Five stately homes a day makes for a happy Briton, says study • BEN MACINTYRE • THE TIMES • NOVEMBER 29, 2014 12:00AM HISTORY makes you happy. That is the verdict of a new study by English Heritage, which found that visiting heritage sites has a greater impact on personal well-being than other leisure activities, including sport. Nothing, it seems, lifts the ¬spirits higher than a visit to a ¬historic building. The Heritage Counts survey converted that conclusion into cash terms: the average visitor derives £1646 worth ($3041) of well-being from heritage sites every year, compared with just £993 for individuals engaged in sporting activities. This is the amount of money you would have to take away from people to return them to the level of well-being they’d have had if they hadn’t done these things. This discovery is not just surprising but culture-changing: for decades, governments have been nagging that we would be happier and healthier if we got off the sofa and played sport, when it should have been telling us to visit Blenheim Palace, or Kew Gardens, or the old iron works. While consuming five portions of fruit and veg a day, we should also be gobbling up ancient buildings, perhaps not five a day, but five a month, or at a minimum five a year. The average British heritage fan currently visits 3.4 sites annually. Britain has a profound sense of historical place. An affinity for its built past is sewn deep into the ¬culture, in literature and ¬landscape. The great buildings across the land provide not just happiness, employment and income, but “heft”, that ancient and almost indefinable sense of belonging. Yet Britain’s built heritage is in peril, under-funded, under-¬appreciated by government and, in too many instances, crumbling. Britons derive vast pleasure and profit from their buildings and neglect them in a way that is illogical, reckless and irreversible. ¬Historians of the future may look back on the early 21st century as the time when Britons let their history fall down. Great English literature is jam-packed with great buildings, for no country is so attuned to the symbolism of bricks and mortar. Mansfield Park, Blandings Castle, 221B Baker Street, Marlinspike Hall and Downton Abbey. All are invented; all are derived from real places. Castle Howard is in the news, ostensibly because of a change in its administration but in reality because it is Brideshead from the television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, a building visited by 200,000 people a year but ¬repeatedly revisited in the imaginations of millions more. Britons’ veneration for stately homes is not mere snobbery or escapism, but a very British form of historical pilgrimage. The heritage sector contributes more than £20 billion ($37bn) to the British economy. About 13 million ¬visitors a year pour into the 1500 privately owned houses and ¬gardens of the Historic Houses Association; membership of the National Trust and English Heritage continues to rise steadily. Our conception of what is worth preserving in the man-made past is also expanding: just as the everyday lives of our forebears now hold interest more than great events, so do their homes and workplaces. We flock to see not just castles and palaces, but cottages, barns, foundries, pubs, prisons, burial mounds, battlefields and shipwrecks. Buildings, like humans, are in a state of ineluctable decay; but ¬unlike us, with proper maintenance they can be preserved for ever. They feed the mind, the exchequer, and the soul. We profess to revere them, and yet as a nation we neglect them atrociously, for the built fabric of Britain has never been more loved, or in greater peril. The latest Buildings at Risk Register, drawn up by English Heritage, includes 1115 important buildings in serious danger. Add churches, parks, gardens and monuments under threat, and the number rises to 5750. More than 600 places have been added to the register in 2014; four in every 10 of the buildings considered at risk in 1999, when the register was first drawn up, are still on it. The backlog of vital conservation projects is growing at an alarming rate, along with the “conservation deficit” — the funding gap between the cost of repairs and the end value of a building. This now stands at £443 million. Since so many buildings would cost more to mend than their final monetary worth, preservation is not an economic investment, but a moral imperative. The heritage sector was disproportionately walloped by the cuts imposed by the Tory-Lib Dem ¬coalition, including a 32 per cent cut over four years to English Heritage. The number of historical buildings conservation officers employed by councils has dropped by more than a third in eight years. To quote Shakin’ Stevens, the balladeer of architectural renovation, this old house is getting shaky. If visiting historical sites makes us happier than sport, then ¬perhaps we should treat our built heritage with the same obsession that we devote to sporting activities: regard it not as a weekend hobby but as a vital public benefit, train a new generation of participants, and encourage oligarchs to invest in heritage projects as status symbols. If Russian money can revitalise Chelsea FC, it might also restore Eastbourne pier. Like sport, the historical training program should be gradual and cumulative: start with a few local sites, and slowly build up to a weekly stately home. This may be demanding to start with, but it will make you happier in the end. The Times
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 01:03:22 +0000
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