Local Distinctiveness

Losing Your Place : Authenticity

The real and the genuine hold a strength of meaning for us. If the advertising world is to be believed this is worth, and costs, a lot: 'It's the real thing', Levi 50ls, Champagne.

Wensleydale cheese : why is it important to makers and gourmets that this cheese continues to be made in this valley and not the next? Amongst the reasons to do with the need for jobs, comes also an understanding that cows of this place, eating grass in this valley, with expertise built here over generations combine to create a food which is particular, authentic and good. Its making brings dignity and pride to the place, since the people who make it are experts, the people who grow the grass to feed the cows are implicated in this. The relationships breed culture and identity which has meaning for the people who live and work here and for those who chance upon it or make it their destination. The landscape that is created and sustained by this activity is one in which mixed grass, wild flowers, barns have a real role and sustain a landscape plotted and pieced with interrelationships.

If the discussion was about Gevrey Chambertin, Julienas and Fleurie, the initiates would nod knowingly about the discrete charms of the different slopes, soils, sun and seasons: the French have made a profession out of the particular. Appelation controllee carries important kudos, identity, place and quality are intimately bound together. The place of origin, the knowledge of derivation is real and important. People can tell the difference. If trace elements can make the difference between life and death, they can certainly make the difference between good and better, and the educated nose can tell. Recent EC regulations are currently calling for protective registration of Geographical Indications and Designations of Origin.

SJ Gould draws a neat analysis of authenticity of object, use and place. He deliberates over the lack of interest we show in a fibreglass dinosaur as opposed to the real fossils, the San Francisco tram full of tourists at noon rather than the workers in the early morning, and the lack of inspiration to be gained from seeing London Bridge somewhere in the USA.

To see a Somerset hedge laid in a Midland pattern, to hear theatrical Yorkshire accents tracing the words of DH Lawrence, to taste a Bakewell pudding made without almonds Authenticity and integrity are related. We use words such as pastiche, facade, kitsch, ersatz, Disney to denigrate forcibly. Much criticism of the packaging of history as 'Heritage', has followed the degrading of cultural complexity to marketing one liners - Bronte Country, 1066 Country or 'Coventry: the City where legends are made'.

It should be perfectly possible to reinforce the medievalness of York, the Thomas Hardy connections in Dorset, but so often you are left with a stage set, a marketing idea of a 'tourist destination', a kind of deadness, one dimensional and unsatisfying. If we leave no room for peeling paint, time before and since, access to the life of the place now, we present a picture which is dishonest and unreal. Local distinctiveness is not necessarily about beauty, but it must be about truth.

Losing Your Place
Local
Distinctiveness
Detail
Particularity
Patina
References

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