Abstract
In the consultation document Review of Heritage Protection: The Way Forward (DCMS 2004, 4), the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (henceforth DCMS) described the legal process for heritage management in England as one that “... commands wide public support and buy-in for the way it has prevented the destruction of our communal history”. Some 200 miles away, in the same year, a small group of people held the 2003-2004 annual general meeting for the Cawood Castle Garth Group (CCGG) – a self-identified community heritage group – in which the chairperson remarked: “The Garth over many years has been neglected and underused, mainly due to legislation” (Johnston 2004, 1). In the first of these statements, heritage legislation is earmarked as a vital and positive force; in the second, it is constructed as something negative and potentially destructive. Suprisingly, the obvious contradiction that lies between these two perspectives has been lost within the conceptual and geographical spaces that separate the DCMS and a local community group attempting to consciously construct and seize control of its own sense of “heritage”. Quite how this contradiction has come to be overlooked forms the essence of this chapter, around which a three-fold argument is developed that examines the realities of community heritage practice in England.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Archaeology of Destruction |
| Editors | Lila Rakoczy |
| Place of Publication | U.K. |
| Publisher | Cambridge Scholars |
| Pages | 107-127 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781847186249 |
| Publication status | Published - 2008 |