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The Pathos of Conservation: Raphael

Samuel and the politics of heritage
a

Kynan Gentry
a

School of History, Australian National University, Canberra,

Australia
Published online: 02 Sep 2014.

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To cite this article: Kynan Gentry (2015) The Pathos of Conservation: Raphael Samuel
and the politics of heritage, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21:6, 561-576, DOI:
10.1080/13527258.2014.953192
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International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2015

Vol. 21, No. 6, 561576, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2014.953192

The Pathos of Conservation: Raphael Samuel and the politics of

heritage
Kynan Gentry*
School of History, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 07:48 11 August 2015

(Received 5 August 2014; nal version received 6 August 2014)

When Raphael Samuels Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has
not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthals The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewisons The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of
factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unnished
project, and heritage in the book having multiple personas the net result
being that Samuels arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuels core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical
background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuels argument
essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what
we might today call unofcial narratives and discourses; and to challenge the
dominant view that heritage was ultimately historys poor cousin, I argue that
Samuels ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.
Keywords: heritage theory; Raphael Samuel; heritage values; politics of
preservation

When Raphael Samuels Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary

Culture was published in 1994 it was critically received. Yet, 20 years on
Theatres has arguably not had the impact that works such as David Lowenthals
The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Robert Hewisons The Heritage
Industry (1987) have had. Google Scholar, for example, puts Theatres of Memory
in a clear third place, after The Heritage Industry which has almost one-and-ahalf times as many citations, and The Past is a Foreign Country four times as
many.1 While one of the limitations of Google Scholar, of course, is that it surveys only scholarly publications, other avenues of investigation seem to suggest
the very same result. Peeking into usage at the library here at the Australian
National University, for example, shows copies of Lowenthals The Past is a
Foreign Country being borrowed almost three times as often as Theatres, while
my local public library has a copy of Lowenthals book, but not Samuels.
Googles Ngram Viewer, which charts the incidence of words and phrases over
the entire 5.2 million books digitised by Google Inc. shows a similar pattern,
plotting the incidence of Hewisons Heritage Industry at nearly twice that of Theatres, and Lowenthals The Past is a Foreign Country as three times more

*Email: kynan.gentry@anu.edu.au
2014 Taylor & Francis

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common. Even a simple web search of Yahoo and Google give twice as many
instances of The Past is a Foreign Country than it does Theatres of Memory.2
In part, the reason for Theatres more limited impact is that as with Samuels
wider oeuvre, heritage in Theatres has many (and at times seemingly contradictory) personas, while the books narrative does not have a logical beginning or end,
but rather offers a panoptic view more typical of old style panoramas. Theatres, of
course, was also an unnished project, with only the rst volume of what was initially conceived as a trilogy being completed before Samuels death from cancer in
early December 1996, leaving his overall argument only partially developed.3 While
Samuels focus was limited principally to European perspectives on heritage, the
radicalness of his argument that heritage was culturally pluralistic and at the forefront of the democratisation of societys production and consumption of the past
was also arguably too much for an Anglo-American heritage community preoccupied with the supposed separation of history and heritage and a reductionist view
of heritage as simply bad history and evidence of a sick society.
In recent years, however, renewed interest in Samuels ideas has emerged
namely on the back of discontent with the oversimplication of the history vs. heritage analogy; as growing interest in indigenous heritage and cultural landscapes
have brought the pluralistic nature of heritage values to the fore; and as the body of
research exploring notions of authority within heritage and museological practice
has grown with demand for Theatres prompting Verso to reprint the work in 2012
(Personal communication, Alison Light, 9 November 2013). While within heritage
studies, Theatres is the most well known and cited of Samuels works, the idea of
heritage and the wider use of the past is central to the bulk of his writing. While
some of his ideas changed little over the course of his life, others, did radically
the net result being that it is often hard to pin his position down. While politically,
for example, he was raised a staunch communist and almost blind supporter of the
left, by the mid-1980s, he was one of the ercest critics of the left and its perspectives on history and heritage. Indeed, the complexity of Samuels heritage values
can only really be understood in the context of his wider work, as is the objective of
this article.
Born into a household steeped in the culture of the Communist Party, Raphael
Samuels childhood saw him surrounded by History and Politics. As the cultural historian Keith Thomas who had read History at Balliol College with Samuel in the
early 1950s later recollected, as an undergraduate he had picked Adam Smiths
Wealth of Nations, a set book for History prelims, from the shelves of Samuels college room, only to nd in it the daunting inscription: To Raphael on his eighth
birthday (Thomas 1995). Heavily inuenced by the historical perspective of his
uncle the renowned Judaic scholar and historian of socialism Chimen Abramsky
as a teenager Samuel was introduced to the Communist Party Historians Group
(CPHG), where he worked side by side with Gods (as he described them) such as
Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, A. L. Morton and Christopher Hill (Harrison
1987).
Established in 1946, the CPHGs primary objective was to anglicise the Marxist
tradition and demonstrate its compatibility with a native idiom of critical social theory. Driving this was the Popular Frontism inaugurated by the Seventh Congress of
the Communist International in 1935, which sought the rehabilitation of progressive
or allegedly progressive aspects of national history and national cultural traditions in
the name of demonstrating that the Communist Party was the inheritor of a long

