TAITMAIL Rebuilding the History House
Robert Jenrick, who is appalled at seeing so few white faces on the streets of Birmingham, has been obliged to leave the Conservative benches and join new friends in Reform UK, including Sarah Pochin who was shocked to see so many black faces in TV ads.
Suella Braverman, the former home secretary who doesn’t believe she’s English and dreams of sending immigrants (presumably, since she's not English, like herself) to Ruanda, is believed to be considering a similar side-ways slide along the green benches. She supports the view of the podcaster Konstantin Kisin who says that Rishi Sunak is ruled out of Britishness by his colour and his religion - “He is brown and Hindu, how can he be English?” And if he were alive now maybe even Norman Tebbitt would be glancing longingly at that growing claque of Reformers; he thought brown and black cricket lovers should declare their cultural allegiance by saying which national cricket team they supported - if you cheer for Pakistan you’re not one of us. And as for Farage…. I’m not going there.
It’s not easy to descend to such puerile caterwauling, childish mithering that, a few months ago, most of us wouldn’t have given a second thought to. But if we have to confront it, let’s do it like grown-ups.
This week Labour’s culture secretary announced a bonanza of £1.5bn over the next five years for doing up our cultural institutions and make them more relevant and accessible to all of us. “At a time when forces are seeking to divide the country and undermine our shared cultural spaces, the arts, culture and heritage are crucial to the nations’ national story and bringing people together” Lisa Nandy said: "Culture is what unites us and tells our shared national story.”
That’s all very welcome, but who exactly are we now? How did we come to share this “national story”? What even is our national story?
The British Museum won’t tell you. That’s a universal collection drawn from an eclectic selection of historical cultures, not a British museum. Don’t go to the National Gallery for clues: it might belong to the nation but it’s based on a private collection of European paintings because when it was founded 200 years ago there weren’t enough British artists considered good enough to be exhibited.
So where do we go to find out about being British? Well, nowhere. But there could have been 30 years ago, and there still could be.
In 1994, at the height of the lottery craze when untold millions were suddenly available for arts and heritage projects, a small group of friends met on a spring evening in the tiny, cluttered first floor Soho office of the editor of History Today. Gathered around him wherever they could squat with their mugs of tea finely balanced were an academic from the University of London’s Institute of Contemporary British History, a BBC radio producer, a newspaper journalist and Kenneth Hudson, the - among other things – august director of the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) whose idea this was. They were, said The Observer, “alarmed that Britain has no comprehensive record of its place in the world”. Today one might add, “or at home”.
Hudson suggested four broad themes for a national museum of us: maintaining the British (feeding us, housing us, clothing us); inspiring us (motivating us to be tolerant good citizens); controlling us (restraining our baser instincts); and us and foreigners, how we have interacted with the non-British over the centuries. Essential religion and education elements would fit into at least two categories.
They were later refined and more generalised: Food (how did chicken tikka marsala get to be our national dish?), clothing (how is the baseball cap standard headgear?), architecture, health, inspirations through education and leisure; guidance/control through laws and constitution; interaction with overseas nations. It was not to be about kings, conquest and commercial interest, it would be about us.
That meeting more or less coincided with the opening in Germany of their national museum of contemporary history in Bonn, and later that year its director, Hermann Schäfer, gave the annual EMYA lecture. “To be an isolated temple of the muses or to be a public place of discussion – that is the question” he said. “The correct answer to this is the beginning of a new museum concept”. His museum was called the Haus der Geschichte (now attracting 850,000 visitors a year). Britain’s version would be the History House.
Image shows Haus der Geschichte
The History House would be a multi-pavilion “museum of the history of the peoples of the British Isles and their connections with the rest of the world” said the lottery grant proposal. It would use the latest technologies - horsepower compared with today’s AI-accented offering. There were a number of possible sites for it; there were negotiations over Milton Keynes, Greenwich, Hastings, Bedfordshire and Telford. But it would be fed by satellite museums with their own specialisms around the country, and there would be feeds to school and community centres. Temporary exhibitions could be mounted separately or collectively and circulated electronically as well as in the conventional way.
It quickly got widespread support. That autumn the historian Asa Briggs headed the list of signatories to a letter to The Times. “Its exhibitions and displays, using the most up-to-date technology, would present artefacts not just as items of interest but as pieces of historical evidence” the letter said. “Thus every visitor would make a journey through the relevant societies, political structures, economies and cultures. History is the collective memory of a society, from which it attempts to shape its future”.
In 1996 a bid to the Millennium Commission (one of the agencies for channelling lottery money to good causes, aiming for dramatic Year 2000 openings) was compiled and submitted, a very detailed 16-page document. The History House would not, said the submission, be an “inward-looking celebration of our island story” but would “seek to raise questions and provoke debate”. But the bid was up against an application from the British Museum for its new Millennium Court, and the History House didn’t make it.
Cost? Lots – in the 1996 lottery bid the detailed estimate came to precisely £61,935,000. Today, in the third or fourth technological generation since then making the process many times more efficient, it could be a comparable amount. There would be lottery money this time; there is philanthropy cash which wasn’t there in 1996 – last October, out of the blue, the Reuben Foundation handed over £30m to the Courtauld as a result of “good people talking to good people”. And then there’s the potential bonanza of the hotel tax being proposed which could deliver £1.2bn a year for local culture and amenities. The creative industries make £125bn a year for us, 5% of that wouldn’t be noticed. And what about a taste of Ms Nandy’s £1.5bn fund?
We do museums in this country, it’s what millions a year come from all over the world to see. We’re very good at it. Now we’re encouraging our museums to be more pragmatic, and like the Manchester Museum address our communities and their issues. The new History House would need a Mark Jones, an Esme Ward or a Nicholas Cullinan at the top, but we have wedges of talent capable of bringing it off almost on tap from, for instance, the Clore Leadership programme.
So let’s get serious, tell our true story according to fact and put these racist political hooligans in their place. Our story is about us, not them.