Well, it turned out to be quite a year for heritage in Wales. While there were occasions which provided cause for great optimism, there was a steady stream of reminders to highlight just how vulnerable our national heritage resource actually is. The sad truth of 2013 however, is that the real negative impacts will not truly reveal themselves until deep into 2014, if not later, as the creeping tendrils of fiscal cuts continue to slowly erode the foundations of museums and heritage organisations in Wales and beyond. Surely the most controversial moment of the year though had to be the Chartist mural debacle. I’ve promised myself on more than one occasion that I would just let the mural story go, but every once in a while we receive little reminders as to why the mural destruction was so symbolic. When Newport city council battered their way through with plans to obliterate the distinctive mural, they critically underestimated the sentiment of locals in Newport. Perhaps there were not thousands demonstrating against the council’s actions, but there were certainly hundreds, not to mention the odd Hollywood celeb to add to the mix. The anger regarding the loss of the mural stimulated a debate as to what constitutes heritage. Is a thirty year old wall mounted mural something that is worthy of protection? Is it part of the heritage landscape worth protecting? Opinion in Newport was clearly divided, with the city council making a concerted decision, that being that the mural was indeed not part of the heritage landscape, and certainly not worthy of saving. This though raises other more pressing concerns, namely what comes next? What else could a council decide to cast by the wayside in the name of development and gain? Perhaps our built heritage, in terms of castles for instance, may not seem under any immediate threat, but the heritage sector is in many respects standing on a precipice. Our museums are slowly being stripped down from the inside out, as budget cuts erode staff positions, education programmes and, in places, the very existence of museums in their entirety. Chapel heritage across Wales is gradually vanishing as more and more buildings fall out of use, while proposed developments seem to be encroaching closer and closer on to the edges of hillforts in Wales (not to mention Offa's Dyke), and it is questionable how close new buildings will get to rampart defences before new residents can confidently claim to actually live on top of an Iron Age fort. Sites and staff are threatened in a manner in which we have not experienced for several decades, and it should be an ongoing cause of concern for all in related fields. At the same time, Welsh Government moved ahead with its consultation on the Heritage Bill for Wales. Many will remember a similar white paper being drafted for heritage in the UK several years ago, before it was bumped in the list of priorities for a general election. Whether a similar fate awaits the Welsh Heritage Bill awaits to be seen, but at the very least government in Wales is actively discussing the future framework for heritage in this country, so the field is at least not being forgotten about. However, the poor old Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments for Wales looks set to buy the farm as a result of government involvement, despite almost everyone in public consultation stressing what an incredibly bad idea it would be to merge the RCAHMW and Cadw. While government is certainly focusing on heritage in Wales, the consequences may most clearly be manifest in the loss of another significant organisation. While the RCAHMW remains threatened, the archaeological trusts are fighting their corner, and the Archwilio application, developed by the four trusts, is a positive reminder both of the scale of the archaeological resources at our disposal in Wales, and the intent in this country to enhance public accessibility to those resources and archives. In this respect, Wales has forged a path as a world leader regarding accessibility. Few other, if indeed any nation, can boast the same level of access to historic environment records as Wales currently does. The next challenge is to make sure people know that they can access this information, and of course encourage potential audiences that this information is worth accessing in the first place, but perhaps that is a battle for 2014. For the moment, we can certainly welcome and celebrate the addition of Archwilio to the likes of the People’s Collection project. The real challenge for 2014 will be one of resilience. Local and national government have collectively lined up the culture sector with a succession of budget cut tipped bullets, and are only too keen to pull the trigger. What fate awaits the Newport medieval ship for instance? This internationally significant artefact is going to be evicted later this year, with no obvious home for it to go to. What happens to the Newport ship will probably serve as the acid test for the position of heritage in Wales for the rest of this decade, for if such an assemblage were to be lost to Wales, it would be an indictment on the attitudes of officials in this country regarding our heritage resource. Should the ship be saved, with an intention to display and develop, in a manner akin to the Mary Rose museum which dominated heritage headlines in 2013, then we might have some reason to be optimistic. That all awaits to be seen though, either way, some very significant decisions regarding the heritage of Wales will take place in 2014, and the ramifications will remain with us for much, much longer.
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Limited time for proper blogging this week, as the University of South Wales excavations are about to get underway. It’s been a frantic few weeks, trying to juggle work commitments, not to mention the thesis, and preparing the excavation. However, it looks like we’ve made it and are ready to go into battle tomorrow morning. The sites, three of them, have been as cleared as much as they are going to be, and the tools are all on site, all that remains is for a team (which seems to contract and then expand again on a daily basis – we lost two at lunch today, but had replaced them by late afternoon) to turn up on Monday morning, and for excavations to commence. Most blog based activities will shift to Excavate2013 for the next couple of weeks or so, but I felt I couldn’t let this week go by without some mention of the catastrophe in north Wales. Few in the heritage sector in Wales will have failed to hear about the awful news regarding Offa’s Dyke. This hugely significant archaeological feature, remarkable for its preservation rate as much as anything else, was the subject of irreparable damage during the week. All sorts of rumours have been flying around regarding the circumstances of the destruction. But be this deliberate vandalism, or unbelievable ignorance, either way, this should be regarding as a heritage disaster for Wales. We are frequently quick to point the finger at nations around the world where such incidents occur. Pyramid destruction in Peru and the desecration of Aboriginal sites in Australia have been among the more significant stories to be shared around the world of late, now Wales can join the community of host nations to see prized examples of national heritage become critically undermined. Yet, for all the attention given to the story on the day through social media outlets, it is perhaps more ominous how the story has subsequently been covered. The Western Mail, national newspaper of Wales that it claims to be, relegated the Offa’s Dyke debacle to page 23 on Saturday, the very last page of ‘proper news’. Having had such success with successive Wales History Months, it might have been expected that the newspaper would have given the story some greater sense of prominence. Yet Paxman’s beard and the weak grasp had by UKIP for the Welsh language, were among some of more tawdry offerings to be consider more newsworthy than the perhaps cynical damage inflicted upon what is theoretically one of the most important tourist attractions in the country. Put simply, the coverage has not been good enough. For a nation that makes strong claims for the significance of its heritage resources, much more noise must be made about this. The damage to the segment of Offa’s Dyke is shameful and should be an embarrassment to us all, for we are collectively responsible for this heritage, including raising awareness of it. We can only hope that such an act never happens again, but unless a national outcry is heard, this will happen again, and again. |
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