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hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I am honored to be here with Anna K Anna is truly a British institution she is director of landmark trust and Architectural historian historian of the
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crown jewels an expert in 17th century history a TV personality and I'm a big fan of her latest book called The Restless Republic Britain Without a Crown Anna welcome thank you thank you very simple question what's the most plausible 17th century
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scenario where England remains a republic ongoing important that there was a revolution in the British Isles and it was Republic for 10 years but the chapel was I think the trouble was really that this is a classic uh classic situation where there was a lot of unhappiness with what had been the case the the monarchy but the but the formulation of a stable Republic had yet to be worked out I think if if Oliver Cromwell had lived longer or
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named a better successor than his son Richard it could have endured but fundamentally it was before its time I would say and it was not sufficiently deeply rooted fundamentally the people didn't want to Republic even though one was brought about and so that meant it was always fragile would there have been a way without a crown to have put a lid on all the religious disputes wouldn't they have just simmered led to more
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Civil Wars and some kind of consolidation into autocratic power and in that sense there is no counterfactual where the Republic just keeps on running say that but of course um there is a kind of counter factual parallel because in um what's now the Netherlands what was then called the United provinces um there had been a um a revolution sometimes called the Dutch Revolt that had happened in 100 years earlier in the 1560s which had both rejected
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Catholicism and had rejected monarchy and and it became something that was governed by a series of states that you know had some institution called the states General where they their representatives met so it wasn't so much
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that religious turmoil and republicanism were irreconcilable but I in in the case of um England the the revolution the throwing off the monarchy wasn't didn't have sufficient buy-in from the political Nation let alone the nation as
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a whole it was really brought about by an army coup so I think that meant for it was fragile and it was also linked to a a a kind of strong view held by a minority and very much represented in the army that a kind of very strictly Puritan regime was what was needed and I think that was um that was kind of incompatible with the with a sort of peaceful set of circumstances because it wasn't widespread enough so yeah but I mean you're right which is
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these counterfactual Avenues you kind of do take you into so many other what ifs that it becomes a bit fruitless after a while an even simpler question if the English Civil War of the 1640s wasn't about having a republic what exactly was it about what's like the stupid answer to that question well yeah it's not the stupid house I think it you know I think it the answer is it was really in my view um overwhelmingly about religion there's
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a there's a historian who works on the this period who talks about um it and says you shouldn't think of it as as a kind of Revolutionary War it's really one of the last Wars of religion and so you know the big that was the big
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the biggest of the issues there was a sort of related secondary um issue about the extent of royal power so that was in the mix but it wasn't the first issue really it was about Charles the first he was the king who was being
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um fought against by the parliamentarian forces wanted English religion wanted the Protestant religion of England to be to be more elaborate more like Catholicism in terms of the way it was performed in the Liturgy and so on and that was
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something that was anathema to a lot of very um uh you know very sort of committed um uh Protestant and that in that tension how much of that was sincere belief and how much was that simply a kind of arbitrary marker that different
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interest groups struggling for power fixed upon and actually the Civil War is about the interest group struggling for power well it's an interesting point I think if you'd ask that question of historians working a generation or two ago they would have said it's all about economic forces it's all about you know the class struggle if you like I I don't think that's my view I think a lot I mean you I think as we live in such a secular age
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and I would say in the UK much more so than in the states where really you know um the church going and religious conviction is very much a minority um uh Pursuit so to to reimagine ourselves or to imagine the world of
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17th century England where religion is such a strong force it involves a kind of mental leap that I think sometimes people have been reluctant to do and I think in in terms of historians working on this period particularly as in the
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mid-20th century really influenced actually by Marxist approaches to understanding the past it was all seen as well this is the rise of this class this is the this is the Mercantile Urban you know um uh sort of strand of society trying to assert authority to climb the ladder and so on and I I I just not at all convinced by those arguments myself I think religion was very very uh strongly held factor in people's lives
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and you read contemporary Diaries and so on and it really is clear that people felt very strongly that wherever they were on the spectrum between a sort of absolutely kind of um calvinist Puritan or a or a Catholic
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in terms of the range that was around at the time that that personal conviction about what was right was really really a big factor so um I don't mean that it was the only Factor but I think to treat it as somehow a cover for other motives is to
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do a disservice I think to to the to the people of the age given how Central the 17th century is in your mind including disputes over the book of common prayer does it go to Scotland James is an absentee Monarch when you look at the disputes today over Scotland becoming independent how do you see that differently than say someone who doesn't obsess over the 17th century well I think the first thing is I mean first of all I'm have to declare an
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interest because I am a Scot I was born and brought up in Scotland um but I think that if you if you're interested in the 17th century the the kind of additional perhaps emphasis or you know lens that it gives you is first
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of all the memory of um how the union came about in the first place you know um Great Britain as a unit was only you know in our historical time depth a relatively recent creation I mean it was there for a long time 300 years whatever
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it was or is um but that of course the what happened was that a sovereign exceeded to two kingdoms and this happens quite often historically I mean it happened quite often with other Kingdoms in or countries in British history so um William III was uh the the king of um in Britain of Great Britain and Ireland but he was also um the overlord of um of what's now the Netherlands George was the first was the elector of Hanover and and none of these
