As regular readers of this blog will know, I am interested in the value of architecture and public art to the historian, but I also have a special place reserved in my imagination for that curious outcrop of eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture – the folly. Conforming to no especial architectural style, these were often buildings that had no discernible use and were erected either for curiosity value, to display their creator’s wealth, or merely as Georgian eye candy. Many have been lost over the years, but a goodly number still remain, mostly crumbling away in the estates of country houses and paying tribute to the strength of the ‘polite’ style in Hanoverian Britain. If a chance ever presents itself to visit a folly, it is rare for me to pass it up.

So, when it transpired that a generally forgotten (and determinedly locked-up) nineteenth century example – Tarner Folly – was being opened up for the Brighton Festival, I had to take a look. Not only that, but it was also to house an innovative piece of public art called ‘Path of the Echo’, which endeavoured to exploit the unique acoustics of the folly’s inside chamber.

Tarner Folly is a small, flint-studded tower, half concealed by foliage, that sits in the corner of a children’s play area, sandwiched between Kemptown and Hanover on the east side of Brighton. It has not been opened for quite some years, which is a shame because such things get forgotten all too easily. There is a question as to whether it can genuinely be described as a folly, since it appears to have been built as a lookout tower and local myths abound that it concealed the entrance to a tunnel that led to the shore (perhaps suggestive of a smuggling operation). Frankly, I’d say that its correct categorisation is really more a matter for the folly anorak, if such people exist.

Tarner Folly.

However, an enterprising artist had managed to persuade the city’s council to open up the folly for the festival in order to house an experiment that could well be described as an attempt to forge a symbiotic relationship between public art and architectural history. Inside, I discovered, sat a rather ingenious art installation. The artist, Mark Mitchell (no relation), demonstrated that by pulling various ropes and cranks, the apparatus would play a variety of string and percussive sounds, which would echo around the chamber. The installation was almost entirely constructed from ‘found material’ – a admirable recycling effort – although I was told that, in fact, Mark had liberated his flat-mate’s wok for part of the mechanism!

The 'Path of the Echo' installation.

As an exercise attempting to draw in two distinct audiences – the historical community and the artistic one – I thought that the installation worked marvellously well. The trouble with such experiments, though, is that they can be somewhat short-lived if funds of some description are not forthcoming. Thankfully, Mark and the Friends of Tarner (a local historical society) have come together in an attempt to keep the tower open. The idea is to curate the folly as a space for other exhibits, which might be generated by other artists through workshops with local community groups and schools. To bring the tower up to standards of public safety, however, requires funds in the region of £30,000, for which a bid to the lottery heritage fund is being prepared. I can only hope that these efforts to rehabilitate the folly as a valuable piece of history and a unique art-space are successful, since even in straitened times society needs its circuses as well as its bread. Besides, there seems something curiously apt about melding together public art and social history in this fashion. The folly builders of the Georgian age had a far more limited audience in mind, but they too were often inspired to construct their idiosyncratic monuments by a desire to create a dramatic talking-point, an aspiration that seems wholly reflected in contemporary public art.

Taking it further

If the above blog has caught your imagination, you may also find the following resources from The Open University interesting:

High Street History

Explore the hidden corners of your high street and see how history is buried in the everyday environment with our interactive high street history feature.

Learning Space: Brighton Pavilion

On the other hand, if you’re interested in the history of Brighton, then the OU offers you this free Open Learn resource on the Brighton Pavilion – which perhaps could even be called a folly itself!

Related courses from The Open University:

Heritage, whose heritage?

Who decides what should be preserved from the past as our heritage? Who is this heritage for and how should it be presented and explained? How can I engage actively with my heritage and have an impact on it? This course endeavours to answer these questions and to engage with current debates on the preservation of the past.

