Stop this Disneyfication of our coastline
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Version 0 of 1. Sculpture by the seaside can always be expected to divide opinion, but English Heritage is inviting charges of Disneyfication by plonking a bronze vision of King Arthur on to the headland at Tintagel, Cornwall. It’s already tried to placate Cornish nationalists by insisting that Rubin Eynon’s statue is not necessarily King Arthur but relates to traces of dark ages kingly feasting found around Tintagel. Still, I fear an uprising in Cornwall, especially as the statue follows English Heritage’s carving of the face of “Merlin” into the granite cliffs below Tintagel castle. When I give talks about my book Coastlines, I’m always asked for my opinion of beachside public art – such as Antony Gormley’s figures on the sand at Crosby or Maggi Hambling’s Scallop at Aldeburgh. Our coast is seen as contemporary common land, the last wild place in southern Britain. There isn’t much that is unmarked by our traces, and people resent others making marks on it. We experience something sacred in an unbroken horizon without requiring an attention-seeking prod from a sculpture. That said, I love Gormley’s increasingly barnacled figures because they demonstrate an essential quality of sensitive coastal art: it is not permanent but is reshaped and eventually taken by the sea. Hambling’s scallop, a great silver presence on a soft coast of Suffolk shingle, less obviously relates to its surroundings but is both practical and abstract enough to attract all kinds of personal pilgrimages – children muck around on it and people picnic and even make love in its shelter. It’s harder to defend a bronze on the cliffs of Cornwall, unless it’s temporary. From castles to wartime bunkers, the coast carries enough monuments to humanity. In my view, Tintagel’s “Arthur” shuts down the imagination, reducing the range of responses to these amazing cliffs and this historic place. It also shows how conservation charities are succumbing to commercial impulses to increase their “offer” to visitors. Amazing places are “sold”, with activities and interpretations thrust upon us. All we really need is to let wild places breathe, allowing us to breathe them in. Oooh, Betty – what a tree! Another thrashing for Britain in this season’s big European tournament – the Tree of the Year competition. The gorgeous Cubbington pear, to be bulldozed to make way for HS2, won fewer than 8,000 votes, as a grand but fairly ordinary oak tree in Hungary grabbed 72,000 votes. It’s a mystery why Britain did so badly but we need to mobilise some social media magic next year. On Friday, I met what must be the 2017 favourite: Betty the ash tree. She’s no great beauty – just three slender trunks rising from a coppiced stump – but she’s super-tolerant to ash dieback disease, despite being surrounded by dying trees in Ashwellthorpe woods, Norfolk. To repopulate Europe with disease-resistant ashes, Betty (forgive the pun) holds the keys. Weed is good Parts of Bristol smell like a chippie because the city council is spraying vinegar instead of potentially carcinogenic weedkillers. My granny swore by vinegar on weeds, but in Bristol even anti-pesticide campaigners argue there are more effective non-toxic alternatives. There’s a really radical alternative that brave Bristol is also trialling: doing nothing. Weeds are only wild flowers in the wrong place, and wild flowers are now trendy. In a decade, I foresee weed consultants paid a fortune to sow dandelions in pavement cracks. I’m off to register the name WeedyMan right now. |