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things involved a political union they were just two countries that happened to share a sovereign and so that's the reason why of course although um England and Scotland have been part of it of of Great Britain as a political union since 1707. it was never a complete one the legal systems have always been completely separate completely distinct the education systems much else besides so although personally I'm a um I would be very sad
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to see the end of the union and very sad to see um a breaking apart between England and Scotland I do think if you think about the 17th century it does really underscore how much independent identity has always been there in those two Nations and how long a history each had before they became a whole what did Robert Boyle learn from Sir William Petty but this is the real like quick five questions what did Robert Boyle learn from Petty okay so um
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so Robert Boyle obviously was as a young Irish nobleman was a student of the new science in the 17th century and William Petty was also they came from very different backgrounds so Robert Boyle had been brought up his his the sound of an Irish nobleman in great comfort and Grandeur in Ireland and um you know Silver Spoon in his mouth and silks to wear and um William Petty had been born the son of a very poor Clothier in a in
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a town on the Southeast coast of England and they met um both in Oxford and in Ireland in the 17th century the mid 17th century and they were both I mean William Peretti was an old older man senior to Robert Boyle Robert Boyle came to Oxford as a
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student um in his early 20s um but he was You Know Rich and had friends and William Petty was um was already a very sort of well-regarded member of The Establishment in Oxford University so he was the kind of older
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man in terms of experience and in terms of scientific experimentation which is what was their great Obsession but on the other hand Robert Boyle was the man with money and with the ability to commission you know fund activities and so on so I think Robert Boyle sorry yeah Robert well I learned from William Petty a lot about what was being embarked upon by this group of young men in Oxford in the middle of the uh in this in the
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1650s which was utterly revolutionary really which was the beginning of what we would regard as proper scientific process and scientific inquiry through experimentation they were a group who would form the Royal Society when it was
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reformulated in the early 1660s and at William Petty's rooms on the High Street and Oxford rooms that still exist um the this group of men gathered Christopher Wren was among them and they carried out experiments and so Boyle
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learned from William Petty all sorts of things about the circulation of the blood about the about vacuums about um about the different characteristics of um of the human organs or all sorts of things because they were they had
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these amazing broad areas of inquiry and of course this is an age where until now really um the job of anyone who we would consider to be a scientist in modern terms was to read The Works of classical Antiquity and to understand what
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Aristotle or you know whoever it was had said about the nature of the world so it was a new dawn and and Boyle learned from Petty a kind of an approach I suppose to inquiring and looking for yourself to understand from how things behaved when you I know cut them or inflated them or you know expose them to light what the properties of of of of of of the world were it seems Petty understood Ireland pretty well and he had some sympathies for
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Ireland if he had been allowed to Simply rule Ireland unconstrained could he have done much better or was the actual problem one that there's simply no way you can rule Ireland at all without cementing in this external Elite which is then going to lead to trouble yes Sir William Petty is a scientist [Music] economist hermit now and he went to Ireland as a doctor and he um because he had this very brilliant brain and analytical scientific mind he
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kind of diagnosed what he saw as the um as the not so much the the problems but as the kind of the nature of Ireland how many people live there how many had been dispossessed by the wars and conflict of recent times and he um uh you know undertooks remarkable business of mapping Ireland as part of the redistribution of land you know which was a extraordinary and horrific undertaking in many ways but he wasn't a he wasn't a person who had any
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experience of governing a place he was hopeless with people he was rude and abrasive and direct and would tell them that they were ignorant and um absurd and in which you may well have been right but as we know in society governing a place that doesn't necessarily work well if you tell them so I didn't think he was temperamentally in any position to go to to be a good Governor what he absolutely was was somebody who saw saw past because it
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didn't interest him um Prejudice and um uh sort of um uh traditional English um dislike of the Irish because he was he was interested in in in things empirical and he'd also been trained by by Catholics and so he didn't share most English people's horror of Catholics and so I think he was a he was he was well placed to advise um on on on the business of running Ireland he wouldn't have been good at doing it himself and had Henry Cromwell
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to whom he gave this advice and who had been given the job by his father Oliver Cromwell of governing Island had he been given more time to do that I think it could have well have been very successful um but it was very short-lived because when Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 Henry Cromwell um lost his position effectively and so the period of time when William Petty and Henry Cromwell were were together working on the business of
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the Reconstruction of Ireland was very short but I think the the evidence is there aspirations for it they thought you could found a university you could make it this great forward-looking nation that could be minook could be a
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kind of model for for um for modernity would could potentially have been very productive seems there are some monarchs they don't do much in the way of building palaces Edward VI Mary Elizabeth is that just random or is there some systematic
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political economy reason why some monarchs are building palaces and others aren't well it's usually a pretty practical reason what two one is to do with money and one is to do with scale of your court so Henry VII uh famously by the time of
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his death had something like 60 palaces um but that was uh partly uh funded of course by the dissolution of the monasteries which involved the government raking in state raking in huge amounts of money which meant you
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could build and um acquire on a huge scale and secondly he had a big family um and a big court so you needed to have palaces for the Queens because there were separate palaces for Queens for the Prince of Wales and for your other Offspring and so on so for Henry VIII built Palace is on a great scale he then passed the Palaces on to his successors who to begin with and inherited a huge patrimony so they didn't you know the
