Visits to and Thoughts on History, Heritage, and the Future

I recently visited Norwich castle museum, the first time in over two decades, and the first time since the extensive refurbishment and "true-to-Norman-lifing" of the castle keep. The first pertinent aspect of the refurbishment is the prominent addition of a collection of mid-late twentieth century teapots in the "teapot gallery", which has always displayed Georgian and Victorian teapots, including a collection of Lowestoft teapots, which are my particular interest, as I collect Lowestoft porcelain myself. This addition is exactly what, from the perspective of this blog, I want to see in history and heritage - the communication that "these things are still relevant, we still use them; and, in fact, the change in style is because art, including the practical art of porcelain, has always been a way of communicating key ideas of their culture; carefully elaborate, highly ornate porcelain speaks of a culture which values femininity, a culture in which wealth is prominent, and is supposed to be shown off. The more austere teapots of Wedgewood discuss a society concerned with prudence, restraint, and masculinity, a society which is unsure of itself, and, in reassurance, is looking back to what it perceives as a "better" time. The simple, bold, almost childlike forms of mid-late twentieth century teapots tell the story of a society that is fully engaged with experimenting with possibilities; playing, if you like. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, the most common teapots available for purchase are very basic, almost entirely without ornamentation. Single-block colours, very starkly moulded forms designed for mass production. Our society is speaking, and has been speaking for at least the last forty years, of a prioritisation of function to the exclusion of form. It is communicating an insistence on a complete absence of anything extraneous - and, beyond that, the anxious belief that we really don't actually have anything to offer. The austere, function-first form wants to echo Wedgewood's looking back to a time it was believed everything was "better", in some vague, ill-defined way, but isn't entirely sure there ever was a "better time". That cognitive dissonance, the wanting to return to a better time, with the fear that, if we were able to do so, we would find that time wasn't better at all, is what's fuelling movements like Unite the Kingdom, and the outbursts of violent racism and Aryanism that we're seeing on a global scale. It's what's causing "quiet quitting" (and "quiet firing"), it's what's behind the disenchantment with digital technology, and the chafing at the heavy hands of leadership on the reins that control our lives. It's what's causing a rise in burnout, and an increase in the desire to control other peoples' lives - to dictate how people can experience and describe their sense of themselves, to delineate how people can place themselves in their worlds, to muzzle words and accents, terms and languages we don't want to hear. This choice by Norwich castle museum is heritage done right - the use of history to create a path through the present to possible futures - we used to communicate through porcelain art, it says; we used to tell stories about ourselves and our society as we poured out the tea. We stopped doing that, somehow, for some reason, and we probably shouldn't have done; we kind of need to have some idea of what we're about and where we're going." I can't say the same, sadly, about the castle keep refurbishment - at least not yet. Knowing how the very wealthiest and most influential people in society lived tells us nothing, gives us no clue as to how we should be living now, and the options and opportunities we have for how we could be living - at least not if it doesn't include the lives of the ordinary people. At the height of Norwich castle's active, inhabited lifetime, the castle mound would have also been teeming with life - the lives of the destitute, the peasants, and the traders. Those lives aren't shown anywhere in the very expensive refurbishment, which has resulted in entry fees which create a barrier to many people from Norwich and Norfolk ever being able to see and engage with history that plunked itself down on top of it, in the form of anxious Norman arrogance. The history and heritage of the ordinary people of Norwich and Norfolk is not really recorded in the castle museum - it gets a brief mention in references to Boudica, whose tribe the Iceni held the lands which are now Norfolk and Suffolk, but even in her heartland, Boudica's story is still presented, as it almost always is, in terms of her engagement with the invaders from Rome - her worst experience, and the beginning of the end of her tribe, rather than the many decades the Iceni thrived in the fertile lands they held with strength, determination, skill at arms, and decisiveness. Museums are becoming very conscious of "anti-colonialism" in how they present non-native exhibits - but, just as the Fairtrade movement ignored and dismissed the unfair pay and demands faced by British suppliers and producers, the centring of historic, actual Britons in museum displays and historical accounts of how Britain and the UK came to be is likewise considered a trivial irrelevance. Heritage should not endure if it refuses to centre the stories of the people whose lives it turns into exhibits. So; how could Norwich castle effectively present the lives of ordinary people who created the history they're selling, including in ways that return a profit to the museum? . A year-round heritage skills market, with a focus on traders being able to take on apprentices without red tape, and entrepreneurs and casual labour can find daily wages as and when they want or need, rather than at the demands of employers. . Seasonal demonstrations and supplier fairs. . Low-rent common grazing land, enabling individuals without their own land or capital to get started in farming; this could be made free to those on welfare, alongside basic accommodation for livestock owners, as the skills of animal husbandry for profit are transferable across a range of employment opportunities, as well as also enabling the very poorest to sustain themselves. . Likewise, making low-rent allotment plots available on the castle mound. (Low-rent in this context should be no more than 10% of basic Universal Credit, with priority given to Norwich city residents without cultivatable gardens attached to their homes. Each plot, whether arable or livestock, should be slightly larger than the minimum required for self-sufficiency, and, in the case or livestock, for full welfare of the animal(s), as well as self-sufficiency; this is likely to result in a natural prioritisation of animals like poultry, rabbits, and smaller breeds of sheep and goats, which themselves provide additional elements, in the form of manure, feathers which can be used decoratively, and fleece, which can be sold, to generate an income, rather than just the subsistence living that their eggs, milk, or meat would afford.) Sheep and goats would also provide natural landscape maintenance, free of charge, which would result in cost savings, and the presence of human food production would require strictly enforced clean air directives - not just in the immediate vicinity, but across Norwich, which, in turn, would result in reduced rates of health inequalities tied to air pollution, which, in turn, would save the NHS money, improve peoples' health, meaning more people were able to participate more fully in the workforce, resulting in savings to the welfare spend...if this plan were rolled out across all the castles in the UK, the savings and health improvements would obviously be magnified, creating a win-win situation.)