Utopian Currents in Heritage
William Morris, 'Architecture and History' (1884).
In 1877, William Morris co-founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), which went on to establish many heritage conservation principles that remain influential to this day. In his advocacy of such principles, Morris’s concern with safeguarding and maintaining the legacy of the past has often been noted. Yet his address to the Society’s Annual Meeting in 1884 reveals a far more socially conscious view of historical buildings and the temporal imaginaries embedded in them. Architecture, he suggested, could provide insights about the past that shape and feed into future hopes. Likewise, his campaigns to protect ancient monuments were motivated less by the conservative impulse to arrest the passage of time, than by a desire to make an intervention in the present with the aim of opening up alternatives for the future.
These ideas were explored more fully in Morris’s famous utopian fiction News from Nowhere (1890). In Nowhere pleasure in art is fully integrated into social and working life, making possible a living relationship with the past and a future where old buildings have become a foil to the beautiful new ones:
For the first time in my life, I was having my fill of the pleasure of the eyes without any of that sense of incongruity, that dread of approaching ruin, which had always beset me hitherto when I had been amongst the beautiful works of art of the past, mingled with the lovely nature of the present; both of them, in fact, the result of the long centuries of tradition, which had compelled men to produce the art, and compelled nature to run into the mould of the ages (Morris [1890] 1995: 146).
In a similar vein, the appeal to architecture in Morris’s speech reaches both towards the past and the future. And it reaches towards the future, not with the promise of a pristine historical inheritance, but with an active engagement and negotiation of what heritage and living well together might mean.
It is precisely this dialogue between the real and the imagined that gives utopian thinking its critical force. With regard to heritage, these critical and transformative impulses are not always acknowledged, although that is not to say they are absent. The utopian dimension in Morris’s thought begins to hint at the potential for thinking heritage with utopia.