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kind of requirement or the need for more buildings was was had been stated but also of course you you go onto a series of Singleton Sovereign so but the six is obviously basically a boy who never gets Beyond his teens
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um Mary Tudor is um an adult woman but she's married but has no children and her husband is king of Spain so he's not really around very much and then of course famously Elizabeth the first is a Singleton suffering unmarried and with
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no children so so I think a lot of it is about practicality um but there's also you know you can add into the mix six the extent to which you see and there are obviously people who did on top of those more practical issues um building as a way of um expressing your status and so if we think of somebody like Louis XIV in France it's clear that over and above any of those practical requirements or questions of means the magnificence of the Monarch
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and therefore of the institution of monarchy and so on was something that he you know realized and expressed in buildings on a massive scale why concretely do the monarchs wear crowns well it's an interesting point because of course no actual practical jobs that a Quran does sure it doesn't and it could be a scepter right there's many different symbols of status you could invoke why a crown well of course there are also all those other symbols of
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status so there are several sectors there's an orb there are Spurs there's Rings there's a whole wardrobe of um regalia as it's known but essentially it's about um it's a it's about it's about the echoing um with this amazing sense of continuity of what was done by your ancestors in and back to the kind of origins of your institution so it's very interesting that um if you look at images of um monarchs of of England or within
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Britain going right back into the Early Middle Ages they all are wearing a ceremonial thing on their head um and then even if you look outside you know you look outside the the the British tradition you see it in other nations you see it in other Traditions which are complete which had no connection to and no kind of interaction um for example in traditional African societies where you see headdressers and the wearing of some ceremonial thing
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which which denotes a person as being other than those around them more important more special elevated um you see it in the archeology I mean the earliest English crowns have been excavated from Iron Age Graves so this
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is before the Advent of the written word you know so I mean that seems to be a kind of enormous sort of um anthropological uh sort of universality of the idea that you're doing something special on your head is a way of setting you apart but
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it also is very you know it is very very clearly Monarch's doing it because they're predecessors do it and we see it you know in the Middle Ages um Henry III who is of great um long-lived and successful medieval Monarch really lionized his predecessor by several Generations but the Confessor who'd been canonized by the Catholic Church there was a saint and had his the the graves were opened of previous monarchs crowns which had been buried
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with them or got out and so on so and of course for all for all um monarchies you know nowadays it's very sort of um you know we have a essentially a ceremonial monarchy in this country but when you trace them back to a time when
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monarchs were actually in charge had executive power always the challenge was how did you pass it on to your children how did you make sure that on your desk although you might be a powerful and successful King that soon as you you die
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all your enemies come in and you know grab everything and so you have to create this sense that somehow it isn't just about you and your body and when you're dead it's over that there's some some continuity there's some kind of heretic to that that carries your you know Aura and power and abilities to command down through the generations and anointing is part of this which is a big thing this kind of business of of of a
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kind of um a sort of holy endorsement of your line but also the passing on of all these objects which when you're you breathe your last on your deathbed are still there and and attention can be drawn to them and then they're put on
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the head of your successor and and and your Aurora passes to him or her so it's a very it's an interesting cocktail of History an anthropology and sociology in a way why is the British Monarchy so extremely successful as a global
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institution including in the United States so when Elizabeth passed many people said oh this is the end of the line that seems clearly untrue the thing is just to get going to continue it's extremely popular draws a wide spectrum
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of Interest what's the marketing genius behind what's going on why is it so well known you look at the royal families of Netherlands Norway they can speak English but no one seems to care yes it's interesting isn't it I guess
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it's probably a cocktail of things I think the um the the I suppose the kind of balance that's been struck between the um the uh a non-executive head of state uh in the form of demonic and the executive in the form of the um you know the the government the prime minister and so on but without dialing down much of the The Bling and the Splendor and the you know the the ceremony of the monarchy even though the power has gone
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has turned out to be a very successful formulation so um and I it's it's interesting because I don't know that it would necessarily have been obvious that that would have worked you know there might have been a feeling
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that it would be absurd to continue to have all these palaces and crowns and um State coaches and all this kind of stuff when you're looking at something which is you know fundamentally part of the kind of ritual of state but it isn't actually
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exercising any kind of executive Authority but it happens to have yeah it happens to have kind of come to pass that actually that seems to be quite a quite a sort of satisfying separation and there's something about the a political
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nature of the monarchy and how incredibly careful they have to be about that that in a world where everything seems to endlessly be in turmoil in terms of electoral politics and so on to to have a certain kind of sense of
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reassurance about it I also think that it's it's it it changes I mean I think if you've been talking about about the success of the monarchy 30 years ago it might have been a different conversation I think there are you know there are there have been moments where um the the monarchists felt very successful others where it's felt more fragile um and but I think fundamentally the the the and then I suppose you have to layer
