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The theft of Cornish culture |
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Page 3 of 7
The National Trust began its reign in Cornwall on a fairly benign footing, although it was the first to start selling off buildings to second-home buyers. That hardly endeared them to local people, and their current practice of renovating buildings for holiday-let use, rather than as homes for local people hasn’t helped their cause either. After a while, they began to deny the traditional rights of local people, such as the age-old right for farmers to take sand from a beach on the Lizard to spread on their fields. Now the NT hierarchy has taken on an almost feudal attitude towards local residents, even interfering with planning applications which are nowhere near the land they hold. Worse, local planning authorities regard them as a statutory authority for consultation (which they are not. I recently read right through the National Trust Acts and found nothing at all that grants them any such role or authority). Like ‘English’ Heritage (and, to a large extent, even our own local authorities), the National Trust has been accused of operating a policy of not employing Cornish people for any position higher than menial labour.
A highly alarming recent development has been the formation of yet another unelected body called Culture South West which is to take on the role of commandeering, controlling and manipulating our birthright cultural heritage. Every person, whether Cornish or not should regard the formation of this body dangerous and, of course, no one local is employed by Culture South West. Their policy statement looks as though it has been written without consultation with culture overall being trivialised in a way that should deeply worry us all. Cornish culture, or at least their version of it, consists largely of the Eden Project, Trebah Gardens…hold on, culture does not equal tourist attractions. As John Angarrack famously wrote, this compares with defining French culture as being Disneyland, Paris.
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