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tradition of English popular radicalism. Two threads were central to the recovery of
this national-popular tradition: the assumption that the authentic national culture
was democratic (and thus that the true national culture was national because it was
popular); and that the dominant culture eeced the people of their heritage and heroes. As the Marxist philosopher and classical scholar George Derwent Thomson
argued in his Marxism and Poetry in 1945, This, then, is the rst need to rescue
our cultural heritage from the bourgeoisie, to take it over, reinterpret it, adapt it to
our needs, renew its vitality by making it thoroughly our own (Thomson 1945, 60).
Edward Thompsons William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955), Dona
Torrs Tom Mann and his Times (1956), and Christopher Hills famous Norman
Yoke chapter in his Puritanism and Revolution (1958) were early efforts at such
reclamation.
Motivated by the perceived value of peoples history as a theoretical basis of
social movement, in 1950 the CPHG established a local-history group and began
publishing a local-history bulletin (CPHG Local History Bulletin 1, October 1950).
The CPHGs notion of local history here differed from traditional local histories
(which tended to ignore or distort class struggle), by developing a history in which
the main theme would be the life of ordinary people their jobs and living conditions, local class struggles and the place of working-class organisation in local and
national politics. Guidance was also offered on the use of different labour resources
such as trade-union histories, minute books and old newspapers, as well as promoting the value of personal recollections and the need to record them before it was too
late.
In the wake of the Soviet response to the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and
Kruschevs disclosure of Stalins purges, things came to a grinding halt as most
members of the CPHG resigned. Samuel, together with Stuart Hall, Gabriel Pearson
and Charles Taylor would go on to establish the heterogenous Universities & Left
Review alongside Edward Thompson and John Savilles New Reasoner. In 1960, the
two journals merged to form the New Left Review (NLR). While the NLRs concern
was squarely politics and issues of international solidarity, by early 1961, Samuel
had become somewhat critical of what he saw as the journals failure to give
adequate historical context to political issues (Samuel to Taylor, 28 October 1961,
RS1-018; Samuel to Birnbaum, 22 November 1961, RS1-019; Samuel to Bourdet,
10 November 1961, RS1-019). Exploring a range of new historiographical areas
with his New Left comrade Denis Butt, he was increasingly drawn to the cultural
dimension of politics in the work of scholars such as Raymond Williams, Richard
Hoggart and Edward Thompson scholarship which explored the people as
makers rather than victims of history, and working-class tradition as a platform
that could inspire demands for social justice in the present. The work of Octavia Hill
and the Charity Organisation Society were especially inuential on him here
(Harrison 1979).
Taking up a tutorship in economics, social history and sociology at Ruskin College in 1964, Samuel soon began pushing for the radical revision of the Colleges
curriculum and raison dtre, centred on the building of working-class capacity and
community (Samuel 1968, 12).4 History from below and popular heritage, he
believed, needed to be central to this, offering both a more direct encounter with the
past and an escape from the aggressive and narrow professionalism of Oxford. As a
discipline he also saw history as a vehicle for moral argument and political debate,
providing the crucible in which opinions and commitments were formed. Such ideas

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had been at the heart of the Social History Group formed by Samuel and a number
of other disenchanted Oxford graduates a few years earlier, and which by early 1966
was running weekly sessions on topics such as Popular Theatre, The Working
Mans Holiday, Working-class Funerals and Censorship and Morals in the Nineteenth-century (Samuel n.d.a).
In the spring of 1966, Samuel decided to experiment with the Social History
Groups format at Ruskin, introducing an extended seminar series on the theme of
The English Countryside in the Nineteenth-century. This would be the beginning
of the History Workshop Movement. Epistemologically and pedagogically, a number
of threads lay at the heart of the Workshop approach. Firstly, the emphasis on primary research showed that students need not learn their history second-hand, but
could go to the sources in the condent hope of making ndings of their own, and
could make a contribution to research at the same time as having an apprenticeship
in its skills. Tapping into libertarian notions of autonomy and resistance, the aim
was to open up new areas of historical enquiry, and challenge the academic notion
of what constituted history. Material culture was equally key, existing as radical
and more importantly living connections to the past, and lling gaps in the record,
while sites and buildings additionally offered a confrontation with dominant narratives by driving home the changing historical nature of place. At the rst Workshop,
attendees accordingly trooped off to Charterville, the Chartists model village at
Witney, and at the third Workshop to Otmoor Common (site of Enclosure Act riots
in 182930), while at the fourth, Alun Howkins conducted a guided walk through
Judes Oxford the tour highlighting the changing historical character of the
Oxford landscape as a site of class conict, while doubling as an introduction to
the real Christminster life by reminding participants that the historians and worldly
clerics of Hardys time were not the only inhabitants of Oxford.5
While within the classroom the Workshop platform sought to break the rigidity
of the expert-amateur juxtaposition by bringing student and teacher together on the
basis of a common research endeavour, at a more general level, the Workshops
principal aim was to establish (or re-establish) a dialogue between history and community through the highlighting of the place of the past in the present. Bringing
these together, the openness of the Workshop was seen as providing a conduit to
new lines of historical discussion and inquiry by showing the work that could be
done through local research and the building of a critical voice within the community la Gramscis organic intellectual. Such variables would ultimately dene
Samuels engagement with the past for the remainder of his life. Indeed, while a prolic writer, his rst sole-authored book would be Theatres of Memory (1994), as he
instead directed his energies into the Workshops (which by the mid-1970s had
become major festivals of history attracting several thousand participants); into getting the research of students and Workshoppers to press; and generally working to
connect the people with their history.
In 1976, the application of these ideals was extended with the launch of the History Workshop Journal (HWJ). Dedicated to making history a more democratic
activity, it offered a sharp critique of the exclusivity, fragmentation and competitive
individualism of academic history by seeking to encourage a collaborative approach
to research; to highlight the provisional and political nature of historical enquiry and
production; and the multitude of ways in which the past was consumed in the present (HWJ 1, 1, 1976, 13). The uniqueness of the local and the personal would
be especially important to all of these practices. In his teaching, for example, Samuel