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into that the fact some quite practical things like um you know it the the the the monarchy in this country is in an anglophone country so the language that is spoken and the kind of traditions Anglo-Saxon Traditions if you like have a certain
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kind of um familiarity um around the world which which makes a connection obviously also I mean you know long past now but the the kind of the the sort of skeleton if you like of something which a monarchy which was at
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Once An Empire that stretched around the world still has kind of connections and associations that makes the British Monarchy of interest in places where the you know the Swedish monarchy might not be as it were so your director of
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landmark trust uh how should we as Outsiders think about where the revenue comes from how does it work financially so we're a charity historic buildings charity and we our job is to rescue historic buildings that are in
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um a derelict or in in a bad way to raise the money to restore them and then we rent them out for people to stay in so we have 200 buildings across the whole of the British Isles castles and dairies and lighthouses and all manner of things um fought um artillery Forts and we are self-financing so the money that we um that we that runs the charity comes from letting the building so if you would just if you this so you make money
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well we don't we don't um we generate money yeah but if I went back into the mission so if you were in if you were staying in London this week and you weren't staying in the smart Hotel you could be staying in a silk worker's house in the East End
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built in 1707 or John betcherman's own apartment which is in Clark and well which we both of which we own and it would be staying a wonderful historic building sleeping comfortable beds and you know everything
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um but as well as your money being a way of paying for your stay it also helps us to run our charity and then to go on and to acquire more buildings that uh would otherwise be lost and we have this amazing stock of buildings in this country do you grade your renters the way say Airbnb does or if anyone can come in we love them we love them all and we don't grade them if you did something really awful like you know made a pile of Adventure
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and set fire to it we might not rent you another building but we don't we don't grade them we are open to everybody and we as I say we're at charity so we're it we're we're not um we don't price ourselves in a way that makes us available only to the super rich it's all sorts of people come and stay in our buildings and anyone can do it just go on our website landmarktrust.org.uk and you can choose a from any number of wonderful Follies
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and mini castles we've just finished restoring an amazing Castle knit in vaness for people who go to Scotland maybe following their own routes beautiful building built in 1550 which had no roof and no floors until two years ago and we raised the money
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through people giving money philanthropically and or surgery grants and so on to re-roof it refluor it put heat and Power in and now you can have your own castle for the weekend is it socioeconomic status that in essence
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stops your renters from trashing the places because the Airbnb had no star system I would be quite worried right whereas presumably you have an error set of renters if not higher in income higher in education or historic understanding yeah I mean I think it is a sort of self-selecting group of people and I think um the nature of our buildings I think you're right which is that on the whole people go to them because they're really
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interested in that kind of thing and so it would be a counter-intuitive thing then to trash it um you know occasionally have people who make a bit of a mess but it's pretty rare and I think people respond to somewhere that feels really special and that you know is run by a charity and looked after with great care and there's a nice member of Staff who gives you the key or you know gets in contact with you so I don't know I think people's good
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nature and and recognition I suppose of the specialness of what they're experiencing is pretty good a pretty good kind of force for keeping them keeping them behaving themselves did the income tax and estate tax lead to the end of the era of great country homes because all of a sudden they became a lot more expensive right the carrying costs are suddenly much higher yes I mean it was definitely a big factor um it ended at the rise of
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inheritance tax and various other land taxes um I mean it didn't bring an end to them you don't need to go very far in this country to see that you know but many more are turned over to groups like Landmark trust right yes yeah it's true and you know a lot of them were um sold off the interior stripped out a lot of the Interiors sold to the states actually it's a very interesting phase in the history of um British country houses really in the
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first sort of 20 30 years of the 20th century where whole and whole rooms are house that I live and this happened to whole rooms beautiful paneling from the Tudor period prized off the walls put in packing cases and dealers would sell them to the kind of Randolph Hearst of the world who were recreating an idea of um old old Europe in um new buildings so there were different there were a series of factors at play I think it was
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to do but also to do with the first World War I mean the the extent of um the the the the the death child taken by the first world war the impact that had on these greater States in terms of the workforce not just in the kind of in
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the in the of the owners of the houses but also the people who were who were you know working on the Estates was enormous so it did make for a big shift but I mean you know there's something there's something called the historic
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houses Association in the UK which is a kind of Club sort of a trade Association for people who are private owners of big historic houses and open them to the public or do public events in them and they have an annual conference and if
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you go to it you really wouldn't think the English or British country house is in trouble I mean there's thousands of people there and of their buildings up and down the country where they're busy you know putting in farm shops and you
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know glamping which is a very big thing in the UK and um amazing um you know kind of Eco projects and so on so it did I mean the the taxation system and the kind of essentially the rise of the state as as an institution that needed resources to be able to fund things like like you know universal healthcare which is obviously a wonderful thing um required the kind of growth of Taxation and that definitely particularly particularly in the mid
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20th century took a big toll on um on land owners and big houses given the standpoint of your job how is it you think differently about say a wealth tax um I don't know I don't know that I do think differently about a wealth tax and it's discouraging the creation and maintenance of the asset you're dedicated to popularizing and preserving right well not necessarily I mean it depends I mean a lot of people who have big historic houses and
