Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am honored to be here with Anna Kay. Anna is truly a British institution. She is director of Landmark Trust, an architectural historian, historian of the Crown Jewels, an expert in 17th century history, a TV personality, and I'm a big fan of her latest book called The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown. Anna, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you.

Very simple question. What's the most plausible 17th century scenario where England remains a republic ongoing?

Well, it could easily have happened. And I think a lot of people have forgotten that there ever was a revolution in the British Isles and it was a republic for 10 years. But I think the trouble was really that it's a classic situation where there was a lot of unhappiness with what had been the case, the monarchy, but the formulation of a stable republic had yet to be worked out. I think if Oliver Cromwell had lived longer or named a better successor than his son Richard, it could have endured. But fundamentally, it was before its time, I would say, and it was not sufficiently deeply rooted. Fundamentally, the people didn't want a republic, even though one was brought about, and so that meant it was always fragile.

Would there have been a way without a crown to have put a lid on all the religious disputes? Wouldn't they have just simmered, led to more civil wars and some kind of consolidation into autocratic power? And in that sense, there is no counterfactual where the Republic just keeps on running?

Well, you could say that, but of course, there is a kind of counterfactual parallel because in what's now the Netherlands, what was then called the United Provinces, there had been a revolution sometimes called the Dutch Revolt that had happened 100 years earlier in the 1560s, which had both rejected Catholicism and had rejected monarchy. And it became something that was governed by a series of states, that institution called the States General, where they their representatives met. So it wasn't so much that religious turmoil and republicanism were irreconcilable. But in the case of England, the revolution, the throwing off the monarchy, didn't have sufficient buy-in from the political nation, let alone the nation as a whole. It was really brought about by an army coup. So I think that meant for— it was fragile. And it was also linked to a kind of strong view held by a minority and very much represented in the army that a kind of very strictly Puritan regime was what was needed. And I think that was kind of incompatible with the sort of peaceful set of circumstances because it wasn't widespread enough. So yeah, but I mean, you're right, which is these counterfactual avenues, you kind of, they take you into so many other what-ifs that it becomes a bit fruitless after a while.

An even simpler question: if the English Civil War of the 1640s wasn't about having a republic, what exactly was it about? What's like the stupid answer to that question?

Well, yeah, it's not the stupid answer. I think, you know, the answer is it was really in my view, overwhelmingly about religion. There's a historian who works on this period who talks about it and says you shouldn't think of it as a kind of revolutionary war. It's really one of the last wars of religion. And so that was the big— the biggest of the issues. There was a sort of related secondary issue about the extent of royal power. So that was in the mix, but it wasn't the first issue. Really, it was about Charles I, who was the King who was being fought against by the Parliamentarian forces wanted English religion, wanted the Protestant religion of England to be more elaborate, more like Catholicism in terms of the way it was performed and liturgy and so on. And that was something that was anathema to a lot of very, you know, very sort of committed Protestants. And that in that tension—

How much of that was sincere belief and how much was that simply a kind of arbitrary marker that different interest groups struggling for power fixed upon, and actually the Civil War is about the interest groups struggling for power.

It's an interesting point. I think if you'd ask that question of a lot of historians working a generation or two ago, they would have said it's all about economic forces, it's all about, you know, the class struggle, if you like. I don't think that's my view. I think as we live in such a secular age, and I would say in the UK much more so than in the States, where really, you know, churchgoing and religious conviction is very much a minority pursuit. So to reimagine ourselves or to imagine the world of 17th-century England where religion is such a strong force, it involves a kind of mental leap that I think sometimes people have been reluctant to do. And I think in terms of historians working on this period, particularly as in the mid-20th century, really influenced actually by Marxist approaches to understanding the past, it was all seen as, well, this is the rise of this class, this is the mercantile urban, you know, sort of strand of society trying to assert authority to climb the ladder and so on. And I'm just not at all convinced by those arguments myself. I think religion was a very, very strongly held factor in people's lives. And you read contemporary diaries and so on, and it really is clear that people felt very strongly that wherever they were on the spectrum between a sort of absolutely kind of Calvinist Puritan or a Catholic, in terms of the range that was around at the time, that personal conviction about what was right was really, really a big factor. So I don't mean that it was the only factor, but I think to treat it as somehow a cover for other motives is to do a disservice, I think, to the people of the age.

Given how central the 17th century is in your mind, including disputes over the Book of Common Prayer, does it go to Scotland, James as an absentee monarch, when you look at the disputes today over Scotland becoming independent, how do you see that differently than say someone who doesn't obsess over the 17th century?

Well, I think the first thing is, I mean, first of all, I have to declare an interest because I am a Scot. I was born and brought up in Scotland. But I think that if you're interested in the 17th century, the kind of additional perhaps emphasis or, you know, lens that it gives you is first of all, the memory of how the Union came about in the first place. You know, Great Britain, the unit was only, you know, in our historical time depth, a relatively recent creation. I mean, it was there for a long time, 300 years, whatever it was, or is, but of course, what happened was that a sovereign acceded to two kingdoms. And this happens quite often historically. I mean, it happened quite often with other kingdoms in, or countries, in British history. So William III was the King of Great Britain and Ireland, but he was also the overlord of what's now the Netherlands. George I was the Elector of Hanover. And none of these things involved a political union. They were just two countries that happened to share a sovereign. And so that's the reason why, of course, although England and Scotland have been part of Great Britain as a political union since 1707, it was never a complete one. The legal systems have always been completely separate, completely distinct, the education systems, much else besides. So although personally, I would be very sad to see the end of the union and very sad to see a breaking apart between England and Scotland, I do think if you think about the 17th century, it does really underscore how much independent identity has always been there in those two nations and how long a history each had before they became a whole.

