Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource. Consider the numbers: 445,000 listed buildings, 12,000 medieval churches, 1,500,000 acres of common land, 120,000 miles of footpaths and public rights of way, 600,000 known sites of archaeological interest (98 per cent of them with no legal protection). Do you know that in my Yorkshire village alone there are more seventeenthcentury buildings than in the whole of North America? And that's just one obscure hamlet with a population comfortably under one hundred. Multiply that by all the other villages and hamlets in Britain and you see that the stockpile of ancient dwellings, barns, churches, pinfolds, walls, bridges and other structures is immense almost beyond counting. There is so much of it everywhere that it's easy to believe that you can take away chunks of it a halftimbered frontage here, some Georgian windows there, a few hundred yards of ancient hedge or drystone wall and that there will still be plenty left. In fact, the country is being nibbled to death.

It astounds me how casual are the planning regulations in such a sensitive environment. Did you know that even in conservation areas a houseowner may remove all the original doors and windows, cover the roof with haciendastyle tiles and the facade with artificial stone cladding, take down the garden wall, crazy pave the lawn and add a plywood porch, and still be deemed, in the eyes of the law, to be maintaining the carefully preserved tone of the neighbourhood? Just about the only thing he can't do, in fact, is tear the house down but even that is a largely hypothetical legal nicety. In 1992, a development company in Reading tore down five listed buildings in a conservation area, was taken to court and fined all of .675.

Despite a certain stirring of consciousness in recent years, householders throughout the country can still do pretty much anything they want with their homes, farmers can still throw up mammoth tin sheds and grub up hedges, British Telecom can whip away red phone boxes and replace them with shower stalls, petrol companies can erect huge flat canopies on every forecourt, and retailers can impose their plasticky corporate styles on the most architecturally sensitive of structures, and there's nothing you can do about it. Actually, there is one little thing you can do: withhold your custom. I am proud to tell you that I haven't gone in a Boots in years and won't until they restore the frontages of their principal outlets in Cambridge, Cheltenham, York and such others as I might care to add to the list from time to time, and I would willingly get drenched to the bone if I could find a single petrol station within twenty miles of my home that didn't have a flying canopy.

Salisbury, I must point out in fairness, is actually much better at looking after itself than most other towns. Indeed, it is the very handsomeness of the place generally that makes the odd desecrations so difficult to bear. Moreover, it appears, little by little, to be getting better. The local authorities had recently insisted that a cinema owner preserve the halftimbered facade on a sixteenthcentury building in the town centre and I noticed two places where developers appeared to be actually taking apart buildings that had been despoiled during the dark ages of the Sixties and Seventies and restoring them with diligence and care. One of the developers' boards boasted that it did this sort of thing more or less always. May it prosper for ever.

I would probably forgive Salisbury anything as long as they never mess with the Cathedral Close. There is no doubt in my mind that Salisbury Cathedral is the single most beautiful structure in England and the close around it the most beautiful space. Every stone, every wall, every shrub is just right. It is as if every person who has touched it for 700 years has only improved it. I could live on a bench in the grounds. I sat on one now and gazed happily for a halfhour at this exquisite composition of cathedral, lawns and solemn houses. I'd have stayed longer except that it began to drizzle, so I got up to have a look around. I went first to the Salisbury Museum in the hope that there would be a kindly person behind the counter who would let me leave my rucksack while I looked at the museum and cathedral. (There was, bless him.) The Salisbury Museum is outstanding and I urge you to go there at once. I hadn't intended to linger, but it was packed with diverting Roman oddments and old pictures and little scale modelsof Old Sarum and the like, for which I am always a sucker.

I was particularly interested in the Stonehenge Gallery because I was going there on the morrow, so I read all the instructive labels attentively. I know this goes without saying, but it really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a fiftyton stone eighteen miles across the countryside, muscle it into an upright position and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party'!' Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.

From the museum, I wandered across the broad lawn to the cathedral. In the tragic event that you have never been there, I warn you now that Salisbury has long been the most moneykeen of English cathedrals. I used to be pretty generally unsympathetic about ecclesiastical structures hectoring visitors for funds, but then I met the vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford the mostvisited parish church in England and learned that its 300,000 annual visitors between them deposit a miserly .8,000 in the collection boxes, since which time I have mellowed considerably. I mean to say, these are glorious structures and deserve our grateful support. But Salisbury, I must say, takes things a good step beyond what I would call discreet solicitation.

First, you have to pass a cinemastyle ticket booth where you are encouraged to pay a 'voluntary' admission charge of .2.50, then once inside you are repeatedly assaulted with further calls on your pocket. You are asked to pay to hear a recorded message or make a brass rubbing, to show your support for the Salisbury Cathedral Girl Choristers and the Friends of Salisbury Cathedral, and to help restore something called the Eisenhower flag, a seriously faded and tattered Stars and Stripes that once hung in Elsenhower's command post at Wilton House near by. (I left lOp and a note saying: 'But why did you let it get in such a state in the first place?') Altogether, I counted nine separate types of contributions box between the admission booth and the gift shop ten if you include the one for votive candles. On top of that, you could hardly move through the nave without bumping into an upright display introducing the cathedral staff (there were smiling photographs of each of them, as if this were a Burger King) or discussing the Church's voluntary work overseas or glass cases with cutaway models showing how the cathedral was constructed diverting, I grant you, but surely more appropriate to the museum across the close. It was a mess. How long, I wonder, till you climb into an electric cart and are whirred through the 'Salisbury Cathedral Experience' complete with animatronic stonemasons and monks like Friar Tuck? I give it five years.

Afterwards, I collected my rucksack from the kindly man at the Salisbury Museum and trudged off to the central tourist office, where I presented the young man behind the counter with a complicated prospective itinerary through Wiltshire and Dorset, from Stonehenge to Avebury and on to Lacock, Stourhead Gardens and possibly Sherborne, and asked him if he could tell me which buses I needed to catch that would let me see them all in three days. He looked at me as if I were wildly eccentric and said: 'Have you by any chance travelled by bus in Britain before?' I assured him that I had, in 1973. 'Well, I think you'll find that things have changed a bit.'