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I mean a lot of them have them in charitable trusts so they're uh and and uh do things which mean there there is public benefit more generally from them and the various sorts of I mean it depends what sort of wealth tax them and how it's calculated what the basis of it is but I think there are lots of ways you could you could formulate something that didn't penalize um those who were clearly taking a very kind of responsible attitude to historic
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buildings and I I also think that sometimes too much money is an absolute killer of historic buildings you see the absolute sort of ruination of wonderful buildings in for example the wealthier parts of London where every cornice has
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been stripped out the plaster has been hacked off to be you know redone every 10 years by the next owner and all character and pattern has been lost for them so I think there's something to be said for poverty as a preserver as well
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as as well as wealth should Britain fund Heritage through lotteries which are generally regressive right they don't offer Fair odds poorer people buy the tickets well say we that does happen in this country well it's a good question I mean so the so the the Heritage Lottery fund um actually I think it's now called the national lottery Heritage fund um generates you know a a significant receives a significant sum of money each
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year from the national lottery which was set up in the 90s to um to fund various things including a lot of sport accusing a lot of community work so it's very broadly based and I would say that I mean I think you're right to say that you have to be very alive to the the demographics of um those people who are buying lottery tickets I buy them myself so it's a broad it's a broad community and the the way that money is allocated by the um
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the the lottery fund is acutely conscious of that and each project that you do and I've done a number of them where you receive money through the lottery fund you have to demonstrate how you are making a difference to the lives
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of the people who are buying the tickets but so much of the work that we that that is done through that program is amazing Grassroots work so for example in the town I live in King's Lynn the local Fisher Folk Museum Which documents
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the lives of the fishing people of that towns regenerations their life livelihoods their communities their way of life is you know that wouldn't wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the lottery Heritage fund and so you know that's that seems to me to be a wonderful thing and something we should be really proud of which were the old buildings that we have too many of in Britain so there's a lot of Christopher and churches right I think there's over
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20. what if there were 15 they're not all fantastic they're no no fantastic tell me one that isn't fantastic the victorians knocked down Saint Mildred's right I've seen pictures of it I don't miss it well you don't miss anything's not there um I don't know I think I think it would be pretty hard to convince me that any Christopher Wren Church wasn't worth hanging on to but your point is Right which is to say that not everything that
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was ever built is worth retaining and there are things which are clearly of much less interest were poorly built which are you know are not serving a purpose anymore in a way that they need to so to me it's all about assessing what matters what we care about but I think it's incredibly important to remember how you have to try and take the Long View because if you let things go you cannot later retrieve them and we look
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at the decisions that were made in the past about things that we really care about that were demolished wonderful country houses we've mentioned and it's fantastic for example Houston Station one of the great Stations of the world
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um built in the middle of the 19th century demolished in the 60s regretted it forever since so I think one of the things you have to be really careful about is to make a distinction between the fashion of the moment and things
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which we are going to regret or our children or our grandchildren are going to curse us for having not valued or not thought about not considered which is why in this country we had to think of the listing system where
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there's a kind of a process of of identifying buildings which are important and and and what's called listing them putting them on a list which means that if you own them you can't change them without getting permission which is a way of ensuring
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that things which you as an owner or as an owner might not you know treat with scorn um that the kind of the interest of generations to come are represented in that why were so many big mistakes made in the the middle part of the 20th century so Saint pancreas almost was knocked down as I'm sure you know that would have been a huge blunder there was something about their time that people seem to have become more interested in
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ugliness or what's your theory how do you explain the insanity that took hold of Britain for what 30 years well I think this is this is such a good question because this is to me what the study of history is all about which is
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you you have to think about what it was like for that generation you have to think of what it was like for people in the 1950s and 60s who had experienced either firsthand or very close at hand not just one but two catastrophic world
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wars in which numbers had been killed You Know Places had been destroyed you know the whole the whole human cost of that time was so colossal and the idea for that generation that something really fundamental had to change if we were going to be a society that wasn't going to be killing one another for at all time and this is very this has a real kind of um sort of mirror in the 17th century when during the Civil War in 17th
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century there was a real feeling that something had to be done otherwise God was going to strike down this nation this errant nation and I think for that generation in the 50s 60s the sense that we we simply have to do things
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differently because this pattern of life this pattern of existence this way we've operated as a society has been so destructive um so I have although I think that lots of things were done when it comes to urban planning and so on that we really
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regret now I think you had to be really careful not to um not to diminish the seriousness of intent of those people who were trying to conceive of what that world might be more egalitarian more um more democratic more um involving more space more air more light healthier all these kind of things now we can see lots now that we say well that's ridiculous you know this is not how Society works but I think I think that we didn't experience what they
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experienced so I actually have real respect for a lot of that and I think a lot of things that were done I'm going tomorrow to see a place in somewhere called lechworth the world's first Garden City which was planned and laid out north of London in the um in some 1910s which was completely about saying we've got to we've got to design a new world so yeah I think we're going to have a bit of humility in in considering these decisions because