What did Robert Boyle learn from Sir William Petty?

Well, this is the real, like, quick-fire questions. What did Robert Boyle learn from Petty? Okay, so Robert Boyle obviously was, as a young Irish nobleman, was a student of the new science in the 17th century, and William Petty was also. They came from very different backgrounds. So Robert Boyle had brought up, he is the son of an Irish nobleman in great comfort and grandeur in Ireland, and, you know, silver spoon in his mouth and silks to wear. And William Petty had been born the son of a very poor clothier in a town on the southeast coast of England. And they met both in Oxford and in Ireland in the 17th century, the mid-17th century. And they were both, I mean, William Petty was an older man, senior to Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle came to Oxford as a student in his early 20s, but he was, you know, rich and had friends. And William Petty was already a very well-regarded member of the establishment in Oxford University. So he was the kind of older man in terms of experience and in terms of scientific experimentation, which is what was their great obsession. But on the other hand, Robert Boyle was the man with money and with the ability to commission, you know, fund activities and so on. So I think Robert Boyle— yeah, Robert Boyle learnt from William Petty a lot about what was being embarked upon by this group of young men in Oxford in the middle of the— in the 1650s, which was utterly revolutionary, really, which was the beginning of what we would regard as proper scientific process and scientific inquiry through experimentation. They were a group who would form the Royal Society when it was reformulated in the early 1660s. And at William Petty's rooms on the High Street in Oxford, rooms that still exist, this group of men gathered. Christopher Wren was among them, and they carried out experiments. And so Boyle learned from William Petty all sorts of things about the circulation of the blood, about vacuums, about the different characteristics of the human organs, all sorts of things, because they were— they had these amazing broad areas of inquiry. And of course, this is an age where until now, really, the job of anyone who we would consider to be a sort of scientist in modern terms was to read the works of classical antiquity and to understand what Aristotle or, you know, whoever it was had said about the nature of the world. So it was a new dawn and Boyle learned from Petty an approach, I suppose, to inquiring and looking for yourself to understand from how things behaved when you, I know, cut them or inflated them or, you know, exposed them to light, what the properties of the world were.

It seems Petty understood Ireland pretty well and he had some sympathies for Ireland. If he had been allowed to simply rule Ireland unconstrained, could he have done much better or is the actual problem one that there's simply no way you can rule Ireland at all without cementing in this external elite, which is then going to lead to trouble. Yes.

So William Petty is a scientist and an economist, as we would term it now. And he went to Ireland as a doctor. And because he had this very brilliant brain and analytical scientific mind, he kind of diagnosed what he saw as the— not so much the problems, but as the kind of the nature of Ireland, how many people lived there, how many had been dispossessed by the wars and conflict of recent times. And he undertook this remarkable business of mapping Ireland as part of the redistribution of land, you know, which was an extraordinary and horrific undertaking in many ways. But he wasn't a person who had any experience of governing a place. He was hopeless with people. He was rude and abrasive and direct and would tell them that they were ignorant and absurd, in which he may well have been right. But as we know, in society, governing a place doesn't necessarily work well if you tell— so I don't think he was temperamentally in any position to be a good governor. What he absolutely was, was somebody who saw past, because it didn't interest him, prejudice and sort of traditional English dislike of the Irish, because he was interested in things empirical. And he'd also been trained by Catholics, and so he didn't share most English people's horror of Catholics. And so I think he was well placed to advise on the business of running Ireland. He wouldn't have been good at doing it himself. And had Henry Cromwell, to whom he gave this advice and who had been given the job by his father, Oliver Cromwell of governing Ireland. Had he been given more time to do that, I think it could well have been very successful. But it was very short-lived because when Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, Henry Cromwell lost his position effectively. And so the period of time when William Petty and Henry Cromwell were together working on the business of the reconstruction of Ireland was very short. But I think the evidence is there, aspirations for a university, you could make it this great forward-looking nation that could be, you know, kind of model for modernity, could potentially have been very productive.

It seems there are some monarchs, they don't do much in the way of building palaces. Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth. Is that just random or is there some systematic political economy reason why some monarchs are building palaces and others aren't?

Well, it's usually a pretty practical reason. Well, two. One is to do with money and one is to do with scale of your court. So Henry VIII famously, by the time of his death, had something like 60 palaces. But that was partly funded, of course, by the dissolution of the monasteries, which involved the government raking in, state raking making in huge amounts of money, which meant you could build and acquire on a huge scale. And secondly, he had a big family and a big court. So you needed to have palaces for the queens, 'cause there were separate palaces for queens, for the Prince of Wales, and for your other offspring and so on. So Henry VIII built palaces on a great scale. He then passed the palaces onto his successors, who to begin with then inherited a huge patrimony. So they didn't, you know, the kind of requirement or the need for more buildings was, had been sated. But also, of course, you go onto a series of singleton sovereigns. So Edward VI is obviously basically a boy, He never gets beyond his teens. Mary Tudor is an adult woman, but she's married but has no children, and her husband is King of Spain, so he's not really around very much. And then, of course, famously, Elizabeth I is a singleton sovereign, unmarried and with no children. So, so I think a lot of it is about practicality.

