I recently spent a couple of days visiting some of England’s surviving windmills with a couple of friends. Though it was a holiday rather than a deliberate exercise in political education, two political points came out clearly.
One, which I’ve blogged about previously, is how the windmill not only used to be a key part of the English landscape but also, in its horizontal axis / vertical sail form, is an English invention.
So windmills not only are a British (or perhaps more accurately English) tradition, they are also an example of technical inventiveness of which we can be proud. And yet when in their modern form of wind turbines they are talked about, critics often have been allowed to get away with painting something with such strong English roots as being some sort of alien invasion of our landscape.
The second is the politics of windmill restoration. As has happened with other industrial artefacts, many windmills were for a long time left to decline and decay until a relatively recent interest in their preservation and their history started to turn the tide. A typical windmill open to the public now is once that has been restored in the last twenty years, with the restoration driven by interested locals, funded by a mix of their fundraising and grants, containing historical displays provided by keen local historians and with a small business, such as a cafe or shop, attached.
Whether you want to call it community politics, the Big Society or the Good Society, dozens of windmills display in miniature the mix of public and private that many politicians are now reaching for more widely.
That mix – committed residents, public sector grants in the broadest sense (more likely from sources such as English Heritage than from the local council) and some form of income-generating business – has advantages which rapidly becoming apparent when you consider the alternatives.
An early twentieth century style of municipal socialism that would have nationalised derelict windmills and put them under a command and control structure reporting to the Minister of State for Windmills (Revival Thereof) would have failed to tap the enthusiasm, energy and love for the projects that the mixed model has delivered in so many places.
Nor would leaving it simply to market forces have worked – as it is only the mixed approached of community action and the public sector which has rescued many of these windmills that were previously left untouched and unwanted by private developers. Public sector support provides the funds to value factors which are not priced into the windmill property market.
Above all, the love of their local community that comes from volunteers and residents provides something it is very hard for staff answerable to a management chain that leads off elsewhere to replicate, regardless of whether that management chain is public or private.
It is a benefit I have also seen in other fields, such as in the very successful use of local volunteers to help staff the police front counter at Muswell Hill Police station in North London, providing an information service that is rooted in community knowledge and commitment. It was what you see too in numerous libraries, where the energy of local reading groups extends the benefits of the library. It is what you see successfully supplementing the work of others across many professions.
So seeing what has been done with so many windmills has hardened my scepticism of those who decry attempts to involve the local community in other services.
Rhetoric about involving the public can be used at times as cover for cuts, but as the windmills show – involving the public can also deliver better results than suggested by the narrow minded view that if it’s not being 100% funded and supplied by the state it’s not worthy.
Cross-posted from Liberal Conspiracy
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13 Comments
Splendid article. If I had time I could construct an argument around the happy coincidence of post materialism and a heirarchy of needs (people have enough spare wealth that they can afford to spend some of it restoring windmills) and direct economic interest in supporting the tourism interest. We are all neo-liberals now.
* tourism industry * of course
The two power stations nearest to our house are Didcot Power Station and a wind farm at Watchfield. I know which I think looks uglier!
Actually Neil, we had an instance a little while ago of someone objecting to a wind farm near Drax on the grounds that they were used to the dirty coal plant, but the wind farm would be new. You couldn’t make it up.
@Adam – I can well believe it. When the wind farm was proposed there was a lot of opposition on the grounds that it would spoil the landscape, with no apprecaiation that everyone living near Didcot, where their power came from, has to put up with looking at the power station there. Nor that climate change might do a lot more harm to the landscape than a few wind turbines.
Surely, power station cooling towers have a beauty all of their own. Old fashioned windmills are only there because they are old and they are hopelessly inefficient. Any proposal to construct a new one today would be met with just as much objection as new modern wind turbines, which are much better looking than the electricity pylons which litter our landscape.
I think it would be a good exercise to map all former windmill sites in the UK.
… then class them as ‘former windmill sites’ – effectively ‘wind turbine brownfield sites’ – and give automatic planning permission to anyone who wanted to put a turbine there…
After all, if there was a windmill there before, what possible objection can there be to having a replacement?
Martin
I can think of two possible reasons, Martin: firstly modern windmills are significantly bigger than ‘traditional’ ones; secondly most of the former windmills were not used for power generation (or even for making flour) but for pumping water. I’m no engineer but you might find no one would want to build a wind turbine at those locations because of the hassle of making sure they dont sink. (I dont have anything against wind turbines.)