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encouraged students to work on places or realms of work that were part of their
background, his rationale being that this would tap into the wealth of individuals
experience and expertise. By the end of the 1970s, wider interest in the local was
also growing, with the emergence of projects such as Exploring Living Memory
established to encourage the development of reminiscence work throughout London
and the work of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, giving rise to a profound growth of interest in, and inuence of, Peoples History and
community heritage (Personal communication, Anna Davin, 25 November 2013).
While the shift in Samuels focus from reconstructing the lost experiences of the
powerless to the mechanisms by which the past was remembered, used and debated
in the present was ultimately the result of a crescendo of interests, the broader frame
of political, social and cultural change that was to occur in Britain during the 1980s
was the most profound factor. Within this, the demise of Marxism, the growth of
post-structuralism and the linguistic turn were major factors, as was the collapse of
the British manufacturing sector, the migration of militancy from the shop-oor to
the trade union ofce, and the demise of traditional political divisions. The most
important moment in Samuels turn to heritage, however, was Thatchers annexation of Victorian values in the run up to the 1983 General Election. Behind this
lay an attempt by Thatcher to both capitalise on the cultural value of the Victorians
by asserting a direct lineage between the values of the Victorian era and her own
political position, and to invoke the era as a talisman for lost stabilities (Samuel
1992). As Thatcher reecting on her own upbringing noted in early 1983:
I was brought up by a Victorian grandmother. We were taught in work jolly hard. We
were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self-reliance; we was taught to live
within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to godliness. You were
taught self-respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You
were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values.
They are also perennial values. (Interview with Peter Allen, LBC, 15 April, 1983)

While the left more generally would focus its response on wider Conservative
notions of patriotism, Samuels interest lay in the broader issue of how the past was
glossed in the present; of how Thatchers Victorian values drew so effectively on
social history to offer a more human version of the past which, like the museum,
had imbued that past with aesthetic qualities it lacked at the time; of how on the one
hand the Tories has signicantly increased expenditure and legislative powers in
relation to law and order at the same time as they looked back fondly to a mythic
past in which the community, not the state, policed itself; and of how Thatcher could
suggest that Britain owed its nineteenth-century greatness to prudential virtues
without even a passing comprehension of the human suffering and indignity which
the mass of our people had to endure in that pre-democratic age (Russell 1983).
Indeed, far from associating nineteen-century Britain with Dickensian squalor and
grime, Thatchers rehabilitated notion of the Victorian was grounded in virtue,
beauty, morality and truth. The great irony, of course, was that this turn to the past
was strikingly similar to the Victorian turn to Merry England in the hard times of
the 1830s and 1840s (Harrison 1994, 229; Samuel 1992).
The past, nonetheless, was central to Thatchers notion of citizenry, and following the passing of the 1988 Education Reform Act, history was placed at the heart
of the national curriculum. Here, the Conservatives sought the restoration of a
chronological national history of a knowledge of a shared past, of a national