Mm-hmm.

But there's also, you know, you can add into the mix the extent to which you see, and there are obviously people who did, on top of those more practical issues, building as a way of expressing your status. And so if we think of somebody like Louis XIV in France, it's clear that over and above any of those practical requirements or questions of means, the magnificence of the monarch and therefore of the institution of monarchy and so on was something that he realized and expressed in buildings on a massive scale.

Why concretely do the monarchs wear crowns?

Well, it's an interesting point because of course no actual practical job that a crown does.

Sure.

It doesn't—

it could be a scepter, right? There's many different symbols of status you could invoke. Why a crown?

Well, of course, there are also all those other symbols of status. So there are several scepters, there's an orb, there are spurs, there's rings, there's a whole wardrobe of regalia, as it's known. But essentially, it's about the echoing with this amazing sense of continuity of what was done by your ancestors and back to the kind of origins of your institution. So it's very interesting that if you look at images of monarchs within Britain, going right back into the early Middle Ages, they all are wearing a ceremonial thing on their head. And then even if you look outside, you know, you look outside the British tradition, you see it in other nations, you see it in other traditions which are complete, which had no connection and no kind of interaction. For example, in traditional African societies where you see headdresses and the wearing of some ceremonial thing which denotes a person as being other than those around them, more important, more special, elevated. You see it in archaeology. I mean, the earliest English crowns have been excavated from Iron Age graves. So this is before the advent of the written word. So I mean, there seems to be a kind of an almost sort of anthropological sort of universality of the idea that you're doing something special on your head as a way of setting you apart. But it also is, you know, it is very, very clearly monarchs doing it because their predecessors do it. And we see it, you know, in the Middle Ages, Henry III, who was of great long-lived and successful medieval monarch really lionized his predecessor by several generations, Edward the Confessor, who'd been canonized by the Catholic Church, so was a saint, and how the graves were opened of previous monarchs, crowns which had been buried with them were got out, and so on. So, and of course, for all monarchies, you know, nowadays it's very sort of, you know, we have essentially a ceremonial monarchy in this country. But when you trace them back to a time when monarchs were actually in charge and had executive power, always the challenge was, how did you pass it on to your children? How did you make sure that on your death, although you might be a powerful and successful king, that as soon as you die, all your enemies come in and, you know, grab everything? And so you have to create this sense that somehow it isn't just about you and your body, and when you're dead, it's over, that there's some continuity, there's some kind of heredity that carries your, you know, aura and power and ability to command down through the generations. And anointing is part of this, which is a big thing, this kind of business of a sort of holy endorsement of your line, but also the passing on of all these objects, which when you're you breathe your last on your deathbed are still there and attention can be drawn to them and then they're put on the head of your successor and your aura passes to him or her. So it's a very, it's an interesting cocktail of history and anthropology and sociology in a way.

Why is the British monarchy so extremely successful as a global institution, including in the United States? So when Elizabeth passed, many people said, oh, this is the end of the line. That seems clearly untrue. The thing is just going to continue. It's extremely popular, draws a wide spectrum of interest. What's the marketing genius behind what's going on? Why is it so well known? You look at the royal families of Netherlands, Norway, they can speak English, but no one seems to care.

Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? I guess it's probably a cocktail of things. I think that I suppose the kind of balance that's been struck between the non-executive head of state in the form of the monarch and the executive in the form of the government, the prime minister and so on. But without dialing down much of the bling and the splendor and the ceremony of the monarchy, even though the power has gone, has turned out to be a very successful formulation. So it's interesting because I don't know that it would necessarily have been obvious that that would have worked. You know, there might have been a feeling that it would be absurd to continue to have all these palaces and crowns and state coaches and all this kind of stuff when you're looking at something which is, you know, fundamentally part of the kind of ritual of state, but it isn't actually exercising any kind of executive authority. But it happens to have kind of come to pass that actually that seems to be quite a, quite a sort of satisfying separation. And there's something about the apolitical nature of the monarchy and how incredibly careful they have to be about that, that in a world where everything seems to endlessly be in turmoil in terms of electoral politics and so on, to have a certain kind of sense of reassurance about it. I also think that it changes. I mean, I think if you'd been talking about the success of the monarchy 30 years ago, it might have been a different conversation. I think there have been moments where the monarchy's felt very successful, others where it's felt more fragile. And then I suppose you have to layer into that the fact some quite practical things like the monarchy in this country is in an Anglophone country. So the language that is spoken and the kind of traditions, Anglo-Saxon traditions, if you like, have a certain kind of familiarity around the world, which makes a connection. And obviously also, I mean, long past now, but the kind of, the sort of skeleton, if you like, of a monarchy, which was once an empire that stretched around the world, still has kind of connections and associations that makes the British monarchy of interest in places where the, you know, the Swedish monarchy might not be, as it were.

So you're director of Landmark Trust. How should we as outsiders think about where the revenue comes from? How does it work financially?