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um they people people don't go around wantingly wantingly trying to destroy the environment they think that they're doing the right thing if we look at most of the Western World it seems to me that after World War II there are very few really very few beautiful new neighborhoods created a lot of spectacular individual buildings but it's very hard to find neighborhoods that are as nice as what was built in the 1890s the 1910s or depends on the
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country the era what happened to Neighborhood architecture why did it so radically decline in wealthier societies so such a good question I I was talking about this for somebody the only the other day I mean I think you know there are clearly places where you do see it and you do see it work now but it's it's they're pretty few and far between and I think there's a lot of work going on with young Architects um in the field and really trying to
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crack this business about neighborhoods and housing not least because in this country there's a real housing crisis because we're a small country with a lot of people and the challenges of building are very great but it is it is really Stark and I think I did I mean I don't know the answer to it I think there are things that observations I would make one I would say is that the idea of the philanthropic um neighborhood development scheme has
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really gone but there was a lot of that that happened in the late 19th early 20th century to do with landowners and and also company um directors and so on doing things that were going to be beautiful I mean there's a wonderful place up near
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Liverpool called Port Sunlight which was all laid out by a great industrialist absolutely most beautiful place you could imagine for for people who would be working for him and there's something about the kind of aspiration of beauty
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and a sense of responsibility for creating it that it feels like has really diminished in the world of the kind of either the state does it and they're you know trying to do it as cheaply as possible or developers do it and they have another reason for trying to do it as cheaply as possible so I agree I think it's something to really regret and I think I think it's something we have to decide we care about or we're not going to make it any
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better if the House of Lords were abolished as labor has proposed as you know would that make it harder for Paul policy to protect Heritage in Britain no I don't think so so you don't think there are net force one way or the other because they do slow down legislation they slow down change it's I know I'm all for abolishing the House of Lords myself personally I mean I think it's I think it's totally past Itself by date as an institution
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um and um the fact that we still have nearly a hundred members of the House of Lords who are hereditary peers who are by definition all men I find extraordinary but they're being replaced right they're literally grandfathered in
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in some ways no but there's still a hundred of them they'll be 100 but they're going to die no but then they get replaced by others but they're not hereditary are they The Replacements except they're from a pool all of whom
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are hereditary so when the when the House of Lords reform happened in 1997 or thereabouts the kind of compromise instead of all the hereditary peers being able to sit in the House of Lords they said there'll only be a hundred and they can nominate among themselves who they are but it seems to be absurd that there should be a hundred I mean they're all men apart from anything else I mean it's not that they aren't great people a
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lot of them are they're wonderful people but it just is a to me it's an utterly absurd basis on which to involve somebody in the process of legislation and I and when it comes to a point about um about Heritage I mean I I think if
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you I think it's good to have a second chamber I think there's a debate to be had about what the basis of that is in terms of how you would um come to have a seat in it but I believe that um that a concern for the the the the
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our environment and the buildings and places in which we live and were built by our ancestors is a really universal one and it doesn't require you to have a kind of particular sort of social slice of society in the House of Lords to ensure it's protected my British EMB friends claimed to me that the cost of living is too high here and we need to build at least 2 million new homes mostly in the south of England do you agree and would that threaten
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heritage I definitely agree that we need a lot new a lot more places for people to live but my contention would be we have an incredible um stock of buildings which are unoccupied you go into any British Market town and you will see half the shops are empty and if you look above the shops these are generally speaking 19th and early 20th century buildings the buildings are completely empty these could all provide wonderful places for
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people to live I live in a town center in a market Town myself with a bit of will to say let's use the things we have let's adapt them you know this is a part of many things apart from the interest and the beauty in my view these
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buildings are all embedded carbon they've all you know the environmental cost of building them has already been incurred and then they bring people to live in in towns near where you know there can be other communities are so
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it's not that I don't think there's a role for building new houses but I think it's an easy Choice it suits a developer very well thank you very much to you know get a field and build some houses on it and sell it off the task of saying how do we make sure our our job photography and our and our wonderful towns and Villages are full of life and how do we use what we've got requires a bit more imagination but I think that
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the the the the opportunity there is absolutely enormous and I I long to see somebody really grasp that and what should policy do to enable that what has to happen well I don't know I'm not enough kind of wired into the way the system works but
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I think there needs to be um there needs to be a clear kind of national policy of exploring that and then there needs to be the the will and the resources for local government to um to to to to to demonstrate
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um that they have exhausted those possibilities before permissions given for new builds in many cases the aesthetic history of jewelry and the crown jewels and the aesthetic history of architecture in England I mean do
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they run on Parallel tracks or are they very different stories well there's a kind of you know there's just ages have different um uh kind of stylistic um uh tastes if you like so we might think of um we might think of the 1920s and 30s
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and kind of art deco architecture and if you look at jewelry and jewelry design you see that similarly in the kind of favor of the kind of square cut stones and very erect linear things similarly if you look at the 70 late 17th century with Baroque buildings and then you look at the design for example of the our crown jewels which were made most of them in the late 17th century the kind of um you see common motifs in terms of