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tradition which they saw as needing to replace the skills-based and highly
politicised leftist new history (Waldman 2009, 215217). For its part, the new history had emerged in the 1960s not so much as the promotion of a political or historical discourse, but as a response to pupils voting with their feet in reaction to what
they saw as the acquisition of information for which they had no use, by recasting
historical enquiry as the study of hermeneutics. The rights argument, however, was
that through its fragmented approach to the teaching of history and the absence of
historical facts, the way was open for Marxists and Socialists to manipulate students
feelings, while the emphasis on the history of everyday life (thereby including
women and children), and multiculturalism came at the expense of traditional narratives denying British children access to their past, and emphasising cultural and
social fragmentation; while oppositional histories denigrated national institutions by
showing the traditional past in an unattering light through their exploration of historys losers (Skidelsky 1988). As Thatcher concluded in the forward of Hugh
Thomas History, Capitalism and Freedom published by the conservative thinktank, the Centre for Policy Studies in 1979 a whole generation has been brought
up to misunderstand and denigrate our national history. Far the blackest picture is
drawn by our socialist academics and writers of precisely those periods of our history when greatest progress was achieved (Thatcher, in Thomas 1979).
At one level, Samuel was scathing of the Conservatives position, arguing that
the unifying themes of their approach of how a free and democratic society has
developed over the centuries ew in the face of present-day perceptions and discontents, and returned to a Whig view of history as progressive development. At a
more pragmatic level, he questioned the simple relevance of drum and trumpet history to the average British citizen, provoking the ire of Conservatives by claiming
rightly so that the Battle of Trafalgar was arguably less inuential on the lives of
the average British citizen than the passing of the Married Womens Property Act of
1882. There was no reason, he concluded, why national history had to be celebratory: it would be more interesting, as well as more truthful, if it was not (Samuel
n.d.b). Yet, acknowledging that the political left was no less guilty of efforts to use
the past for political purpose, his primary concern was not so much with Conservative use of the past, as with the imposition of any rigid approach that would impact
on school historys exibility and sensitivity to the changes and tensions in broader
society. Taking an anti-conformist position that put him at odds with the left, his
conclusion was that Conservative, radical and liberal approaches to history were
not mutually exclusive or as incompatible as they seem (Samuel 1990d). Indeed,
hoping that neither the left nor the right would win the curriculum debate, he supported a duality a pluralistic syllabus that within the loose framework of nation
would include both higher political history and social history, considered from both
international and transnational perspectives, as well as in their local moments
(Samuel to Harrison, 22 September 89, Samuel-038, Bishopsgate Institute).
Far from being motivated by any sort of radical contrarianism, however,
Samuels stance here was driven by the realisation that the pursuit of any singular
position was only likely to further fragment the craft sub-divisions which permeated
the study of the past the separation of the social and the political; the urban
and the rural; the local and the national; the professional from the amateur; the past
from the present (Samuel 1990a). In a similar capacity, while himself one of the
chief proponents of History from Below, Samuel readily acknowledged its limitations and inadequacies in particular its patchwork approach and privileging the

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local and the familial while openly criticising the wariness of many left historians
to aerial views such as the nation and empire (Samuel 1990c, 127). This, in fact,
presents a valuable illustration of the complexity of Samuels position, for while historians on the left generally read any engagement with the empire as tantamount to
an exercise in jingoism, Samuels enthusiasm for imperial history was grounded in
his belief that to abandon the area would deny subalterns such as his Bengali neighbours in Londons East End of a crucial point of reference (Samuel 1990b).
Unlike Labour, the Conservatives could equally be praised for their recognition
of the importance of history to society and education:
History has had a better deal from the present Conservative administration than it
would from any imaginable Labour one. At least as their passionate attacks on the
New History suggest, Conservatives care about the subject. While Left-wing ideologues splash about in the shallows of post-modernism, their right wing counterparts
think up Trafalgar Day as a public holiday, celebrate the glories of the country house,
and dream of a return to Our Island Story. (Samuel 1989b)

What the Conservatives recognised, was that history was quite crucial to any understanding of what Britain is, was and might be, and no party which had any pretensions to leadership or representation could wash its hands of it. Yet this, Samuel
charged, was the lefts very problem a problem he unpacked in the trilogy of
articles written between 1985 and 1987 under the provocative title Lost World of
British Communism. Unusually intimate in the details it unveiled of his childhood
and beliefs, at the heart of The Lost World lay an image of the British Communist
Party that aligned not with the usual narrative of struggle, split and international
afliation, but with the British national culture of deference, authority and conformity. While Party support had been grounded in class alignment and class feeling,
the rush for new perspectives in the face of economic decay, unemployment and
technological change had seen these traditional loyalties swept aside a phenomenon he described as post-radical chic. The Labour Party was similarly charged,
being neither radical enough to dene itself by opposition to the past, nor conservative enough to want to preserve it (Samuel 1990b). The lefts response to the
19845 miners strike explored by Samuel in The Enemy Within (1986) was only
further evidence of this loss of direction, of its raison dtre, and of its taste for the
streets (Samuel, Bloomeld, and Boanas 1986).
Accordingly, while many on the left simply cringed at the ood of nostalgia and
sentimentalism taking place under the Conservatives, Samuel understood how for
Thatcher the invocation of heritage was being used to ll the gap left by patriotism,
nationalism and even socialism. Why, he questioned, was the left not tapping into
these same wells of popular sentiment? Indeed, Thatcher, Samuel believed, had
handed the left an opportunity it desperately needed to grasp, with the changes her
government was seeking to make most notably in relation to New Commonwealth
immigration and settlement, the recrudescence of Celtic separatism and the Assembly movement in Scotland, and Britains membership of the EEC having propelled
history into the arena of public debate by questioning what it meant in the present
day to be British. These tensions were further explored in two collections Samuel
edited and contributed to Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British
National Identity (1989a), and The Myths we Live By (1990). Conceived as an
exploration of the politics of the past, Patriotism emerging from the 1984 Patriotism History Workshop that had itself been held in response to the jingoistic recall

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of the Battle of Britain surrounding the Falklands War of 1982. While The Myths
We Live By had similarly been inspired by Thatcherisms constant efforts to nd
conrmation for contemporary policy in the past, it was also at heart a swipe at the
limitations of the professional historians obsession with the hard realities of historical evidence. Historical awareness was as much a product of unofcial as it was
of ofcial knowledge. As it had with his establishment of the History Workshop
movement, this would lay at the very heart of Samuels approach to heritage. Seeing
the heritage question as an essentially public debate, he similarly embraced increasingly popular and democratic forms of publication and engagement, such as writing
for the independent and conservative press, and television and radio, while also
seeking contributions to publications and conferences from across the political spectrum. Driven in part by his desire to break from the sterility of the lefts position, at
a more basic level Samuel both by inclination and his communist upbringing
sought to communicate to the largest possible audience, while also viewing the historical intelligence of the public far more positively than most scholars did (Personal
communication, Alison Light, 15 November 2013).
As all of this suggests, Samuelss approach to heritage ew somewhat in the face
of the critical voice that emerged during the 1980s, largely from the left. Caustically
summed up by the poet Tom Paulin as a loathsome collection of theme parks and
dead values, this position was most importantly developed in Patrick Wrights On
Living in an Old Country (1985), Robert Hewisons The Heritage Industry (1987),
and David Lowenthals The Past is a Foreign Country (1985). At the heart of Hewison, Wright, and Lowenthals attack was a perceived growing museumication of
Britain (or in the case of Lowenthal, western culture more generally), their charge
being that the modern heritage industry was evidence of a sick society it was
backward-looking rather than future-oriented, fearful of the present, and incapable
of innovation.6 Heritage was similarly a structure largely imposed from above to
capture a middle-class nostalgia for the past as a golden age in the context of a climate of decline, with Wright charging that Conservative support for heritage could
be read as the revival of the patriotism of the Second World War, which was also
connected to Thatchers patriotism of the Falklands War. Importantly, the lefts critique was also structured around a fundamental separation of history and heritage.
Wright, for example, took issue with how heritage redened history as the historical, abstracting and redeploying it as a unifying spectacle with the net result that
active historicity was denied to a consequently devalued and meaningless present
day experience (Wright 1985, 66). For Hewison, the heritage industry was the
enemy of the principle of hope, presenting a history that sties, but above all, a history that is over, while for Lowenthal heritage paradoxically distanced people from
history, replacing the reality of the past with an idealised version that looked more
like their own reality a position which echoed Pierre Noras insistence that memory and history were two different orientations towards the past (Hewison 1987,
141; Lowenthal 1985; Nora 1992).
While the general dismissal of heritage as parochial touched a raw nerve in Samuel, his critique of the heritage baiters as he called them, was multi-faceted, but
ultimately grounded in the argument that there remained an epistemological privileging that saw History (with a capital H) as superior to other versions of the past. This
hostility to heritage was both grounded in, and reinforced by, the fetishisation of
archives, with its giving of talismanic importance to manuscripts. As he noted in
one early review of Hewisons Heritage Industry, for example, the preoccupation

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with the supposed link between heritage and decline ignored the ways in which the
heritage industry had democratised (or at least contributed to the democratisation
of) the past, and how conservation served as a metaphor and principle of growth in
contemporary economies even when this was through the appeal to nostalgic sentiment. Indeed, as Samuel made blatantly clear in his criticism of the privileging of
History, nostalgia had arisen to serve or stand in for a critical and subversive potential of the past. At the heart of his argument here was the idea of retrochic, which
he framed as one of the core ways that modern society drew upon the past. In
contrast to a concern with restoration of original detail or the quest for authenticity,
retrochic was concerned with how heritage objects and places were often valued
for their decorative effect for their aesthetic or parodiable worth, rather than their
authentic connections to the past (Samuel 1994, 95). Nostalgic it may have been,
but it was also big business:
One could point to the dominance of vernacular or neo-vernacular style in new house
building, or to the way in which the new ofce blocks disguise themselves in skins of
pseudo brick. Or consider the shelves of country or natural food in a supermarket, from
such newly minted traditional breads as the granary loaf to hand-made marmalade and
even designer potato crisps. Conservation is proving the cutting edge of the business
recolonisation of the city. (Samuel 1987a)