So we're a charity, historic buildings charity. Our job is to rescue historic buildings that are in a derelict or in a bad state. Bad way to raise the money to restore them. And then we rent them out for people to stay in. So we have 200 buildings across the whole of the British Isles— castles and dairies and lighthouses and all manner of things, forts, artillery forts. And we are self-financing, so the money that runs the charity comes from letting the building. So if you were just— if you— this—

so you make money?

Well, we don't— we generate money, yeah, but then we plow it back into the mission and we plow it back If you were staying in London this week and you weren't staying in a smart hotel, you could be staying in a silk worker's house in the East End built in 1707, or John Betjeman's own apartment, which is in Clerkenwell, both of which we own. And it would be staying in a wonderful historic building, sleeping in comfortable beds and, you know, everything. But as well as, you know, your money being a way of paying for your stay, it also helps us to run our charity and then to go on and to acquire more buildings that would otherwise be lost. And we have this amazing stock of buildings in this country.

Do you grade your renters the way, say, Airbnb does? Or does anyone can come in and stay in the castle?

We love them all. We love them all and we don't grade them. If you did something really awful, like, you know, made a pile of furniture and set fire to it, we might not rent you another building. But we don't grade them. We are open to everybody. And we, as I say, we're a charity, so we don't price ourselves in a way that makes us available only to the super rich. All sorts of people come and stay in our buildings and anyone can do it. You just go on our website, landmarktrust.org. Castletrust.org.uk, and you can choose from any number of wonderful follies and mini castles. We've just finished restoring an amazing castle near Inverness for people who go to Scotland, maybe following their own roots. Beautiful building built in 1550, which had no roof and no floors until 2 years ago. And we raised the money through people giving money philanthropically and also through grants and so on to re-roof it, re-floor it, put heat and power in, and now you can have your own castle for the weekend.

Is it socioeconomic status that in essence stops your renters from trashing the places? Because if Airbnb had no star system, I would be quite worried, right? Whereas presumably you have a narrower set of renters, if not higher in income, higher in education or historic understanding.

Yeah, I mean, I think it is a sort of self-selecting group of people and I think the nature of our buildings, I think you're right, which is that on the whole people go to them because they're really interested in that kind of thing. And so it would be a counterintuitive thing then to trash it. You know, we occasionally have people who make a bit of a mess, but it's pretty rare. And I think people respond to somewhere that feels really special and that, you know, is run by a charity and looked after with great care. And there's a nice member of staff who gives you the key or, you know, gets in contact with you. So, I don't know. I think people's good nature and recognition, I suppose, of the specialness of what they're experiencing is pretty good, pretty good kind of force for keeping them behaving themselves.

Did the income tax and estate tax lead to the end of the era of great country homes? Because all of a sudden they became a lot more expensive, right?

Yes.

Housing costs are suddenly much higher.

Yes, it was definitely a big factor. The rise of inheritance tax and various other land taxes. I mean, it didn't bring an end to them. You don't need to go very far in this country to see that, you know, that—

But many more turned over to groups like Landmark Trust, right?

Yes. Yeah, it's true. And, you know, a lot of them were sold off, the interiors stripped out. A lot of the interiors sold to the States, actually. It's a very interesting phase in the history of British country houses, really, in the first sort of 20, 30 years of the 20th century, where the house that I live in, this happened to. Whole rooms of beautiful paneling from the Tudor period, prized off the walls, put in packing cases, and dealers would sell them to the kind of Randolph Hearsts of the world who were recreating an idea of old Europe in new buildings. So there were different— there were a series of factors at play. I think it was to do, but also to do with the First World War. I mean, the extent of the death toll taken by the First World War, the impact that had on these great estates in terms of the workforce, not just of the owners of the houses, but also the people who were, you know, working on the estates was enormous. So it did make for a big shift. But I mean, there's something called the Historic Houses Association in the UK, which is a kind of club, sort of, a trade association for people who are private owners of big historic houses and open them to the public or do public events in them. And they have an annual conference. And if you go to it, you really wouldn't think the English or British country house is in trouble. I mean, there's thousands of people there and there are buildings up and down the country where they're busy, you know, putting in farm shops and, you know, glamping, which is a very big thing in the UK, and amazing, you know, kind of eco-projects and so on. So the taxation system and the kind of the, essentially the rise the state as an institution that needed resources to be able to fund things like universal healthcare, which is obviously a wonderful thing, required the kind of growth of taxation. And that definitely, particularly, particularly in the mid-20th century, took a big toll on landowners and big houses.

Given the standpoint of your job, how is it you think differently about, say, a wealth tax?

I don't know. I don't know that I do think differently about a wealth tax.

It is discouraging the creation and maintenance of the asset you're dedicated to popularizing and preserving, right?

Well, not necessarily. I mean, a lot of people who have big historic houses, I mean, a lot of them have them in charitable trusts and do things which mean that there is public benefit more generally from them. And the various sorts of, I mean, it depends what sort of wealth tax and how it's calculated, what the basis of it is. But I think there are lots of ways you could formulate something that didn't penalize those who were clearly taking a very kind of responsible attitude to historic buildings. I also think that sometimes too much money is an absolute killer of historic buildings. You see the absolute sort of ruination of wonderful buildings in, for example, the wealthier parts of London, where every cornice has been stripped out, the plaster has been hacked off to be, you know, redone every 10 years by the next owner, and all character and patina has been lost for them. So I think there's something to be said for poverty as a preserver, as well as wealth.

