Time for Change
Today I walked though a forest, still bearing the scars of Storm Arwen two years ago. That natural act of violence had thrown down many of the tallest trees, pulling them up by the roots. It was a mess, branches strewn around, ground ripped apart, chaos brought to the ordered forest plantation.
But in that chaos, there was opportunity for complexity, for new growth, for animals to shelter and burrow, for mosses and ferns, for fungi and for seeds to germinate and new growth to stretch up to the light.
My path was disordered, circling round roots, sliding over fallen trunks, looking out for hanging branches. It slowed me down, made me focus more, forced me to maintain a sense of direction though the best way ahead was not clear.
And so it is now, with us. Much change is coming. As nature becomes more violent, assumed order will be disrupted, things that appear strong will fail. Our path is unclear, and there is perhaps not a single right path, the important thing is to keep moving forward, to take diversions where necessary and to overcome obstacles. As nature re-establishes its own balance, our key skills will be adaptability, the ability to let go of past certainties, to focus on the horizon and be light of foot. This is true as a species, as individuals and as organisations.
This week an interesting thing happened to me at work. We were sprucing up the office for a party and refreshing some of the pictures that hang on our walls, images of past projects. I was startled to see a picture I had not intended be replaced, disappear. I was caught surprised and unnerved.
It was a poster of a talk 20 years ago about the state bed from Melville House, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. An extravagant symbol of power from 1692, the bizarre concoction of fine fabrics, embroidery and feathers, was a bed that was never slept in. it was part of the formal architectural theatre of power around the first Earl of Melville, who came over with William of Orange, becoming his Secretary of State for Scotland and Head of the Orange Order in Scotland. He once sued a neighbouring weaver for disturbing his carriage view (and lost) and there are records of starving people in times of famine pleading for food at his door.
Years ago, I advised as Melville was turned from a state school for disturbed boys, back into a private house for rich people. The boys had their own culture and occasionally ‘escaped’, echoing the escapades during WW2 when the house had been a secret training base for the resistance. It’s conversion back to a house was a less than conventional process, with broad cockney accents and rumours of Russians with suitcases of cash being turned away.
One day, I came by and found that an original 1692 window had been discovered hidden behind some masonry, and thrown into a skip. In what I took as a lesson in the importance of being ready to take action beyond your authority, I removed it, send a record to RCAHMS and deposited it safely.
The V&A talk focused on the beauty of the bed as an historic object and the curatorial process of conservation, but missed all the social history and cultural context of power symbols. All these experiences were bound up for me in that small poster on our office wall, a way marker in 35 years experience in professional practice.
But for the youth it had no meaning, it was not a good reflection of what the practice is now, not a good mirror for us to look at on our wall each day, guiding our future. So it was changed for a picture of our experimental protostructure for COP26. I’ve gotten over the shock of change now and am grateful for the progressive intervention from a fresh generation with clearer forward focus. Diversity = strength in age as everything else.
I write this today to dispel my anger at the coronation of a King. We are the 6th richest country in the world, where children don’t have enough to eat, the elderly can’t heat their homes and people with disabilities don’t get adequate support, while kings parade through our streets in gold carriages and the media feed opium to the masses. We still give out British Empire medals like it was something associated with honour rather than a badge of shame.
We know that the happiness of countries relates to their level of equality, and that we are one of the least equal countries around. In Scotland, 10 families own more than the poorest 30% of the population. That’s wrong. The crown is the pinnacle symbol of a system of white, male, protestant inherited wealth and privilege that holds our country back from progress. If you pledge allegiance to the pinnacle, then you give support to the deep-rooted system and values that it rests on.
Its time for some old trees to be blown over in our forest, to be rooted up and let some light in. Change is natural but disruptive and we need to keep our eyes on our progressive future and develop smart routes around obstacles and light footsteps. Maybe a new route marker will be when my two professional bodies, RIBA and RIAS, take the Royal out of their names.