Somebody in a university heritage management class once day started a discussion about heritage and how important it was in tourism. I asked if anyone had heard of Robert Hewison’s book “The Heritage Industry”. Not one of them had. Perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising as they were only toddlers when the work appeared in 1987, and it faded from sight after a huge amount of initial publicity in which every columnist and commentator seemed to jump onto a journalistic bandwagon, usually siding with Hewison. I suggested to the students that they should read the book, and also look for Patrick Wright’s “On Living in an Old Country”, published two years earlier, and to my mind a much better book, and David Lowenthal’s “The Past is a Foreign Country”, also from 1985, and a work of great scope. It reminded me of some curiosities about the discussions in the mid-nineteen eighties about ‘heritage’, especially since I recently acquired a copy of Frank Atkinson’s autobiography “The Man Who Made Beamish”.
At the time Hewison’s book appeared I was Public Relations and Marketing Officer for the Calderdale Inheritance Project in West Yorkshire, some notes about which appear on another page in this web site. It was a regeneration project which achieved a great deal, alongside other, longer established work by local Civic Trusts, an organisation called Pennine Heritage, and, indeed, other departments of Calderdale Council, which led the Inheritance Project, and for which I had been Tourism Officer from 1978. Many, many people from voluntary bodies, the Council and what was up to 1986 West Yorkshire County Council, plus some commercial companies, had since the late 1960s been slowly building up a wide range of initiatives to re-use derelict mills, shops and houses, to clean up eyesores in open spaces long abandoned, and to remove some of the highly inappropriate ‘redevelopments’ which had butchered elements in a remarkable industrial landscape. I had quickly come to the conclusion, along with others, I’m sure, that the Calder Valley was an area above most others where the changing effects of the industrial system on human communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be seen.
