? If we understand that the Past as we choose to construct it, is necessarily a response to conditions of the present which are not of our own choosing, then by the same token we must recognise that the Past ain’t wot it used to be. Perhaps it once meant past glories deployed to give added lustre to present ones, or even to act as substitutes in the absence of the latter. But in the present the Past is a much-prized means of connection to substance, permanence and predictability. That which can show a continuous line into years gone by, however spurious, serves as a refuge against the attack of the superficial, temporary and arbitrary – all of which seem to be more emphatically present in the present-day. In a world where character is constantly corroded, Heritage serves as a prefabricated form of character-building.

Yet Heritage is not alone in this. In our craving for substance, we often resort to iconic, airbrushed representations not only of the past but also of the present. Just as Heritage frequently makes a myth out of the past, so Brands and their significance (even among those who are against them) make myths of the world even as we produce it. In both these urban mythologies, past and present are equally mystified.

In this aspect, while Heritage is distinctive in that it builds a structure of feeling around interpretations of the past in particular, it is also part of a wider trend towards the mythification of everyday life, where, in the UK at least, capital gravitates more towards product promotion than product innovation, and re-describing the world takes precedence over re-building it.

My hope is that, by providing a platform for the discussion of Heritage, this issue of Rising East will help, albeit in the tiniest of ways, to reverse this perverse order of priorities.

Best

Andrew Calcutt (a.calcutt@uel.ac.uk)

Editor, www.risingeast.org

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