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decoration in terms of sort of floral devices in terms of the massing of objects and the kind of relationship between different elements so yeah I mean there's a kind of you know whether it's an age of ornament or an age of
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minimalism you see that across across different artistic forms and and jewelry and architecture like clothes and other things uh are all part of that will there be a new age of crown jewels that are designed today produced today viewed
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as important or do they somehow have to come from the 17th century and they have to be old but that wasn't the case in the 17th century right no one said back then they all have to be old that's why they produce new ones well they produce
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new ones because the old ones have been melted down so it was a bit more it was a bit more of a necessity than and a desire for novelty there wasn't any desire for novelty they could have had the old ones they would have had them
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and when the new ones were made in the 1660s which is the collection that we now have the instruction worthy should be exact replicas of the things that were destroyed thank you that's that said there has always alongside this idea that you should be using something very ancient that speaks of you know the ancientness of your um your lineage and so on and New pieces have in the past often been made to accompany the um older sort of
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um sort of ancestral pieces quite often for for Queens for Queen's consort but I think I don't think that's where that's not the appetite of the age I think it would be very hard to imagine anyone feeling that it was a good use of money to you know spend a lot of money buying new diamonds and making a new Crown at the moment not least because they're quite a lot in the collection so I'd be quite surprised if we see see many more pieces
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made in my lifetime since they're not using the original Jewel of Kohinoor anymore why not just give it back right it was taken in Wartime 1849 second anglo-sik war East India Company India Pakistan they want it back why not
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just give it back well it's an interesting it's a very interesting point the trouble is that um well the criminal Diamond has been a stone that was taken in Conquest through a whole series of conquests so as you say it came to
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um Britain following the anglo-sik wars in the middle of the 19th century and was a kind of um you know I mean it was it was given a kind of legal status but it clearly was a you know a spoil of War but of course it had only been in what's now in Lahore which is where it was taken from for I can't remember how long now but you know decades and had been taken before then by um Ranjit Singh who's the Maharaja um uh from um somebody that he had
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conquered who had previously taken it had been through Persia had been to the Moguls been through Pakistan so I mean you know how far back do you want where do you choose your moment I mean it could it could be given to Lahore give
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him to Pakistan back to Pakistan but then the Indians would say well hang on a second you should have given it back to us because the Indian um if you have to well yeah you could do that I mean you could do that but I'm
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not sure where it gets you really I mean but then you start saying well what about all the other things do you do you go for a kind of massive repatriation I mean empty you'd empty a lot of museums and I'm not sure you'd solve a lot of problems really I think I think there's you know it's been there for a long time and I think the the the kind of I I don't think there's an easy solution I don't think there's a kind of act that
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you could take in relation to that stone which would just involve kind of I did Britain's saying well that's fine we don't need to have it anymore that would that would do anything other than cause infinitely more conflict and aggro
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because it would open up the whole question of all these other moments of conflict when the stone was taken and I I just don't see that gets you very far I think it's bad it's just you know it's not being used in the coronation
46:36
which I think is very wise and it's you know it's an object which can be seen and viewed and discussed by all of us but I wouldn't start passing around the world myself here's a reader question and I quote why do houses in Britain have so little storage I think they do yes well probably part of the reason is that houses in this country are on the whole very old hazards I mean the vast majority of our building stock in this country was built
47:08
before the second World War uh in a time when you know the amount of you know garages and skis and you know and snowboards and things that everybody needed to keep was considerably less and were built for people who were used to living less expansive lives um less well soon so it's probably a facet of that really as much as anything else but uh yeah it would make me look when I next go to the States look in some cupboards see what the storage
47:35
levels are now you live in Clifton house it's what an 800 year old house yeah yeah what's the hardest thing about living in a house that old um uh keeping warm is not always straightforward space heaters are that's what they did in New Zealand what do you do uh we light some fires that's nice light fires yeah um we wear a lot of socks jumpers and we also have a thing in this country I don't know if people go in for them in
48:04
the states which is called an electric blanket have you come across them of course again A New Zealand thing as well yeah so we love an electric blanket because you don't need to heat your bedroom because you don't need your
48:13
bedroom to warm it doesn't mean when you get into bed you're not freezing so keeping warm in the winter is a bit of a challenge but mostly it's the most wonderful delightful thing you could possibly imagine and a massive massive privilege
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to live in a very old and beautiful building and you have a dishwasher we do have a dishwasher we didn't for a long time because my husband is bits of puritanicals said that he thought we shouldn't but I said let's put them put
48:38
the plumbing in and he's pretty grateful now how practical are thatched roofs uh to cool I mean they're very you know if you see if that's really the the thickness of the thatch is absolutely enormous so it has very good thermal
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properties it's very good for biodiversity lots of beetles live in them um but they're not cheap and you need a wonderful Thatcher to replace the thatch on a cycle every sort of generation or so so um they are they keep you very warm and they're very sustainable they're very low carbon um but they're not cheap what could you tell us about windows at all times that maybe we wouldn't know well what I would say is that um you
49:22
must never underestimate just how much our ancestors cared about keeping warm you think we care about it and the cost of warming our houses but if you had to chop every log that warmed your sitting room you'd pretty much be focused on it
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too but we often forget about the things that they did which we ought to do too to keep warm which is for example really thick curtains with lining um which means that you can when you draw them really exclude all the heat
