I’ve been living partly in Sheffield for the past month or so, which has given me the chance to catch up on some of the great monuments of industry and power in and near the city – the model miners’ village and the fantastical Jacobean castle in Bolsover, the stately home of Wentworth Woodhouse with its battleship-length Palladian facade, the buildings of the subtle modernist Peter Womersley in Huddersfield.
Also the Weston Park Museum in Sheffield and the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, both of which combine world-class art with humdrum relics of local life. In one, a large John Singer Sargent portrait of three young Yorkshire women shares the premises with the plastic car roof sign of a 1970s driving school. In the other, there is a gallery full of the illuminated tableaux of science and humanity by Joseph Wright of Derby and another room with a collection of stuffed animals, presumably from a local donor. I hope institutions like this, apart from whatever upgrades might be desirable, don’t change: art comes to life when it’s seen as part of the place it comes from.
A batty theory
Some hilarity has been caused by the news that a £100m tunnel, intended to protect bats from trains on HS2, may not do its job, or may even endanger those lovable/demonic creatures. The story has also become handy ammunition for those who argue that care for nature is the principal reason for the sluggish and exorbitantly expensive provision of such things as high-speed railways in this country. I strongly suspect that, if all protections for bats and newts and other small, rare fauna and flora were removed, we would still not have the dynamic, soaraway, value-for-money new infrastructure of which we dream. Such factors as poor procurement and leadership, or the profit seeking of private companies, would still be there. But then, they’re harder to take on than flying mammals.
Honesty counts
The opaquely funded rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange has published the latest edition of its History Matters Project Compendium, an allegedly “non-partisan documentary record” that sets out the ways in which Britain’s heritage is “under threat” from activists who “rewrite the past”. Examples include an exhibition on Leamington Spa’s links with the transatlantic slave trade and the information that Virginia Woolf, although married to a Jewish man, made antisemitic remarks, accessible via a QR code on her statue in Bloomsbury. (“Nine Jews,” she said of some of her in-laws, “might well have been drowned without the world wagging one ounce the worse.”) The truth, of course, is that the real rewriting of history comes from those – such as Policy Exchange – who want to suppress such awkward facts. It does not invalidate all of Woolf’s achievement, nor the delights of Leamington Spa, to talk about their dark side. It only creates a more honest account.
In poor condition
Recently, my family has had more interactions than we would have wished with the health services, and can report what seems to be the a common experience of many – amazing professionalism and dedication combined with potentially life-threatening mistakes and miscommunication. Much time and emotional energy is spent discussing problems that didn’t need to be there in the first place, or revisiting decisions already made. The situation is among other things wasteful of time and resources, and creates avoidable stresses for staff, patients and their families. The ideals of the NHS, daily put into practice, remain a wonder, but the still greater miracle is that they survive at all in what look to the outsider like impossible circumstances.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
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