Why are heritage enthusiasts so stubbornly hidebound?

Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by class, gender and race, there can be no civilised argument against the preservation and enjoyment of great architecture and art from the past. But ‘heritage’ is not quite that simple. There’s something else going on. A la recherche of what precisely?

Our troubled world accommodates, even embraces, heritage tomatoes and heritage paint. The former reaches back into agricultural history to find an uncontaminated source of perfect taste; the latter, chalk-dense, impure colours popularised by Farrow & Ball, elevates ordinary cottage woodwork to gentility. And these two poles of misplaced desire define the heritage sensibility.

It’s a malaise which uneasily mingles nostalgia with a distrust, verging on dislike creeping into phobia, of the new. When the future seems uncertain or even threatening, how nice to sit down to a feast of Cherokee Purple Heritage toms, in the light of a setting sun shining through window joinery painted Germolene or Mouse’s Back.