Art of the twentieth century

If you are drawn to art history more generally, this wide-ranging course discusses developments in the recent past and includes study of all the major twentieth century artistic movements.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

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I have periodically been harping on about the great benefits of studying history in these blogs – and I stick by all of them. Perhaps, though, I haven’t been quite so clear about the disadvantages that sometimes accompany being an historian.

In the past few years, for example, I have been experiencing a certain level of minor social embarrassment when watching plays at the theatre. Not always – I stress – and not caused either by any repellent physiological problem. It occurs solely when I am watching a play written at some time before the last decade or so, and it generally becomes more acute the further back in time the piece was composed.

And the simple fact is that I laugh (or, on one occasion, gasped) when practically nobody else in the audience is laughing (or gasping). This is, I assure you, no inexplicable nervous tic, but rather is entirely down to my profession. Because the thing is that I’m able to contextualize the writing within the period in which it was composed, as I suppose relatively few of the audience can. At The Importance of Being Earnest, this exchange (amongst others) between Jack Worthing and Lady Bracknell struck me – and no-one else – as splendidly ticklish:

Lady B: What are your politics?
Jack: Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

"Hahaha," I laughed, amid the silence. Thinking: "That would have been very funny in 1895." Later, however, I was mortified to imagine my fellow audience members wondering of each other who the bloke with the inappropriate cackle was.

This was not a one-off, however, as I have also descended into solo guffaws at The Revenger’s Tragedy, HMS Pinafore, and The Cherry Orchard. And whilst it helps that all of the above (yes, even the Chekhov) have comic moments, that advantage is largely cancelled out if one laughs at the "unfunny’"bits.

Man laughing.
[image by Thomas Hawk, some rights reserved]

At a Shakespeare play this is not quite such a trial. An unaccompanied chuckle at Shakespeare is more like boasting to the audience. As if to say, "I understand the complex language here, that you – poor sap – do not." When the language is much simpler, much more akin to how we speak in the twenty-first century, the solo giggler is immediately marked out as an idiot.

All the same, I wouldn’t be without the understanding that underpins my social faux pas. It has enriched my enjoyment of all art forms hugely. This is not merely a matter of being the jovial twit at the theatre: I could say the same of various poems, songs, paintings, films, or novels. The essential point is that it is history that has opened up such things for me. It is just regrettable that it can cause social side effects of such a laughable kind. 

Taking it further

• The arts past and present
• Film and television history
• Shakespeare: text and performance 
• Repetition and Deviation
  
  
   

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

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Snow and ice. Britain grinding to a halt. Unofficial strikes. Unemployment rising to its highest level in over a decade. A culture of complaint in the media. Doubts over Britain’s relationship to Europe. A Prime Minister widely seen as out of touch. The British government seemingly exhausted after twelve years in office. A general election less than two years away. If this all sounds familiar then either you have an exceptional memory or you’ve temporarily forgotten that this is a history blog. Because, of course, I’m talking about 1963.

Now, because of the superficial parallels between 1963 and 2009, you might well think that this blog is going to harp on the common maxim that history always repeats itself. In fact, I don’t think that is true in the great majority of cases. However, the reason I started with that list is to show just how seductive the idea is, and how difficult to challenge. Because, on seeing those ostensibly startling parallels, there emerges a temptation to map the trajectory of 1963-64 onto 2009-10 and to make some predictions based on what happened in the past. Forty-six years ago, the government apparently became mired in ‘sleaze’, antagonised its core supporters, scuppered its relations with the EEC, and subsequently lost the 1964 election to a rejuvenated opposition. All too easy to see how that pattern might repeat itself, right?

Alec Douglas-Home, Prime Minister (1963)
[image © copyright BBC]

Wrong. Whilst that’s one possibility – it is very possible that the Labour Party will lose the next election, for instance – I sincerely doubt that it’s a likely one. If it does, though, then it will be caused by contemporary circumstances; it will not be because history circles around in an unending groove. To understand why, we need two things essential to the historian: intimacy and distance.

