How a ‘geography of ideas’ can help us reimagine English heritage
Philip Seargeant (The Open University)
There used to be a pub on the corner of Downing Street. This was in the days when it was an ordinary street which just happened to have the prime minister’s official residence partway along it. A number of notable non-politicians have lived there over the years. James Boswell, for example, took rooms there in 1762, after coming down from Scotland at age twenty-two, a few years before he gained fame as Dr Johnson’s biographer. A couple of decades earlier, the novelist Tobias Smollett – author of works such as Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker – lived and worked on the street, trying, with mixed success, to establish a medical practice there.
Both Boswell and Smollett would have had a prime minister as a close neighbour (the Earl of Bute and Henry Pelham, respectively). It was in the 1730s that the king gifted No.10 to Robert Walpole, the very first PM. The street itself had been built some fifty years earlier by Sir George Downing, 1st Baronet. It was during the era of his grandson, the 3rd Baronet, that No. 10 became established as the prime minister’s official residence. In a pleasantly symmetrical way, Sir George Downing III was himself a politician, serving as member of parliament for Dunwich, a small constituency on the coast of East Anglia.
It’s at this point that the political story gets somewhat murky. Downing held his seat for Dunwich thanks to the ‘rotten borough’ system. Dunwich had once been a flourishing medieval port, with a substantial population, and because of this, was represented by two members of parliament. But in the thirteenth century, a series of huge storms washed almost the entire town into the sea. All that was left was a tiny village with a population of a few dozen people. Despite this, however, it still retained its two parliamentary seats, which could effectively now be bought by local wealthy families. The Downings were one such family.
Cases of this sort highlighted major faultlines in the parliamentary system of the time – the newly-booming industrial cities lacked almost any representation while tiny boroughs like Dunwich had a huge, outsized influence. In the end, it was the absurdity of scenarios such as this which led to the Reform Act of 1832, removing many of the rotten boroughs and redistributing seats according to a set of far fairer principles.
There’s a certain retrospective irony in all this. A street that today is synonymous with British political power bears the name of a family who were closely connected to some of the most notoriously corrupt electoral practices that later reformers sought to eliminate. History is rarely as morally coherent as it’s publicly represented.
So what does all this have to do with English studies and life-long learning? The answer is a combination of heritage, place, cultural networks and commemoration – and the role played by English (literature, language and creative writing) in all of these.
We all live somewhere, and that somewhere has been home to countless generations before us. People are shaped by the places they live, but they also shape those places. The ideas that create our culture, our civilization and our politics arise from these places, from the experiences of the people living there, from the networks they make and the narratives they generate. Each new generation then contributes to and reinterprets these narratives. This is the heritage we inherit and with which we engage throughout our lives.
The relationship between place, people and ideas can be commemorated in many different ways. There are blue plaque schemes, public statues, street names – many of which we walk past every day almost without noticing, and certainly without reflecting upon. Then there’s the issue of who gets commemorated and who doesn’t. Of which narratives get told and which don’t. All these things become part of the discourse of a place.
The ‘Mapping Heritage’ project, currently being conducted at the Open University, looks to explore these issues through a mixture of narrative studies, linguistic landscape research, human geography and creative practice. If you take a little village like Dunwich, for example, which even today has just a couple of hundred inhabitants, its history, its location and its metaphorical value has attracted countless writers, artists and musicians over the last several centuries, all drawing on their experience of the place to reflect on issues of identity and existence. From the cliffs of Dunwich, you can see other towns along the coastline: Southwold, Sizewell, with Aldeburgh just round the coast of the shore. These places have all contributed to a network of thinkers and ideas which have played their part, great or small, in the culture we inhabit today. And by mapping the contours of this network, looking at the marks it’s left on the environment, the ways it’s commemorated in the landscape, the stories it’s inspired, we can explore the vital role that a sense of place has played in the generation of that culture.
And lifelong learning? Heritage, in this conception, is something one does rather than something that merely exists. It’s the discussions you have about the state of society, about the direction the country is going in, about what it means to be British, Liverpudlian, Welsh or whatever. And because it’s not a static entity, it offers constant opportunities for learning, and for using that learning to help shape the culture and environment in which we live.
Resources
- Word of Mouth: Street Names: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bt8m
- Political Activism in the Linguistic Landscape: Or, how to use Public Space as a Medium for Protest: https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/political-activism-in-the-linguistic-landscape/?SF1=work_id&ST1=CVIEW-63909166e2dff
- Black Blue Plaques: A film about Black heritage and the linguistic landscape: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/languages/linguistics/black-blue-plaques
- A conversation with Tim Marshall, author of Prisoners of Geography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD7s0d4KXzw
Philip Seargeant is Professor of Language and Education at The Open University.
