LITERARY WOES
Let’s not be sentimental when building near homes of authors, says Max Davidson
HOW much should dead writers influence where new homes should be built? The question has reared its head in Hertfordshire, where devotees of the novelist e. M. Forster are in a battle royal with developers. Forster spent part of his childhood in
Rooks Nest House, close to what is now Stevenage. The handsome Grade Ilisted property, now on the market for £1.5 million with Hunters ( hunters.com), was the inspiration for the house Howards end in the novel of the same name, published in 1910.
In his book, Forster wrote lyrically about the house and its surroundings and warned of an age when the ‘rust’ of an ever‑expanding London would swallow up the tranquil fields of his beloved Hertfordshire.
He was right to be concerned. The bulldozers are now circling Rooks Nest House itself, with developers close to winning final approval for 1,700 flats and homes on 122 acres of land near the property.
The Friends of the Forster Country are up in arms, and you cannot blame them. But, although a Forster fan myself, I will not be joining them as a comrade in the fight.
Surely the one thing about which we can all agree is that the country badly needs new homes. And if Nimbys are going to be joined by Nimfys (Not In My Favourite Writer’s Back Yard), the whole planning system is in danger of grinding to a halt.
The row over Rooks Nest House is reminiscent of a feud that rumbled on for years in Hindhead, Surrey, when it was proposed that Undershaw, the former home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, should be converted into apartments. You could have heard the howls of protest from Sherlock Holmes fans as far away as Baker Street.
THeobjectors got their way in the end, and the property is now a school for children with special needs, but the fact that such a large property sat vacant for ten years, at a time of increasing shortage in the housing market, was a travesty.
Some campaigners are now arguing that the status enjoyed by National Parks and Sites of Special Scientific Interest should be extended to landscapes that have inspired works of art and literature.
Areas that might qualify include the Slad Valley in Gloucestershire, immortalised by Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie, and the tract of agricultural land on the Suffolk‑essex border which John Constable painted so exquisitely.
It is a noble concept and, if Britain were a land of vast open spaces like America or Australia, it would be a viable one. Alas, it is nothing of the kind.
Literary england, from Hardy’s Wessex to Wordsworth’s Lake District, from Dickens’s Kent to A. e. Housman’s Shropshire, stretches the length and breadth of the country and is made up of regions that are all crying out for new housing.
Conserving a literary heritage does not mean conserving the physical world in which books were written. Who in their right mind would want to turn the clock back to the soot and the grime and swirling fogs of the Sherlock Holmes stories?
Or take Stratford‑upon‑Avon. In 2011, plans were drawn up to build 800 homes in the village of Shottery, near Anne Hathaway’s cottage, where Shakespeare courted his future wife. The protests from Shakespeare‑lovers were so heated that the development was shelved. It is only now proceeding, in modified form.
But, for me, the objectors were missing the point. The single best guarantee of the Bard’s legacy is a flourishing Royal Shakespeare Company, staging world‑class productions of his plays.
New‑builds will never be as pretty as Anne Hathaway’s cottage, but if their residents swell the population of Stratford, and fill the theatre, that offers a far better long‑term future for the town.
As for Rooks Nest House, it is time for a little realism amid the sentiment, understandable though the latter is. Just as the India about which Forster wrote in A Passage To India has changed beyond recognition, so the Hertfordshire of Howards end belongs to the past.
Modern Hertfordshire is more crowded, less rural, less picturesque. But its residents have no cause to feel sorry for themselves. Thanks to technological advances, they can be in the centre of London in half an hour. And they can read Howards end on their iPads and be transported back to that vanished edwardian world.
Ultimately, it is books, not the buildings in which they were written, which stand the test of time.