Marcus Binneys SAVE Britains Heritage had similarly shown how old buildings
could be tangible economic assets, securing a measurable nancial return (Binney
1978, x).7 Samuel would develop this argument more fully in Theatres of Memory,
the core argument of which was that History and memory were indivisible, and
understanding a creature of its time: that the point of address in any discussion of
historiography should be the ensemble of activities and practices in which ideas
of history are embedded (Samuel 1994, 8). Not only was History not the prerogative of the professional historian, but to give it a post-modern spin, it was not even
the professional historians invention. To assume anything less was to overlook
those extra-curricular sources of knowledge, which subvert the learning process,
change its direction or create alternative histories of their own (Samuel 1994, 15).
This argument in many ways ipped those of Hewison, Wright, Lowenthal and
Pierre Nora (not to mention the entire tradition of modern historiography) on its
head, with Samuel ultimately suggesting that it was not history, but the supposedly
inferior memory and heritage which most effectively captured social experience.
A similar stance was taken in respect of the blanket claim by the left that heritage was a hegemonic tool of ruling elites Neal Ascherson, for example, warning
that the rise of heritage heralded the advent of a permanent Conservative majority
(Ascherson 1987). At the heart of this narrative, broadly speaking, was the assertion
that History was a weapon of social control a means of generating consensus and
legitimatisation of the status quo by reference to a mythologised version of the past
(Barthel 1996; Bennett 1995; Gillis 1994; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). While this
was the very position that had earlier driven the CPHG in which Samuel had begun
his training as a historian, by the late 1980s his view was that such an argument was
symptomatic of how academic historians had, through the turn to countercultural
high-theory, become all too keen to theorise airily about the way meanings were
constructed in the present without considering the wider consequences or ramications of these images (Samuel 1987a). The past was unquestionably being hegemonised by both the political left and right, however, the efcacy of such narratives

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could not be assumed a view supported by the sociologist John Urrys argument
that as tourists (and equally society) were socially differentiated, any argument that
they are lulled into blind consumption of heritage could not hold true (Urry 1990).
In a position that paralleled, but developed quite independently from, Michel
Foucaults notions of counter-history and counter-memory (Foucault 1977), Samuel
recommended that rather than accepting such an outcome as a given, a more
open-minded, ethnographic approach, in which other possible ofcial motives were
considered. History, he argued, was after all an organic form of knowledge, whose
sources were promiscuous and content was shaped by social forces.8 As he
explained in the Afterword of Theatres:
History has always been a hybrid form of knowledge, syncretizing past and present,
memory and myth, the written record and the spoken word. Its subject matter is promiscuous In popular memory, if not in high scholarship, the great ood or the freak
storm may eclipse wars, battles and the rise and fall of governments. As a form of
communication, history nds expression not only in chronicle and commentary but
also ballad and song, legends and proverbs, riddles and puzzles. Church liturgies have
carried one version of it sacred history; civic ritual another. A present-day inventory
would need to be equally alert to the memory work performed (albeit unintentionally)
by the advertisers, and to the inuence of tourism As a self-conscious art, history
begins with the monuments and inscriptions, and as the record of the built environment
suggests, not the least of the inuences changing historical consciousness today is the
writing on the walls. The inuence of video-games and science-ction would be no
less pertinent in trying to explain why the idea of chronological reversal, or time traveling, has become a normal way of engaging with the idea of the past. (Samuel 1994,
443)

The rst great waves of conservationism such as the railway preservation mania of
the 1950s, the growth of interest in industrial heritage, and the steam traction rallies
of the early 1960s, had similarly been plebeian rather than patrician in character,
while the origins of the heritage boom stretching back far earlier than the political
era of decline suggested by critics such as Wright and Hewison. Newer versions of
the national past notwithstanding the efforts of the National Trust to promote a
country-house version of Englishness were also decidedly more democratic than
earlier ones, offering more points of access to ordinary people and minorities, and
a wider form of belonging:
Indeed, even in the case of the country house, a new attention is now lavished on life
below the stairs (the servants kitchen) while the owners themselves (or the live-in
trustees) are at pains to project themselves as leading private lives ordinary people
in family occupation. Family history societies, practising do-ityourself scholarship
and lling the record ofces and the local history library with searchers, have democratized genealogy, treating apprenticeship indentures as a symbolic equivalent of the
coat of arms, baptismal certicates as that of title deeds. They encourage people to
look down rather than up in reconstituting their roots, not to establish links with the
noble and great. (Samuel 1994, 160)

Indeed, in popular forms of history making, Samuel found a dedication to a past

which embodied decidedly apolitical virtues, yet virtues which at the same time
safely tted into notions of Britishness. His historiographical technique of thick
description the accumulation and deployment of a mass of detail was closely
linked to this, being an attempt to capture and illustrate the range of historical
ensemble, and the pluralism that, he concluded, had left any unied view of the
national past liberal, radical, or Conservative in tatters (Samuel 1994, 281). For

