Date: 14 November 08
Author: Dr Miles Glendinning, Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, ECA
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RIAS
In many countries, including England, governments tackle their archaeological and architectural heritage through unified agencies that not only physically preserve historic ‘monuments’ but also assemble records, ideas and representations about them – a conflation of policy-management and education, of administration and knowledge-seeking, that usually puts first the politically urgent pressure to ‘save buildings’, and reduces recording to a research arm of preservation, focused on ‘preservable’ elite monuments.
As a Scottish academic interested especially in the everyday built environments of recent centuries, from tenements to tower blocks, or coal mines to shopping malls, it’s a matter of satisfaction to me that we in Scotland can boast a very different heritage system, under which the researching and recording of knowledge about our buildings is dealt with by a dedicated agency – the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) – a specialised public institution more akin in its operation to a national library, archive or research institute than to a ‘Ministry of Administration’, and concerned with ‘ordinary’ as much as ‘elite’ buildings. And despite occasional misguided government attempts (most recently, and oddly, by our new SNP administration) to merge it and other heritage agencies into an English-style mega-bureaucracy, RCAHMS has survived and flourished, to the point where, in 2008, it has now reached its centenary.
To celebrate this centenary in a way that appropriately emphasises the educational and knowledge-based character of its work, RCAHMS has mounted a Heritage Lottery –supported programme, ‘Treasured Places’, of which this City Art Centre exhibition is the culmination. Earlier in the year, to catch the attention of people in all parts of Scotland, RCAHMS staged an innovative public competition, in which over 20,000 people voted for their favourite illustration of a ‘treasured place’ from a list of over a hundred drawings and photographs in the RCAHMS collection. Of the ten eventual finalists, some were predictable ‘heritage icons’ (including, inevitably, Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art), but several picked by the public – such as Glasgow’s Red Road flats or Cumbernauld Town Centre – were buildings that would never in a lifetime qualify for designation as ‘listed monuments’. Eventually, in a telling sign of the enduring emotional pull of Scotland’s industrial past on the nation’s collective imagination, the final winner was the Lady Victoria Colliery, home of the Scottish Mining Museum. Alongside the competition, workshops and exhibitions were mounted to engage the interest of local communities near the ‘top ten’, which also feature prominently in the present exhibition (marked by crosses on the floor).
After the inevitably somewhat populist overtones of the national competition, the substantial and palpable reality of this exhibition, and the high quality of the objects on display, in their dignified beech frames, come as a refreshing surprise. Spaciously arranged on two floors of the CAC, the arrangement is, basically, along traditional thematic building-type lines, with public buildings and community spaces (‘Places we gather’) on the lower level, and housing (‘Places we live’) with commercial/industrial (‘Places we work’) on the upper floor. At each level, the interest of younger visitors is engaged by well-placed puzzles and activity zones, while a continuously-running film explains the history of the Commission. Within these overall themes, around the set-pieces of the ‘top ten’, objects are grouped in eclectic and intriguing juxtapositions – with, for example, a spectacular 1960s drawing of Cumbernauld Town Centre alongside a delicate 1850 watercolour of a traditional burgh mercat cross. RCAHMS has always emphasised a twin-track acquisitions policy - external collection of archive material, alongside internal ‘field survey’ by the Commission’s own staff - and this approach pervades the exhibition arrangement, with the display on standing stones and crosses, for example, including an interwar architect’s drawing of a war memorial alongside superb elevation drawings and photographs of the Glamis Pictish cross-slab.
More recently, the all-embracing social scope of RCAHMS collecting policy has been further accentuated by the acquisition of a succession of large aerial photo collections, many from the Europe-wide postwar ‘TARA’ collection (as strikingly highlighted by one panoramic photograph of ‘bombed wartime heritage’, not in Clydebank but in devastated Cologne). Here, the overriding scope constantly allows unexpected cross-connections to be made. For example, it is well known that the innovative 1940s ‘AIROH’ aluminium prefabs were assembled in a factory and delivered to sites in four pieces by lorry. Amazingly, though, a 1947 RAF aerial photo of Arbroath in the exhibition actually shows, on close inspection, a ‘delivery’ of AIROHs in progress, with a line of lorries laden with sliced bungalows solemnly trundling along a suburban street!
Finally, it is perhaps worth remarking that one factor that may impede public appreciation of the Commission’s inclusive scope within the modern built environment is its lengthy and confusing name, which misleadingly implies a traditional antiquarian focus on elite monuments. Things could be made much clearer by adopting a shorter and more modern ‘popular name’ (say, ‘National Survey of Scotland?) for public use, leaving the long title for use in small-print contexts or on official documents!
For further information on the exhibition visit: www.treasuredplaces.org.uk
Images: Copyright RCAHMS. Top Image: Cumbernauld Town Centre
Click on each thumbnail below to view the image:
Stones of Stenness, Orkney
