Transcript of Dame Fiona Reynoldss words, as Guest Speaker at - PDF document

Transcript of Dame Fiona Reynolds’s words, as Guest Speaker at National Trust of Guernsey’s AGM, held on Wednesday 26 th September 2018, at Les Caches Farm, Guernsey. Thank you to the National Trust of Guernsey, for welcoming Bob and I here. We have had a marvellous time getting to know an island that we've never visited before and have fallen, frankly, flat in love with Guernsey so thank you for that. I’ve also fallen in love with not just the physical appearance, but the spirit of Guernsey and I read something by Victor Hugo who, as you know better than me, was a famous resident of the island and he said – ‘the work of the sea which has brought destruction, has been supplanted by the work of Man, which has created a people’ – and I really love that idea, because I'm passionate about cultural landscapes, about man-made, man-created landscapes, but Victor Hugo is adding in that idea, it's not just the physical appearance but the people that make a place and, certainly, this is a place with immense character and immense spiritual succour. I've learnt a lot in a day and a day and a half and we can't stay longer, but I think what I wanted to talk to you about tonight, is something which I hope will be relevant, inspiring and possibly even something which will encourage us in our darkest hours. I want to talk actually, about beauty. When I left the National Trust everyone was very surprised indeed, and I left to work as Master of Emmanuel College, which is an incredibly beautiful college. In fact, I sometimes say that it's a bit like being a property manager in the National Trust – beautiful buildings, beautiful gardens, people with interesting ideas not always agreeing with each other and all of the rest of it, but I also did become Chair of the International National Trust Organisation. It’s a body of National Trusts from all over the world and an inspiring and a kind of the collective vision which is really incredible and, which I must say, has certainly inspired me for many years. But I think the thing that holds us all together, is the idea of beauty – this is the theme of my book – and the thing that intrigues me about beauty is that it's a word that we all use all the time, don't we? ‘We went somewhere beautiful, or we saw something beautiful’ – we feel very comfortable with the word, whether we are we talking about the beauty of landscape or whether we're talking about the beauty of wildlife, or whether frankly, we are talking about the importance of our cultural heritage. We all feel very, very comfortable with the word but, do you know what? At least in the UK, this is not a word that you ever hear politicians using, because politicians are entranced by something different. They are entranced by the economy and they tell us, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – wasn't that Clinton’s great word, when he came into power? 1

It's almost as if politicians are embarrassed to use the word beauty, as though somehow, revealing an emotional side is not the right thing to do. And, instead of using a word like beauty in fact, we have invented a whole load of management-speak words to substitute for it. Words like biodiversity or ecosystem services – horrible words which don’t really mean anything and certainly don’t inspire us. And so, we’ve sort of lost that idea in public life, of talking about beauty. But it wasn't always like this because if you think about our past or the past, whether it's through poets or writers, or music or early architecture, beauty was absolutely stitched in to our very being as a culture. It was Chaucer who wrote that it was ‘ the beauty of an April spring that longen folk to go on pilgrimages’ . I love that idea people longing to go on pilgrimages. The early churches, of which you have many here, could have been built in an entirely utilitarian way, but they weren't. They were built beautifully with craftsmanship and with love and indeed, the Saxon church near us in Gloucestershire and Ely Cathedral near Cambridge, was something done reverently but also beautifully, and beauty was absolutely integral to the vision of those incredible buildings. But, it's perhaps the romantic poets which best summed up the core values of beauty for us as a nation. Above all, it was the poet Wordsworth who wrote in words that I think all of us will know – those lines written above Tintern Abbey – ‘ to recognise in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughts. The nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul. ’ This wasn't just beauty as an aesthetic element, this was beauty as a deeply moral sense that shaped all of our lives and all of our thinking. Indeed, it was Wordsworth writing about the Lake District – this is the Lake District painted by John Glover almost contemporaneously when Wordsworth was writing about it – this is Thirlmere, before it was drowned as a reservoir – and he talked even then, and then in his Guide to the Lake District in 1810, about the things that were beginning to creep into the Lake District that were threatening its beauty. He talked about the ugly villas colonising the valleys, about the extraction of ore from the mountainside and he talked about the spiky Larch, he hated the Larch instead of these wonderful deciduous woodlands and so, it was he above all, who hated the thought of the arrival of the railway and who wrote those words that any conservationist knows – ‘ is there no nook of English soil that is safe from rash assault ’. And so, it was Wordsworth who took this idea of beauty as being central to people's lives and thinking of it not only as something we admired, but needed to protect the shift from admiration to defence. 2

But if there was a rash assault taking place in the Lake District perhaps the real rash assault was that which was taking place in our towns and cities and – this famous cartoon by Cruickshank in the 1820s – shows London going out of town and look how you can see the bricks pouring out of the kiln and landing on the poor hayricks running for their lives. You can see the automatons marching on the countryside, destroying everything in their path; and you can see these houses which are decaying even as they are built. This wasn’t something that was made up. This was something to fear, both of the pace and scale of urbanisation and the filth and degradation of urbanisation. In Sheffield alone, in five years in the early 1830s, one hundred and fifty six new streets were built. This was development at a pace that no one had ever seen before, but also houses decaying as they are built. This was the reality for many urban residents living in horrific circumstances in housing that had no water or no clean air; horrible problems of typhoid and cholera; living life with no sense or access to beauty at all. There were huge public concerns about these social conditions that rapid urbanisation brought about, a cacophony of public reports and public debate, and out of that cacophony came a voice explicitly for beauty and that voice was lead by this man – John Ruskin – who was both a great art critic, architectural expert, a philosopher, an extraordinary man who as a child, had a Cyanometer to measure the blue of the sky, because he feared as he grew up that the sky would no longer be blue because of the incredible pollution that was being pumped into the air. He travelled widely, wrote as many of you know about Venice, about architecture but also had what can only be described as an epiphanous experience in the Chamonix Valley where he saw a great storm break over the Alps and he said, in words very similar to Wordsworth, ‘ this is beauty, the meeting of nature, of man and of a sense of destiny and commitment to the future ’. He wrote and spoke on public platforms, gathered hundreds of people following him and inspiring him. It was he, who set up and inspired William Morris and his movement for Arts and Crafts and indeed, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings which inspired so much conservation architecture. He also inspired this young woman, who really has been my heroine throughout my working life – Octavia Hill – who was an extraordinary young woman when she met Ruskin as a teenager. She worked in The Ragged Schools and she used to march the children out on a Sunday, because they needed to get out into the countryside, to feel green grass under their feet, to smell fresh air and to pick flowers, because they had none of that in their lives and, she believed that everybody was entitled to and needed beauty. She was a pioneer in the social housing movement, buying houses and letting them to families, but always making sure that there was either a garden for the children to play or perhaps even a window box, if nothing else could be provided. 3