Halting production of ITV’s long-running drama, ‘Heartbeat’, also means clotting the lifeblood of Goathland, the real village setting for the series. Every year 1.2 million visiting fans bring vital income to ‘hotels, souvenir shops and other businesses’ there. Loss of this revenue stream ‘will kill village’. (1)
This news stirred up in my head a similar story I had heard on the radio a few weeks ago. The gist was that fishermen from a small port had secured permission to build a jetty and access road to ease their laborious transport of catches from boat to shore. This, however, was all to be subject to a judicial review brought on by a group of well-heeled second home owners alarmed that the project was going to ruin the picturesque port. Although based in London and the home counties they are to argue that that their own ‘local’ industry, ie letting holiday homes and bringing in visitors, will be jeopardised by the destruction of the local environment by the fishermen and their local industry.
English social history is not short of examples of absentee landlords overriding the interests of local people but this all seemed to me to be something different, something new- as well as strangely familiar.
The great chroniclers of patterns of settlement in England and America, such as Hoskins and Mumford, have always been able to demonstrate a direct functional relationship between a place and the human activity there. Locations within or on the edge of an agricultural hinterland and beside a river crossing or along a major route became market towns. Foundries were built close to sources of iron and coal, the streets of workers housing grew around them and soon there’s an industrial town. The infant film industry seized on the twin opportunities of reliable sunlight for shooting and cheap hillside lots in California etc. etc.
Now what functional relationship is there between a TV series and the foundation of Goathland village, between holiday lets and the springing up of a coastal port? For the first time the answer is none whatsoever. Production company and investment income alike are parasite, feeding on the empty husk of meaning of place- its external appearance embodying ideas of ‘heritage’ and of ‘tradition’
15 years ago I wrote about the coming society ‘……absolved of the responsibilities of physical proximity for its workings’ and characterised by a ‘……withdrawal of the imperatives of function and usage from the real outer city.’(2) I should have added ‘the real outer countryside’ as well. And I should have paid closer attention to the human consequences of this literal dislocation of economic power from the everyday, real, world of you and I. What else are we looking at today in the recession- lives blighted or put on hold, dereliction in the towns- but just such a lack of connection?
(1) Observer 08/03/09 News p23
(2) ‘The Beauty of the Morning’ in World Architecture no 32 see also issues nos 26 and 29 for a wider discussion of the effect of this dislocation on our surroundings.