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all its shortcomings, this was arguably one of Theatres greatest strengths, with the
marriage of Samuels writing style and idealism irrefutably demonstrating the
ineffectiveness of academic writing as an inuence on popular views of the past,
especially when compared to the visual and emotional immediacy of such diverse
phenomena as the National Trust, Merchant-Ivory lms, Edith Holdens The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, Laura Ashley, and the Campaign for Real Ale.
While as this paper has thus far suggested, Samuels increasing concern with heritage was ultimately shaped by his underlying politics, and in part a natural corollary
to his being increasingly drawn into the debate about the changing place of history
in modern Britain, it also had a very personal dimension in the form of urban regeneration and gentrication in the London East-end parish of Spitalelds. Moving to
Spitalelds in 1962, Samuel found himself drawn to the historicity of the areas
mixed architecture, and its mediaeval sense of enclosure. He was also particularly
taken with the richness of the parishs working class and subaltern associations
Huguenot refugees in the seventeenth century, who were followed by Irish weavers
and Jewish refugees in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more recently
Bangladeshi immigrants (Samuel 1989c). His fascination with the rebel similarly
aligned with the parishs dubious distinction of being the worst criminal rookery in
nineteenth-century London an attribute not helped by two of Jack the Rippers
presumed victims being murdered in Spitalelds and the remainder in neighbouring
Whitechapel. From a heritage perspective the great irony was that such deprivation,
decay, and evil reputation meant that by the time the 1957 Survey of London
(which sought to systematically record the historic built fabric of the city) was
undertaken, the parish was virtually untouched by twentieth-century urban change.
When, in the late 1970s, however, it was recognised that a third of the historic buildings identied in the 1957 Survey had been lost to slum clearance and piecemeal
demolitions, a charitable organisation called the Spitalelds Historic Buildings Trust
was established to save the area. Seeing itself as a lobby group, the Trust combined
a form of guerrilla activism with business cunning, establishing a sleeping bag ying squad that occupied threatened buildings, forming delegations and establishing
a programme to purchase houses in the area (Blain 1989, 134). Armed with his
sleeping bag and enthusiasm for front-line activism, Samuel soon joined the Trust.
By the mid-1980s, however, the Trust had refocused its energies on the faithful
restoration of Spitalelds Georgian architecture, and worked to regulate who moved
into the area by carefully controlling publicity and actively pursuing a certain type
of home buyer (Jacobs 1996, 7980). Into this setting, in the late 1980s, the City of
London moved to develop the site of the Spitalelds Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable
Market as retail and ofce space something the Tower Hamlets local authority saw
as an opportunity to mend the historic fabric of the area (London Borough of
Tower Hamlets 1986). Initially, the Trust had viewed the markets as adding local
colour through their provision of a link with Old Spitalelds (the market having
been on the site since 1638), however, as it focused increasingly on Georgian Spitalelds, the Trusts tolerance for elements of the area that contradicted this image
diminished. Indeed, by the time the wholesale development of the market site was
proposed, the Trust was arguing that market operations contributed to a feeling of
decay in the area (Spitalelds Trust Newsletter 19761989, 2).
Samuels criticism of the Trusts single-minded focus on Georgian Spitalelds
was wide-ranging, but ultimately linked back to a number of his core values. On the
one hand, he believed that the Trusts emphasis on authenticity had created an area

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K. Gentry

that had an inescapable element of artice in which homes were transformed into
little more than period residences and showcases of the restorers art (Samuel
1989c, 162163). More importantly, while driven primarily by aesthetics, the focus
on the Georgian largely overlooked the Jewish and Bengali revitalisations of the
area, with gentrication of housing stock to private ownership displacing the Bengali garment industry which occupied the once affordable Georgian buildings.
Whats more, the ethnic origins of both Georgian and neo-Georgian Spitalelds were
not exclusively English, despite the gentried image of the parish having come to
stand as a monument of a sanctioned English heritage. His concerns soon to be
supported through the formation of the Campaign to Save Spitalelds from the
Developer thus focused not on the areas architectural stock, but on the impact
change was having on the character of the community. At the heart of this lay the
belief that the character of a district was determined not by its buildings, but by the
ensemble of different uses to which they are put, and, above all, by the character of
the users (Samuel 1987b). As continually evolving living spaces, the transitioning
of Calvanist churches to Jewish synagogues and then Islamic mosques was to be
celebrated, as was the passage of the local economy from Huguenot weaving industry to a Jewish fur trade and then Bengali garment industry (Samuel 1989c, 148).
Indeed, the arrival of the Bengalis had revitalised and transformed the area, bringing
new life and whole new lines to the textile trades; creating a leisure strip of restaurants and cafes; and had brought a settled and youthful population to the district for
the rst time since the dispersal of the Jewish community. Far from being foreign,
they were the natural inhabitants of the area (Samuel 1989d).
For Samuel then, the case of Spitalelds raised a number of unresolved, and possibly unresolvable contradictions at the heart of the conservationist project. Was it a
real historical past which provides the point of reference, or an imaginary one, of
grandiose or gracious living? Georgianised Spitalelds, with its immaculate brickwork, restored lintels and tasteful interiors, no more resembled the real life origin
than the Revived Gothic of nineteenth-century England did the Christian architecture
of the High Middle Ages. What meaning did preservation have, what claim could
be made to authenticity, when a building was frozen in historical limbo, robbed not
only of its original functions but also of its successor qualities. Heritage preservation, if it was to be true to its own claims, needed to be concerned with protecting
the total environment, warts and all, rejoicing in buildings as palimpsest on which
generations had left their mark. And preservation should encourage new growth. In
the case of Spitalelds, this would mean both celebrating the heterogeneity of the
built environment and recognising the truly remarkably continuities of its artisan
production and market-based economies.
Conclusion
To look back at the period between his break with ofcial communism in 1956, and
death forty years later, a number of threads can be seen to remain consistently at the
heart of Raphael Samuels thinking his situating himself as a gure who listened
to the voice of, and worked to empower, the people; as a tireless agent for the
democratisation of historical practice in all its forms; and as a thinker who harboured deep suspicions of the legitimacy of all external sources of authority. This
commitment to the social making of memory and the wider notion of how collective being shaped class and political allegiance required that he attend both to the