Should Britain fund heritage through lotteries? Which are generally regressive, right? They don't offer fair odds. Poorer people buy the tickets.

That does happen in this country, as you probably know. So should it? Well, it's a good question. I mean, so the Heritage Lottery Fund, actually I think it's now called the National Lottery Heritage Fund, receives a significant sum of money each year from the National Lottery, which was set up in the '90s to fund various things, including a lot of sport, including a lot of community work. So it's very broadly based. And I would say that I mean, I think you're right to say that you have to be very alive to the demographics of those people who are buying lottery tickets. I buy them myself, so it's a broad community. And the way that money is allocated by the Lottery Fund is acutely conscious of that. And each project that you do, and I've done a number of them where you receive money through the Lottery Fund, you have to demonstrate how you are making a difference to the lives of the people who are buying the tickets. But so much of the work that is done through that programme is amazing grassroots work. Say, for example, in the town I live in, King's Lynn, the local Fisherfolk Museum, which documents the lives of the fishing people of that town through generations, their livelihoods, their communities, their way of life, you know, that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the Lottery Heritage Fund. And so that seems to me to be a wonderful thing and something that we should be really proud of.

Which are the old buildings that we have too many of in Britain. So there's a lot of Christopher Wren churches, right? I think there's over 20.

Too many, you think?

What if there were 15? They're not all fantastic.

They're not all fantastic? Tell me one that isn't fantastic.

The Victorians knocked down St Mildred's, right? I've seen pictures of it. I don't miss it.

Well, you don't miss something that's not there. I think it would be pretty hard to convince me that any Christopher Wren church wasn't worth hanging on to. But your point is right, which is to say that not everything that was ever built is worth retaining. And there are things which are clearly of much less interest were poorly built, which are, you know, not serving a purpose anymore in a way that they need to. So to me, it's all about assessing what matters, what we care about. But I think it's incredibly important to remember how you have to try and take the long view because if you let things go, you cannot later retrieve them. And we look at the decisions that were made in the past about things that we really care about that were demolished, wonderful country houses we've mentioned. It's fantastic, for example, Euston Station, one of the great stations of the world built in the middle of the 19th century, demolished in the '60s. And they've regretted it forever since. So, I think one of the things you have to be really careful about is to make a distinction between fashion of the moment and things which we are going to regret or our children or our grandchildren are going to curse us for having not valued or not thought about, not considered. Which is why in this country we have this thing called the Listing System where there's a kind of a process of identifying buildings which are important and what's called listing them, putting them on a list, which means that if you own them, you can't change them without getting permission, which is a way of ensuring that that things which you as an owner or I as an owner might not treat with scorn, that the kind of the interest of generations to come are represented in that.

Why were so many big mistakes made in the middle part of the 20th century? So St. Pancras almost was knocked down, as I'm sure you know. That would have been a huge blunder. There was something about that time that people seemed to have become more interested in ugliness. Or what's your theory? How do you explain the insanity that took hold of Britain for what, 30 years?

Well, I think this is such a good question because this is, to me, what the study of history is all about, which is you have to think about what it was like for that generation. You have to think of what it was like for people in the 1950s and '60s who had experienced either firsthand or very close at hand, not just one but two catastrophic world wars in which numbers had been killed, you know, places had been destroyed, the whole human cost of that time was so colossal. And the idea for that generation that something really fundamental had to change if we were going to be a society that wasn't going to be killing one another for all time. This has a real kind of sort of mirror in the 17th century. I mean, during the Civil War in the 17th century, there was a real feeling that something had to be done, otherwise God was going to strike down this nation, this errant nation. And I think for that generation in the '50s and '60s, the sense that that we simply have to do things differently because this pattern of life, this pattern of existence, this way we've operated as a society has been so destructive. So I have, although I think that lots of things were done when it comes to urban planning and so on that we really regret now, I think you had to be really careful not to diminish the seriousness of intent of those people who were trying to conceive of what that world might be more egalitarian, more democratic, involving more space, more air, more light, healthier, all these kind of things. Now we can see lots now that we say, that's ridiculous, you know, this is not how society works. But I think that we didn't experience what they experienced. So I actually have real respect for a lot of that. And I think a lot of things that were done— I'm going tomorrow to see a place in somewhere called Letchworth, the world's first garden city, which was planned and laid out north of London in the 1910s, which was completely about saying we've got to design a new world. So yeah, I think we've got to have a bit of humility in considering these decisions. Because people don't go around wantonly trying to destroy the environment. They think that they're doing the right thing.

If we look at most of the Western world, it seems to me that after World War II, there are very few, really very few beautiful new neighborhoods created. A lot of spectacular individual buildings, but it's very hard to find neighborhoods that are as nice as what was built in the 1890s, the 1910s, or depends on the country, the era. What happened to neighborhood architecture? Why did it so radically decline? In wealthier societies?

