Take the statues, but restore our lovely Victorian water fountains
The Welsh government has monuments on its mind. Its new guidance on public commemorations lays out a four-step plan designed “to help create a more informed relationship with our history”.
The careful scrutiny of our streetscapes is an important duty of government, both national and local. The effect on our mood of the environment we inhabit is tremendous. An ugly walk to work, school or the shops has an alienating effect that becomes chronic with repetition, while a delightful detail offers a regular hit of happiness.
There is no good reason why the monuments fancied by our forefathers should remain in place for ever. Our own age has different figures to admire, but while we may not cherish the pompous aesthetic of past public art, there is little point in replacing it with something more ideologically palatable, but equally mediocre.
William Morris, the 19th-century artist and architectural conservationist, urged his followers to “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. Applied to public monuments, the same philosophy might transform our streetscapes.
Walk through any market town or metropolitan borough and you will inevitably come upon a derelict Victorian drinking fountain. Vandalised and long disused, these florid monuments to 19th-century philanthropy are the fruits of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, established in the mid-19th century to provide drinking water of “perfect purity and coldness”.
Rebranded in 2011 as the Drinking Fountain Association, the champions of free public drinking water are mapping the nation’s drinking fountains, installing new ones and promoting the restoration of glorious old fountains, often in the name of forgotten philanthropists.
In east London, a newly restored fountain celebrates the brief life of Leonard Montefiore, a passionate supporter of women’s emancipation. In Wimbledon, the fountain erected in memory of the campaigner (and Queen Victoria’s otologist) Joseph Toynbee, invites passers-by to fill their own bottles instead of buying bottled water.
Across the United Kingdom the opportunity exists to restore lovely old drinking fountains to working order in the name of good people, past and present, who deserve a memorial. Who would not choose to have their name writ in water, rather than attached to a dodgy statue, destined to be derided by future generations?
Choral singing makes
people happy. Innumerable studies (and popular television programmes) have demonstrated its benefits for individual and community well-being: the joy it brings to disaffected schoolchildren, dementia sufferers, military wives and the residents of Ambridge, as well as to ordinary people who turn up once a week for the pleasure of singing together.
All of which makes the disbanding of the BBC Singers, a year short of their 100th anniversary, all the more lamentable. As a nation we pride ourselves on our cultural richness, yet the recent application of cultural weed-killer to the roots of some of our most distinguished classical music organisations is an act of vandalism that bodes ill for the future of music in Britain.