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forms of knowledge that comprised the complex and varied topographies of history,
high and low alike, and to the social, cultural and philosophical divisions in which
these variant histories were grounded. Theatres of Memory was an attempt to weave
these threads together, with the book standing as a vindication of history as a popular art traceable in innumerable diverse forms.
The relevance of Samuels ideas around the politics of heritage has only grown
since the 1990s as increasing attention has been paid to the memory narratives of
marginalised groups and to the politics of memory and commemoration. Such explorations have also given weight to his assertion that history, heritage and memory can
be complementary, identical, oppositional and even antithetical. More recent work
on exhibitions and museums, historical lm and popular ctions, and the boom in
popular interest in heritage sites have similarly been ideal for exploring the porousness of the boundaries between academic history and the wider universe of knowledges about the past he described. And as contemporary research agendas in
heritage focus increasing attention on issues such as authority, plurality and community led preservation; Samuels ideas have much to offer heritage theory, policy and
practice alike. Indeed his ideas have much to offer areas that were themselves outside of the realm of Samuels own writing, such as Indigenous heritage, cultural
landscapes and holistic heritage approaches, raising fundamental questions about
how notions of authenticity are determined, and whether they are even relevant, and
forcing a reassessment of the rationalisation of how we rationalise the awkward marriage between past, present and future. While Samuel died on the very cusp of the
emergence of the modern Internet, his argument even have much to offer the emerging mineeld of digital history and digital cultural heritage, with the digital having
the potential to activate, engage and transform social capital, and to negate traditional notions of hegemony. This is the cutting edge of where historys relationship
with memory is being rethought.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Alison Light, Anna Davin, Steven Yeo and John Urry for their feedback and
comments on aspects of this paper.

Notes
1. As of early August 2014 the gures Google Scholar gives are:
Author and book title
Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in
Contemporary Britain, London: Verso, (1985 and 2009 editions together)
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary
Culture, London: Verso, 1994.
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998
Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline,
London: Methuen, 1987
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.

No of
citation
491
1076
1442
1466
4168

2. A criticism of this could be that Lowenthals The Past is a Foreign Country and
Hewisons The Heritage Industry, were published earlier than Theatres, however, this

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3.

4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

K. Gentry
has been taken into account, with searches in Ngram Viewer being run from 1994, when
Theatres was rst published. Google and Yahoo searches were conducted using author
surname in combination with book titles as a phrase.
While the second volume was completed under the leadership of Samuels widow the
social historian and literary scholar Alison Light she did so with the lightest of touches,
with the nal published work consisting essentially of essays in various states of completion. Subtitled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, the primary theme of this volume was
the wildly different versions of the British national past on offer at any given point in
time. The nal volume, which was still being conceptually sketched out when Samuel
died, was going to explore memory work, with a focus on commemoration, progress
and nostalgia, with its central argument being that subjectivity, like history, was fundamentally socially constructed. At the time of his death, Samuel was also considering a
forth volume, which would focus on historical thinking and sense of place (Private communication with Alison Light, 18 November 2013).
For more on this see Gentry (2013).
For the real Christminster life see Thomas Hardy (1896), part II At Christminster.
An important earlier exploration of the growth of nostalgia in post-war Britain can also
be found in Hewisons (1981).
In the revised 2009 edition of On Living in an Old Country, Wright acknowledges that
the argument associating heritage with decline has failed to thrive. p. xiv.
See Samuel (1981) for Samuels early work in this area.

Notes on contributor
Kynan Gentry is a lecturer in history at the Australian National University. With a background in preservation practice and history and heritage policy, his published work thus far
has focused on the social role of history and heritage in society, and the wider use and
abuse of the past. His most recent book, History, Heritage, and Colonialism (Manchester),
explores the emergence of historical consciousness and interest in heritage in colonial New
Zealand, Canada and Australia.

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