The past was different from today. This might sound pretty damn obvious, but it’s surprising how many people don’t take it into consideration. Explaining just how it was different is one of the historian’s jobs; unsurprisingly, we get a bit peeved when journalists and various other commentators seek to do it for us by looking for lazy parallels like the 1963 one. By intimacy, I meant that we must look very closely at the past, to show how it was unlike today. Let’s take some of the points I made above. The winter in 1963 was actually more severe and the snow lasted longer than it is likely to now. Most of the major wildcat strikes in that period were the result of the government’s attempt to impose an incomes policy – they were principally about wages, not jobs. Relations with the Common Market were scuttled by General de Gaulle, not by anything done by administration or public on this side of the channel. Unemployment was generally not tolerated to the extent that it is in 2009: in fact, the figure for those out of work was barely over 600,000. The Prime Minister was replaced, through ill health, later in 1963. And finally, though the government lost the election of 1964, a four-seat majority was hardly a lively endorsement of the opposition. That’s a snap-shot, of course, but nonetheless even from this list we can see that 2009 is far from being a mirror of 1963, whatever the superficial resemblance. Symptoms, to put it another way, are not causes.

Distance, too, is important, because by standing back and viewing the whole vista of the past, we can see how the neat congruence of factors that offer parallels across time may be obscuring other realities. A media culture of complaint, for example, has been a fairly constant escort to British society for a very long time. It may have reached rather shrill peaks in 1963 and again now, but, frankly since the Reformation, Britain has been off to hell in a handcart so often that it is somewhat surprising that the country has conspicuously failed to reach its destination. Other examples come readily to mind. Bar the severe winter and the imminence of a general election, practically every aspect that I outlined to begin with was present in 1981. The Falklands conflict resurrected Margaret Thatcher, but prior to the war the public generally saw her as out of touch, and she undoubtedly presided over a strike wave, a huge surge in unemployment, and magnificently frosty relations with the EEC. And, speaking of frost, Britain has ‘ground to a halt’ under a spell of bad weather pretty regularly in the past – 1947, in the midst of savage rationing and production problems, springs to mind – but it has never generated the level of criticism that would fatally wound a government. The phenomena with which I started have appeared periodically throughout history, at least in the democratic age. Sometimes a handful of them have occurred simultaneously, but they have never brought about exactly the same outcomes.

But I like to be even-handed, and I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that historical parallels are at all times bunkum. One thing that recurs consistently in history is the sort of generic lunacy that occasionally grips the human character. Cupidity is a good stimulant of this – so, in a way, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the railway mania of the 1840s, and the dot.com boom of the 1990s are instances, in a broad sense, of history repeating itself. But even in those cases, we must understand that the circumstances, and the outcomes, of each were somewhat different.

Perhaps a rather more useful way of employing historical parallels is to challenge those policymakers, and I do not mean only politicians, who would serve us up re-heated pottage. So, if a long forgotten policy is suddenly revived by a bright young thing, keen to make his or her mark on the world, it is incumbent upon the historian to ask, ‘if it didn’t work in 1952 (or whatever date), then why should it work now?’ There may be reasons why it could work now – nothing in history is inevitable and, as we’ve seen, it rarely repeats itself – but the question is important to ask nonetheless.

Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make here is to watch out for the easy analogy and the casual comparison – and to shoot them down when spotted. An onerous task, no doubt, but nevertheless one that allows the barely concealed show-off in every historian to shine.

Taking it further

If the above blog has interested you, you may also find the following resources from the Open University to be of interest:

Power, dissent, equality: understanding contemporary politics
This course invites you into the world of politics in a fresh and accessible way, using a wide variety of case studies drawn from the UK and beyond. It sheds light on the inner workings of power, decision making, and protest. It covers politics from parliament to the street, and the politics of ideas as well as institutions.

History Lessons: Parts One & Two

My earlier blog covers other common history ‘howlers’.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Subscribe to Stuart Mitchell's posts