So such a good question. I was talking about this with somebody only the other day. I mean, I think there are clearly places where you do see it and you do see it work, but they're pretty few and far between. And I think there's a lot of work going on with young architects in the field in really trying to crack this business about neighborhoods and housing, not least because in this country there's a real housing crisis because we're a small country with a lot of people and the challenges of building are very great. But it is really stark I mean, I don't know the answer to it. I think there are observations I would make. One I would say is that the idea of the philanthropic neighborhood development scheme has really gone, but there was a lot of that that happened in the late 19th, early 20th century to do with landowners and also company directors and so on doing things that were going to be beautiful. I mean, there's a wonderful place up near Liverpool called Port Sunlight, which was all laid out by a great industrialist, absolutely the most beautiful place you could imagine for people who would be working for him. And there's something about the kind of aspiration of beauty and a sense of responsibility for creating it that it feels like has really diminished in the world of the kind of either the state does it and they're, you know, trying to do it as cheaply as possible, or developers do it and they have another reason for trying to do it as cheaply as possible. So I agree, I think it's something to really regret. And I think it's something we have to decide we care about or we're not going to make it any better.

If the House of Lords were abolished, as Labour has proposed, as you know, would that make it harder for policy to protect heritage in Britain?

No, I don't think so.

So you don't think they're a net force one way or the other? Because they do slow down legislation, they slow down change. It's—

I know I'm all for abolishing the House of Lords myself, personally. I mean, I think it's totally past its sell-by date as an institution. And the fact that we still have nearly 100 members of the House of Lords who hereditary peers, who are by definition all men. I find extraordinary.

But they're being replaced, right? They're literally grandfathered in, in some ways.

No, but there's still 100 of them. There'll be 100.

But they're going to die.

No, but then they get replaced by others.

But they're not hereditary, are they? They're replaced.

Well, except that they're from a pool, all of whom are hereditary. So when the House of Lords reform happened in 1997 or thereabouts, the kind of compromise, instead of all the hereditary peers being able to sit in the House of Lords, they said there'll only be 100 and they can nominate among themselves who they are. Are. But it seems to me absurd that there should be 100. I mean, they're all men, apart from anything else. I mean, it's not that they aren't great people, a lot of them are, they're wonderful people. But it just is a— to me, it's an utterly absurd basis on which to involve somebody in the process of legislation. And when it comes to your point about heritage, I mean, I think it's good to have a second chamber. I think there's a debate to be had about what the basis of that is in terms of how you would come to have a seat in it. But I believe that a concern for our environment and the buildings and places in which we live and were built by our ancestors is a really universal one. And it doesn't require you to have a kind of particular sort of social slice of society in the House of Lords to ensure it's protected.

My British yimby friends claim to me that the cost of living is too high here and we need to build at least 2 million new homes, mostly in the south of England. Do you agree? And would that threaten heritage?

I definitely agree that we need a lot more places for people to live. But my contention would be we have an incredible stock of buildings which are unoccupied. You go into any British market town and you will see half the shops are empty. And if you look above the shops, these are generally speaking 19th and early 20th century buildings, the buildings are completely empty. These could all provide wonderful places for people to live. I live in a town centre in a market town myself. With a bit of will to say, let's use the things we have, let's adapt them. This is it, apart from the interest and the beauty in my view, these buildings are all embedded carbon. They've all— the environmental cost of building them has already been incurred. And then they bring people to live in towns near where, you know, other communities are. So it's not that I don't think there's a role for building new houses, but I think it's an easy choice that suits a developer very well, thank you very much, to, you know, get a field and build some houses on it and sell it off. The task of saying, how do we make sure our geography and our wonderful towns and villages are full of life, and how do we use what we've got, requires a bit more imagination. But I think that the opportunity there is absolutely enormous, and I long to see somebody really grasp And what should policy do to enable that?

What has to happen?

Well, I don't know. I'm not enough kind of wired into the way the system works, but I think there needs to be a clear kind of national policy of exploring that. And then there needs to be the will and the resources for local government to demonstrate that they have exhausted those possibilities before permission's given for new builds in many cases.

The aesthetic history of jewelry and the Crown Jewels and the aesthetic history of architecture in England, I mean, do they run on parallel tracks or are they very different stories?

Well, there's a kind of, through time, ages have different kind of stylistic tastes, if you like. So we might think of the 1920s and '30s and kind of Art Deco architecture. And if you look at jewellery and jewellery design, you see that similarly in the kind of favour of kind of square-cut stones and very rectilinear things. Similarly, if you look at the late 17th century with Baroque buildings, and then you look at the design, for example, of the Arc en Ciel, which were made, most of them in the late 17th century, the kind of, you see common motifs in terms of decoration, in terms of sort of floral devices, in terms of the massing of objects and the kind of relationship between different elements. Yeah, I mean, there's a kind of, whether it's an age of ornament or an age of minimalism, you see that across different artistic forms and jewelry and architecture, like clothes and other things are all part of that.

Will there be a new age of crown jewels that are designed today, produced today, viewed as important? Or do they somehow have to come from the 17th century and they have to be old? But that wasn't the case in the 17th century, right? No one said back then they all have to be old. That's why they produced new ones.