49:48
not something very sort of flimsy um a lot of our buildings have shutters which are also very very good so you use those in conjunction with the windows so those things are um I think so those things are really really worth doing in your house and I think we've off as far as making sure that old windows are doing a doing their job and keeping you warm because I think there's a real real risk at the moment with the completely um correct focus on
50:16
um on insulation in buildings that all are beautiful old sash windows with their wonderful handmade glass get put and skips and upvc windows get put in instead and so I think that is very important for all of us who care about this stuff to remind ourselves and remind each other about the things you can do that enable you to keep your beautiful windows but also to make sure that you're not wasting energy what makes the historical architecture of
50:43
Norfolk so special so one of the things that's really interesting about Great Britain is if you ever have one of those maps that you can get which show the geology of the place that you live the country or the state you live in
50:57
um so it says the kind of stripes or the bands of different kind of um geology whether it's Limestone or granite or chalk or whatever and if you look at one for Britain it is amazing because there are so many different Stripes of geology
51:09
just to do with the way the world evolves geologically which means that places in Britain that are very close to each other have completely different geology and the reason that is interesting and relevant is it places are built overwhelmingly from the materials that you find locally and when you have an old building stock like we do that's very Vivid it's expensive to transport materials and so on so one of the great Pleasures I would say of
51:34
traveling around the UK is that places that are maybe only 15 miles apart can look completely different because of that so in the case of Norfolk what it means is that Norfolk has no Building Stone it has has a lot of chalk which has seams of flint in it so what you get are buildings in our part of the world which are overwhelmingly brick very beautiful red brick that's been fired locally from local brick Earth and then you get
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dressings of napped Flint which is very beautiful black um kind of knobbly sort of stone um if you go if you go 20 miles east from us to get to northamptonshire there's wonderful I'm standing everything is built of honey it's beautiful stone and it's it's such a lovely thing about um about your connection with your environment and I feel in this country we're very lucky in this that you have this tremendous local distinctiveness
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you could open your eyes if you know about this stuff and you could just see by looking doing that which county of England you are in from and given all these places are very closer together compared to the states and quite often
52:48
which part of which county so Norfolk is very very strongly brick and has beautiful um uh brick Merchants houses and buildings of the 16th 17th 18th century and it has also some wonderful medieval churches because Norfolk was in a very
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very wealthy it's a sort of bulgy bit on the side of England if you look at the map of England on the right hand side and it's where it was the wealthiest part of England all the way through the Middle Ages because it was where all the Sheep farming happened and all of England's wells in the Middle Ages really uh came from wool came from the export of wool it had less of a 19th century also right in the sense of less
53:24
of an industrial revolution yeah so it was its Prosperity was in the Middle Ages and then it's it's essentially kind of you know disappeared from the sort of League table of affluence in the UK as the industrial towns of the north which
53:38
is where you know big scale cotton production and so on really took off um and as a consequence as a part of the UK it's it's it's very very beautiful it's not very wealthy at all um and it's very unurbanized because it
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wasn't it essentially still has its kind of medieval and sort of early modern landscape both in terms of buildings and and topography um whereas if you go I mean equally interesting but does very different something like Manchester which is an
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amazing world's first industrial city um you know had this extraordinary explosion in the 19th century the railways were invented there you know everything kind of was was was developing in a in a very different
54:16
direction three final questions first which is your favorite John fowles book and why um I think it is the French lieutenants woman I think it's just an amazing novel and it really really Bears really reading that's less fashionable now than it was maybe 20 30 years ago but it is tremendous he wrote some pretty creepy other novels one called The Collector which I wouldn't particularly recommend amazing though it is but I think the
54:41
French lieutenants Woman as a as a as a Kind of Love Story and as a as a kind of um a dialogue with Victorian literature is peerless who's your favorite British composer and why oh I think um Handel um whose music I hope we will be hearing
55:01
at the coronation which is coming up next year and you count him as a British composer I do yeah okay that's fine we claim him um can you claim Haydn and the shakier I would say um and he Compares such wonderful Court
55:15
music which I love because that's that's great um it's an area that I've worked on before I ask you the last question uh just to repeat for our listeners and readers uh Anna's book which I'm a big fan of it's called the Restless Republic Britain Without a Crown if you type her name into Amazon it's pronounced Anna K but you spell it k-e-a-y last and final question what is it you will do next uh I'm trying to save an amazing building
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um outside Edinburgh High School may this bank which was built in the 1720s for a man um who was one of our great Renaissance figures man of the great Pioneer discussion Enlightenment and it's the most beautiful beautiful house
56:02
it's derelict it's walls of standing but the ceilings and the roofs have fallen in and it's clinging onto Life by its fingernails so my great hope for what I'm doing next is being able to raise the money to save it from collapse and
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are we doing enough to preserve the Scottish Enlightenment no what else should we do extra questions everything everything but what what concretely well there are all sorts of things I imagine the Scottish Enlightenment such a completely gripping extraordinary phenomenon that this tiny little country you know my birthplace of micro little place on any world view through the course of the early and into the later 18th century had such incredible
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influence around the world and I think the buildings of that period I think that you know the political thought the Poetry all these things we should all know more about we should teach it more to our children and we should celebrate it and if you're recommending one thing for people to read on the Scottish Enlightenment what is it well there's a very good new book that that your listeners might be interested in um called Scotland global history
57:08
written by someone called Murray pisek that came out earlier this year and it is a a wonderful account of how from the sort of mid 17th century Scotland is to say a tiny little country with a minuscule population came to to have such incredible Global reach in terms of science technology thought politics music so much so yeah that's a good place to start Anna has numerous other books all of which I've enjoyed Anna thank you very much thank you