renovate and be damned

Now rendered and painted peach on the outside, it has local inhabitants up in arms. Complaints that “it looks as though he is trying to create his own film set . . . completely artificial and in this state would be more appropriate in the Mexican desert” were expressed by one neighbour, while the owner of a guesthouse has mourned the passing of a romantic silhouette.

It’s true that Kilcoe Castle does now look as if the team of Changing Rooms has got to work on it. You can just see Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen tossing his raven locks and enthusing about its groovy biscuit-tin potential before getting rid of that grim real-stone look. In fact, according to the local council, the castle would have been plastered in medieval times, to keep the wind and rain out, and lime-washed, too, so all the people who loved it being a ruin are ignoramuses. You can’t, however, stop people loving what the authors of 1066 called the Wrong but Wromantic.

It’s this love that ensures we keep listing hideous and useless buildings rather than razing them to the ground and reviving the wasteland that blights acres of precious inner-city land. I’m all for preserving the best of the past, or the humbler kind of domestic housing that is fine and comfortable to live in, but it took the Great Fire of London to give the capital Wren’s magnificent cathedral and rid the streets of the chronically narrow and insanitary medieval city that existed before. Not everything old is good.

When I was a child, people believed in the future. The craze to make everything in our lives look as modern as Thunderbirds made people rip out their fireplaces and panel up their doors. This was very nice for arty types like my mother who could buy what used to be called junk furniture pretty cheaply, but many beautiful details were forever damaged or destroyed.

More beautiful buildings in London were destroyed by developers in the 1960s and 1970s than by the blitz. It took community action by brave and tireless people to prevent charming Georgian dwellings such as those in Gospel Oak and Islington from being replaced by lumpy, looming tower blocks.

But the rush to conserve and preserve everything has, in many cases, gone too far the other way. The owners of Georgian and Victorian houses who insist on stripping down every last floorboard and painting their walls in colours approved of by the National Trust make me want to scream. Buildings are meant to change and evolve, not forever remain as if preserved in aspic. The inhabitants of Notting Hill, west London, whose houses are made a thousand times more charming by the soft, bright rainbow colours in which many are decorated, now have to apply for planning permission before they can paint them.

Mourners visiting Highgate cemetery have just been banned from leaving artificial flowers at their relations’ graves on the grounds that the cemetery is a site of “metropolitan importance”, and so shouldn’t be blighted by cheap, proletarian bouquets. People have become so obsessed by recreating the past – or their vague, softfocus understanding of it – that they’ve forgotten that old houses, or even cemeteries, were once places where real people were intended to live, work and die.

One doubts very much that those who worship the past would really like their own dwelling to resemble a proper Victorian home, such as Dickens’s House in Doughty Street with its gruesome clashing colours, but that doesn’t stop the fantasy of antiquity.

All those gorgeous country houses, like the bonnets and bustles of BBC dramas, present us as a green and pleasant land brimming with romantic potential. But because I live in what is called an “environmental area” I can’t even prune the big lime trees at the bottom of my garden without council permission and the services of a tree surgeon. My neighbours, bursting at the seams with three generations, aren’t allowed to build a loft extension to accommodate elderly parents dying of cancer for fear it would damage the skyline.