Well, they produced new ones because the old ones had been melted down. So it was a bit more of a necessity than a desire for novelty. There wasn't any desire for novelty. If they could have had the old ones, they would have had them. And when the new ones were made in the 1660s, which is the collection that we now have, the instruction were these should be exact replicas. Because of the things that were destroyed. That said, there has always, alongside this idea that you should be using something very ancient that speaks of, you know, the ancientness of your lineage and so on, new pieces have in the past often been made to accompany the older sort of ancestral pieces, quite often for queens, for queens consort. I don't think that's where— that's not the appetite of the age. I think it would be very hard to imagine anyone feeling that it was a good use of money to, you know, spend a lot of money buying new diamonds and making a new crown at the moment, not least 'cause there are quite a lot in the collection. So I'd be quite surprised if we see many more pieces made in my lifetime.

Since they're not using the original Jewel of Koh-i-Noor anymore, why not just give it back, right? It was taken in wartime, 1849, Second Anglo-Sikh War, East India Company, India, Pakistan, they want it back. Why not just give it back?

I mean, it's a very interesting point. The trouble is that, well, the Koh-i-Noor Diamond has been a stone that was taken in conquest through a whole series of conquests. First. So as you say, it came to Britain following the Anglo-Sikh Wars in the middle of the 19th century, and it was given a kind of legal status, but it clearly was, you know, a spoil of war. But of course, it had only been in what's now in Lahore, which is where it was taken from, for— I can't remember how long now, but, you know, decades— and had been taken before then by Ranjit Singh, who's the Maharaja, from somebody that he had conquered who had previously taken it. So it had been through Persia, it had been to the Mughals, been through Pakistan. So I mean, where do you choose your moment? I mean, it could be given to Lahore, back to Pakistan, but then the Indians would say, "Well, hang on a second, you should have given it back to us because Babur, the Indian Mughal emperor—" Flip a coin if you have to. Well, yeah, you could do that. I mean, you could do that, but I'm not sure where it gets you really. I mean, but then you start saying, well, what about all the other things? Do you go for a kind of massive repatriation? You'd empty a lot of museums, and I'm not sure you'd solve a lot of problems really. I think, you know, it's been there for a long time. And I don't think there's an easy solution. I don't think there's a kind of act that you could take in relation to that stone, which would just involve kind of Britain saying, "Well, it's fine. We don't need to have it anymore," that would do anything other than cause infinitely more conflict and aggro, because it would open up the whole question of all these other moments of conflict when the stone was taken. And I just don't see that gets you very far. I think it's better just, you know, it's not being used in the coronation, which I think is very wise, and, you know, it's an object which can be seen and viewed and discussed by all of us, but I wouldn't start passing it around the world myself.

Here's a reader question, and I quote, "Why do houses in Britain have so little storage?" Unquote. That's a very funny question.

I didn't know that they did. Do houses in the States have lots more storage? I think they do. Yes. Well, probably part of the reason is that houses in this country are on the whole very old houses. I mean, the vast majority of our building stock in this country was built before the Second World War in a time when, you know, the amount of garages and skis and snowboards and things that everybody needed to keep was considerably less and were built for people who were used to living less expansive lives, less wealthy. So, it's probably a facet of that really as much as anything else. But yeah, it would make me look when I next go to the States, look in some cupboards, see what the storage levels are. Yeah.

Now you live in Clifton House. It's what, an 800-year-old house?

In part, yeah. Yeah.

What's the hardest thing about living in a house that old?

Keeping warm is not always straightforward. Space heaters?

Or that's what they did in New Zealand. What do you do?

We light some fires. That's nice. Light fires, yeah. We wear a lot of socks and jumpers. And we also have a thing in this country, I don't know if people go in for them in the States, which is called an electric blanket. Blanket. Have you come across an electric blanket?

Sure, of course, again a New Zealand thing as well.

Yeah, so we love an electric blanket because you don't need to heat your bedroom, because you don't need your bedroom to be warm, but it does mean when you get into bed you're not freezing. So keeping warm in the winter is a bit of a challenge, but mostly it's the most wonderful delightful thing you could possibly imagine, and a massive, massive privilege to live in a very old and beautiful building.

And do you have a dishwasher? We do have a dishwasher.

We didn't for a long time because my husband, who's a bit puritanical, of course, said that he thought we shouldn't. But I said, let's put the plumbing in, and he's pretty grateful now.

How practical are thatched roofs? They're pretty practical.

You know, if you see a thatched roof, the thickness of the thatch is absolutely enormous, so it has very good thermal properties. It's very good for biodiversity, lots of beetles live in them. But they're not cheap, and you need a wonderful thatcher to replace the thatch on a cycle every sort of generation or so. So they keep you very warm, And they're very sustainable, they're very low carbon, but they're not cheap.

What could you tell us about windows in old homes that maybe we wouldn't know?

Well, what I would say is that you must never underestimate just how much our ancestors cared about keeping warm. You think we care about it and the cost of warming our houses, but if you had to chop every log that warmed your sitting room, you'd pretty much be focused on it too. But we often forget about the things that they did, which we ought to do too, to keep warm, which is, for example, really thick curtains with lining, which means that when you draw them, really exclude all the heat, not something very sort of flimsy. A lot of old buildings have shutters, which are also very, very good. So you use those in conjunction with the windows. So those things are really, really worth doing in your house. And I think as far as making sure that old windows are doing their job in keeping you warm, because I think there's a real, real risk at the moment with the completely correct focus on insulation in buildings that all our beautiful old sash windows with their wonderful handmade glass get put in skips and UPVC windows get put in instead. And so I think that it's very important for all of us who care about this stuff to remind ourselves and remind each other about the things you can do that enable you to keep your beautiful windows, but also to make sure that you're not wasting energy.

