Why not put a plastic portico on Chatsworth?
I’m kicking myself for throwing into a skip the warped and ghastly plastic windows that I removed from my house two years ago. I should have offered them to English Heritage. I can see now that it would have fawned over them as a very important piece of late 20th-century fenestration added to an 18th-century cottage. The heritage quango, which is charged with looking after the nation’s Grade I and Grade II* properties, has just told the Diocese of Worcester that no, it may not change a warped Victorian wooden frame on to which are mounted the 14th and 17th-century bells of Malvern Priory. English Heritage describes the frame as being of “historic interest”, though to Malvern’s campanologists it is just “a very bad piece of Victorian engineering” that has warped and will, in a few years’ time, make the bells impossible to ring. It used to be monks who fooled themselves into treating mundane objects as relics worthy of holy reverence. But now English Heritage does it. It wasn’t so long a
