If only Stonehenge were of use in the culture wars, then it might be protected

Thankfully, as the prime minister once reminded us, “there are international conventions in place that prevent the destruction of cultural heritage”. At specific risk (from Donald Trump’s threats) at the time were 52 of Iran’s major cultural sites, 24 of them world heritage listed. Theoretically protecting them in 2020 was the 1954 Hague convention for the protection, in the event of armed conflict, of cultural assets: “Movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people.” Places, for instance, such as Stonehenge.

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Photograph: Marianne Purdie/Getty Images

In peacetime, however, alterations that might be resented as “adverse and irreversible” if inflicted on a great monument by a foreign power may be completed by a national government with consequences hardly more serious – for a leadership that routinely courts both – than international condemnation and contempt.

Last week, as the government was in court, defending its decision to upgrade the road, partially covered in a tunnel, whose portals are within the Stonehenge heritage site, Unesco repeated its conclusion that the tunnel is too short to “avoid highly adverse and irreversible impact on OUV [outstanding universal value], particularly on the integrity of the property”. If the scheme goes ahead unmodified, Unesco warned, Stonehenge could lose its status as a world heritage site.

It seems unlikely at this stage to prevail on Grant Shapps who, along with Unesco’s initial intervention, ignored advice from his government’s planning inspectorate that the tunnel would cause “substantial harm” and should not go ahead. His arguably unlawful decision was the subject of last week’s legal challenge by campaigners.

As for Oliver Dowden, the heritage secretary, his many public pronouncements on the preservation of national monuments, some of zero or even negative universal value, are yet to feature Stonehenge. Campaigners can only wish the stones commemorated martial triumphs or that the area featured, atop even one sarsen megalith, an inspiring ancient flagpole. If it only showcased Georgian royalty, an olde-time wig or some glancing connection with slavery, Stonehenge might be better placed to elicit some protective intervention from Dowden, backed by his newly formed body of “custodians of our heritage”. For the man is not without higher feelings. Notably for football. “We invented it,” Dowden announced during the European Super League incident, “we helped export it around the world and it has been a central part of British life for over a century.”

© Photograph: Marianne Purdie/Getty Images
‘Campaigners can only wish the stones commemorated martial triumphs or that the area featured an inspiring ancient flagpole.’

Where certain heritage assets are concerned, inadequately reverent commentary is enough to trigger a passionate warning from Dowden, ever vigilant to the “woke agenda”. “I am proud of our nation’s heritage,” he told Telegraph readers in May. Thus he would not, no, not even as one of the “baying mobs” of Robert Jenrick’s imagination demanded this sacrifice, “look on as people threaten to pull down statues or strip other parts of our rich historic environment”.

Literally tunnelling through this same environment is, we gather, a different matter, best decided in defiance of expert advice by the thrifty “petrol-head” (“I drive for pleasure and for work”) Shapps. So far, in fact, is the government from attributing national importance to Stonehenge, it seems not to have considered whether dramatically increased sentences for damage to memorials (reflecting “the emotional or wider distress caused by this type of offending”) might arrive just in time to expose Stonehenge’s tunneller-in-chief to a 10-year term.

Given the abundant evidence that government ministers care very deeply about the last night of the Proms, the renaming of student accommodation, the union flag, the accuracy of The Crown, a statue of Cecil Rhodes and the sanctity of a photograph of the Queen threatened by probably foreign postgraduates, maybe it’s only fair to pause – retain and explain – and wonder if their comparative indifference to Stonehenge couldn’t somehow make sense, once you put it in context. Maybe they don’t know any better?

Alternatively, given Dowden’s superior understanding of heritage of all kinds, maybe the stones really were overrated by generations of naive visitors, including Samuel Pepys (“[I] find them as prodigious as any tales I ever heard of them”) and Henry James (“It stands as lonely in history as it does on the great plain”), and are thus ideally suited, unlike the forthcoming national boat, to be treated with exemplary parsimony?

What evidence is there, after all, that Stonehenge fulfils the primary purpose of cultural assets under Johnson, that of, via some lurid nationalistic message, generating useful domestic discord? What did it do in the culture war? When, in fact, did Stonehenge ever win anything – unless you count its increasingly inconvenient world heritage status? “It is regretted,” says Unesco’s latest contribution, “that for such an iconic world heritage property, the argument persists that the perceived benefits of a longer tunnel do not outweigh the costs.”

This insistence that Stonehenge’s importance merits expensive protections might be more easily dismissed if Johnson had not, in world-beating mode, expressed a wish for another “Unesco accolade” (for Gwynedd’s unique slate landscape). If Stonehenge surrenders its older honour because of Shapps’s cut-price road upgrade, Gywnedd could at least keep the UK entries stable, at 32, barring the threatened relegation of Liverpool’s waterfront.

Still, as Johnson discovered when he was trashing London’s skyline, most irreversible damage to heritage assets, cultural and natural, can be achieved without serious annoyance from abroad. At home, complaints from the usual suspects – environmental and heritage bodies, distressed local campaigners – have been only marginal deterrents to incursions in the green belt or the elevation of party donors over local democracy in planning policy. To the question – if ostentatiously patriotic ministers would do this to Stonehenge, what won’t they do to less precious or celebrated British heritage? – the answer is: take a look.

Si monumentum requiris, here’s the historic Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which the government is happy to exchange, regardless of a widely supported campaign by actual heritage enthusiasts, for a US investor’s boutique hotel. Accusations of “money-grabbing philistinism” quite missed the point that these days – and coming from an arts professional! – that is quite the compliment.

• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist