Dear all,

I respect the great interest in these matters and concern that many of you have. But there are lots of people who say “so what?”. Part of the human condition is that we do, and have to, forget things, and we do re-imagine, re-tell history with each generation. There is no empirical history out there, independent of us, just waiting to be discovered. At what level of investigative or recording detail to we go down to before we realise we’ve lost our agency to make a difference? Sometimes we need to look up from our particular interests to see the present, and a future. Well, at least it’s an interesting ‘Friday afternoon’ discussion.

All the best,

Neil

From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of lancashire.archaeology
Sent: 29 November 2017 14:46
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pillbox conservation and repair

The trouble is, is that we don't know where most of these are, nor where they all were, nor how they functioned together with other, now vanished items such as barbed wire entanglements, slit trenches, etc.  as part of a particular period of this country's history.  

I added a previously unknown pillbox to the HER earlier this week and, last week, we had what may be the last of the pillboxes at the former Royal Ordnance Factory site, Chorley, demolished without record.  The demolition was outside the planning process - the structure was too small to require any formal consent - and the site is now gone.  It was said to have been a specific ROF design rather than one of the more standard WD types, but this can no longer be confirmed ...

Pete Iles,

Lancashire 

Dear Phil,

Hyperbole is not required. It’s a matter of proportion, interpreting a fragmentary past, where to spend scarce resources. And people these days have every right to create their own cultural historical record (whether good or bad), not to live in an ‘Historic England’ hodge-podge past.

Cheers,

Neil