What makes the historical architecture of Norfolk so special?

Yeah. So, one of the things that's really interesting about Great Britain is if you ever have one of those maps that you can get, which show the geology of the place that you live, the country or the state you live in, so it's the kind of stripes or the bands of different kind of geology, whether it's limestone or granite or chalk or whatever. If you look at one for Britain, it is amazing because there are so many different stripes of geology just to do with the way the world evolved geologically, which means that places in Britain that are very close to each other have completely different geology. And the reason that is interesting and relevant is it— places are built overwhelmingly from the materials that you find locally. And when you have an old building stock like we do, that's very vivid. It's expensive to transport materials and so on. So, one of the great pleasures, I would say, of travelling around the UK is that places that are maybe only 15 miles apart can look completely different because of that. So, in the case of Norfolk, what it means is Norfolk has no building stone. It has a lot of chalk, which has seams of flint in it. So, what you get are buildings in our part of the world, which are overwhelmingly brick, very beautiful red brick that's been fired locally from local brick earth. And then you get dressings of napped flint, which is very beautiful black kind of knobbly sort of stone. If you go 20 miles east from us to get to Northamptonshire, there's wonderful limestone and everything is built of honeyed, beautiful stone. It's such a lovely thing about your connection with your environment. And I feel in this country, we are very lucky in this, that you have this tremendous local distinctiveness. You could open your eyes, if you know about this stuff, and you could just see by looking, doing that, which county of England you are in from, and given all these places are very close together compared to the States, and quite often which part of which county. So Norfolk is very, very strongly brick, has beautiful brick merchants' houses and buildings of the 16th, 17th 18th century. And it has also some wonderful medieval churches because Norfolk was in a very, very wealthy— it's a sort of bulgy bit on the side of England. If you look at the map of England on the right-hand side, and it's where it was the wealthiest part of England all the way through the Middle Ages, because it was where all the sheep farming happened. And all of England's wealth in the Middle Ages really came from wool, came from the export of wool.

It had less of a 19th century also, right? In the sense of less of an industrial revolution. Yeah, so it was—

its prosperity was in the Middle Ages and then it essentially kind of disappeared from the sort of league table of affluence in the UK as the industrial towns of the north, which is where, you know, big-scale cotton production and so on really took off. And as a consequence, as a part of the UK, it's very, very beautiful. It's not very wealthy at all and it's very unurbanised because it essentially still has its kind of medieval and sort of early modern landscape, both in terms of buildings and and topography. Whereas if you go, I mean, equally interesting, but just very different, somewhere like Manchester, which amazing world's first industrial city, you know, had this extraordinary explosion in the 19th century. The railways were invented there. You know, everything kind of was developing in a very different direction.

3 final questions. First, which is your favorite John Fowles book and why?

I think it is The French Lieutenant's Woman. I think it's just an amazing novel. It really, really bears rereading. Now it's less fashionable now than it was maybe 20, 30 years ago. But it is tremendous. He wrote some pretty creepy other novels, one called The Collector, which I wouldn't particularly recommend, amazing though it is. But I think The French Lieutenant's Woman, as a kind of love story and as a kind of a dialogue with Victorian literature, is peerless.

Who's your favorite British composer and why?

Oh, I think Handel, whose music I hope we will be hearing at the coronation, which is coming up next year. And you count him as a British composer?

I do, yeah.

Okay, that's fine. We claim him. Can you claim Haydn? Shakespeare, I would say. And he composed that wonderful court music, which I love, because that's a great area that I've worked on.

Before I ask you the last question, just to repeat for our listeners and readers, Anna's book, which I'm a big fan of, it's called The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown. If you type her name into Amazon, it's pronounced Anna Kay, but you spell it K-E-A-Y. Last and final question, what is it you will do next?

I'm trying to save an amazing building outside Edinburgh, a house called Mavis Bank, which was built in the 1720s for a man who was one of our great Renaissance figures, man of the great pioneer of the Scottish Enlightenment. And it's the most beautiful, beautiful house. It's derelict, just walls standing, but the ceilings and the roofs have fallen in and it's clinging on to life by its fingernails. So my great hope for what I'm doing next is being able to raise the money to save it from collapse.

And are we doing enough to preserve the Scottish Enlightenment? No. What else should we do? Extra question. Everything. Everything, but what?

What concretely? Well, there are all sorts of things. I mean, the Scottish Enlightenment is such a completely gripping, extraordinary phenomenon that this tiny little country, you know, my birthplace, but micro little place on any worldview through the course of the early and into the later 18th century had such incredible influence around the world. And I think the buildings of that period, I think the, you know, the political thought, the poetry, all these things we should all know more about. We should teach it more to our children and we should celebrate it.

And if you're recommending one thing for people to read on the Scottish Enlightenment, what is it?

Well, there's a very good new book that your listeners might be interested in called Scotland: A Global History written by someone called Murray Pittock that came out early this year. And it is a wonderful account of how from the sort of mid-17th century Scotland, as I say, a tiny little country with a minuscule population came to have such incredible global reach in terms of science, technology, thought, politics, music, so much. So yeah, that's a good place to start.

Anna has numerous other books, all of which I've enjoyed. Anna, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.