I’m not saying it’s compulsory to build a wind turbine there! 🙂
Ye Olde Windmills have as much in common with modern wind turbines as the Three Gorges Dam has with historic British watermills – trying to excuse one through the other is mere political expediency.
But to be honest, that’s not what the article is about anyway. It’s actually about how the few remaining windmills we have, have often been restored to their former glory by groups committed to preserving our heritage and its place in the British landscape. And it’s true, they have. But that doesn’t make this a particularly good article, or the use of the point to support coalition policy a good one. Firstly, the article employs its straw men liberally:
“An early twentieth century style of municipal socialism that would have nationalised derelict windmills and put them under a command and control structure reporting to the Minister of State for Windmills (Revival Thereof) would have failed to tap the enthusiasm, energy and love for the projects that the mixed model has delivered in so many places.”
Possibly, but such an absurd idea would never have happened anyway, and is about an accurate a representation of left-wing politics as that of McCarthy. There’s never been a “Minister of State for Windmills (Revival Thereof)”, and there’s never been an equivalently arcane post in any other field – such things don’t happen beyond the deepest recesses of Marxist literary theory, and certainly have never been close to any sort of political position in this country. What the left would more likely have done is to create a catch-all public body, with responsibility for conserving Britain’s heritage in terms of windmills and everything else. And indeed, this is what happened, and the public bodies – quangos – proliferated. Where the problem lies is in the belief that it was a case of “Government” – quangos – versus the “Big Society” – volunteers. In fact, what more commonly happened was that the quangos were the fuel which fed the Big Society. The vast majority of heritage and restoration projects have been undertaken by committed volunteers, but the knowledge and, crucially, the funding, came from the quangos in the background. Hailing the input of the volunteers is all well and good, but if you pull the rug from under them – as the quango cuts risk doing – they can’t continue. It’s one thing asking volunteers to come and help rebuild your windmill. It’s another thing asking those same volunteers to research the history of windmills, draw up viable and historically sensitive plans for the reconstruction, then fund the raw materials and the expert construction from their own pockets.
It’s one thing asking volunteers to come and help rebuild your windmill. It’s another thing asking those same volunteers to research the history of windmills, draw up viable and historically sensitive plans for the reconstruction, then fund the raw materials and the expert construction from their own pockets.
Are you willing to consider that private philanthropy might do exactly that if the state did not step in first? And do it in a less regulated and more responsive way?
Mark as a fellow historian I share your enthusiasm for Windmills, have visited a fair few myself and indeed I long ago used to take school parties to visit one in Derbyshire at weekends. Likewise I could point you to local volunteer groups who have renovated the Chesterfield Canal, Barrow Hill Roundhouse (Railway not Prehistoric!) and Arkwrights Cromford Mill, all of which would have remained derelict otherwise. As a Chesterfeild Cllr back in the 1980’s and 1990’s I was able to nudge (no political connotations ref the current fad), Council policies in the right direction in relation to supporting the first two. As a member of the Arkwright Society I played a very very peripheral role in the latter.
I fear however that a Cameroon enthusiasm for applying this ‘Big Society’ model more widely would be a disaster.
Lets apply your analogy to care for the elderly or provision of services for those with disablities. First, on the none statist approach you quote approvingly as the ‘Windmill model’, we would see very little care provided at all over many decades followed by a random patchwork of provision dependent upon where capable volunteer groups emerged (and don’t forget many volunteer groups fail or fold as soon asone key member moves on). It may not be the end of the world that most areas no longer have a windmill because ‘conservation’ -and public funds – only became available after decades of neglect -and then usually (although not exclusively) in wealthier and ‘touristy’ areas. That pattern of provision however is hardly suitable for needy groups in society, or for educational provision or for much else that marks a civilised society. As a historian just look at the appalling social conditions of Victorian and Edwardian England.
That’s why some (Social) Liberals such as Joseph Chamberlain, Hobhouse, Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge took one approach and other (Economic or Classical) Liberals like Gladstone bitterly opposed them or like Asquith couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. As much devolution and local empowerment as possible yes -that’s why I have spent 27 years campaigning for Liberal Democracy rather than Labour control freakery. A return to Gladstone and Samuel Smiles -no.
Paul Holmes.
One of my favourites is Horsey Wind-Pump in Norfolk, which is owned by the National Trust, and can be visited and climbed. Its purpose was to pump water out of Hickling Broad and thereby keep land dry for livestock. A few miles away, off the coast at Caister, is a phalanx of wind turbines. If they were further out at sea I wouldn’t mind so much. The ones on Romney Marsh, that spoil the view over Dungeness form Rye, I think one is entitled to be very rude about them.