Think of the way we use ‘policy,’ as something like thinking for others, both because you think others can’t think and also because you somehow think that you can think, which is the other part of thinking that there’s something wrong with someone else—thinking that you’ve fixed yourself somehow, and therefore that gives you the right to say someone else needs fixing. (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 112)

One way of thinking about ‘policy’ is that it is an argument for particular forms of legitimacy, scaling and ontology which holds the seeds of its own failure. As policy seeks to advance its argument, its very stridency means it always meets other legitimacies, other scaling and other ontologies that stop it short. Cultural policy has been argued to exist in everyday lives—it is in our living rooms when we watch TV, as David Bell and Kate Oakley put it (2015, p. 10). Yet we might still find analytical purchase, following Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, in thinking of policy as a particular political ontology and therefore different from the political ontology, to build on Bell and Oakley’s example, of the everyday practice of TV watching itself. We might usefully think of ‘policy’ as a specific political mode (one that is different from, say, protest, direct participation or everyday practices), one which seeks to think on behalf of others, for their benefit, in normative terms and to direct their subsequent action.

Clearly you can enact the political ontology of ‘policy’ in the scale of space known as the local. Any city, any town, any village can, and does, produce a form of politics that is ‘policy’, that asserts a direction in advance for others to follow. Yet the ‘local’—when added to ‘policy’—is not only an ‘abstract’ geographic designation (Gilmore et al., 2019, p. 265). ‘Local’ can also be used ontologically to smuggle in other modes of being, other modes of knowing and other ideas of time and causality. Local can also mean not universal, not widely applicable, not replicable, not lasting or persisting. Local can also mean idiosyncratic, singular, particular and partial. Part of thinking policy locally is then to also think something that is not-policy, something that is different from the political ontology of ‘on behalf of’ and the distanced direction of activity. In the spirit of this volume, which takes both ‘policy’ and ‘local’ as its focus, possibilities are clearly opened up by occupying ‘policy’ and infusing it with ‘local’ and therefore identifying what can be gained through their combination. 

This chapter will contribute towards this volume’s conjuncture of ‘policy’ and ‘local’ by exploring heritage policy through taking two different tacks. The first is offered by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon and allows for a consideration of how scale—of the types expressed in the concepts of ‘national heritage’ and ‘heritage significance’—is achieved through enrolment of many different people, things and ideas into what they call ‘black boxes’. ‘Black boxes’, which hide their own construction, are always leaky and never finally secure the scale they set out to achieve (Callon & Latour, 1981). The second tack will follow Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’, an intervention aimed at cultivating a modified meaning of objectivity precisely through its partiality, its contingency, its modesty and its accountability (1988, pp. 594–5).

De-black boxing allows for seeing heritage and how it is made up and constructed as being a process which is, in Latour’s terms, ‘local at all points’ (1993, p. 117)—the ‘national’ being also produced somewhere specific through particular local means (via policy documents; the law; in specific offices; by specific people). Situated knowledges enable attention to be paid to how we might build shared understandings of the world that work modestly with particularity. In this way we will explore if ‘situated policy’ might offer a useful means of supporting the wider turn represented in this volume of thinking of policy less as document and more as method (Bell & Oakley, 2015; Gilmore et al., 2019). How might a concept like ‘situated policy’ support in challenging ‘the traditional binary distinctions between top down and bottom up governance and instead draw […] attention to the importance of viewing policy-making as a horizontal, dynamic and relational process involving multiple agents, with different perspectives, areas of skill, knowledge and interests’ (Gilmore, et al., 2019, p. 266)? ‘Situated policy’ might indicate a way of building shared ideas and action in ways that nevertheless do not deny the political ontology of policy (on behalf of, in advance, to direct others’ actions). Rather ‘situated policy’ might work to foreground the ways in which the visions of policy are made up and constructed from a particular standpoint, through particular practices that are endlessly leaky and which are themselves also local and will always meet other ‘locals’ that are working with different political ontologies as policy seeks to become lived, enacted and practised.

Heritage: Scales of World, National and Local Heritage

Heritage designation is a process by which an object, building, site or practice is listed or scheduled as being of significance. There is therefore no question that heritage designation is a political form that reflects Harney and Moten’s definition of policy. Heritage policy seeks to tell us what matters and to constrain future actions by governing how the heritage in question can change. A major intervention in heritage policy and practice from Critical Heritage Studies has been to reveal how attempts to see heritage as consensual and aesthetic are ‘authorized’ through professional discourse. ‘Authorized heritage discourse’ has been diagnosed as privileging ‘monumentality and grand scale, innate artefact/site significance tied to time depth, scientific/aesthetic expert judgement, social consensus and nation building’ (Smith, 2006, p. 11). It has also been widely noted that these ideas of significance and importance are articulated through the policy designation of geographic scales—such as ‘national heritage’ and ‘world heritage’ (Macdonald, 2003, p. 2; Mason, 2013, p. 46; Daugsbjerg & Fibiger, 2011).

Tensions between world and national designations and local life are very well documented. In the research literature there are rich accounts of nationally designated heritage or UNESCO World Heritage sites misrecognising heritage as aesthetic or as a primarily material form rather than recognising practices and ways of life (Hertzfeld, 1991, 2016). Accounts also show the ways in which, rather than nourishing the local culture that produced the heritage so designated, the effects of heritage designation can constrain and, in the more egregious examples, displace local people, leading to contestations of various kinds (Hertzfeld, 2016; Meskell, 2010, 2018). In terms of UK heritage—our focus here—there are many examples of complex ownership and governance arrangements where national heritage is owned and managed nationally, yet is still bound up in local planning considerations and where the reasons something might be seen as nationally significant are not the same as the reasons something might be valued locally (Smith & Waterton, 2009).

It is these tensions that I will follow out in this article, de-black boxing national heritage designation, showing the particular ways in which ‘heritage’ is ‘local at all points’ (Latour, 1993, p. 117) and suggesting a situated approach to heritage policy and, beyond that, to policy more generally. Part of what I will do here is link the growing interest in expanding ontologies for heritage—that have been mobilised in order to challenge nature-culture binaries (Harrison, 2015, 2018), to reimagine preservation as curating decay or loss (DeSilvey, 2017) or to cultivate alternative temporalities and materialities of heritage (Harrison & Sterling, 2020)—to the question of the kinds of politics heritage needs. I will explore whether a term such as ‘situated policy’ might offer a way of approaching the connections between the ‘policy political ontology’ of national and world designations of heritage and the myriad political ontologies that are at work in everyday life.

A Motte in England

To experiment with the analytical potential offered by situated policy, I will work with a motte, once part of a castle, known as Clifford’s Tower.Footnote 1

Clifford’s Tower is in York, in the north of England. What Clifford’s Tower ‘is’ has long been, and remains, contested. Seen through different eyes Clifford’s Tower is ‘all that remains of York Castle built by William the Conqueror’, has ‘stunning panoramic views over Old York’ (English Heritage, ‘Clifford’s Tower Revealed’), is a site remembered through a kinah, a lamentation recited at Tisha B’va to remember the massacre of York Jewish community 1190 (Rosenfeld, 1965), is an aesthetic symbol of the city as produced through the brush of L.S. Lowry (Lowry, 1952), a place to watch the sunrise on new year’s day or is adjacent to where you park your car.

Clifford’s Tower is managed by English Heritage. English Heritage had emerged from government in 1983 as an arm’s-length body which combined management of the properties and sites with statutory roles relating to designation (scheduling of ancient monuments and listing of buildings) and planning advice (Thurley, 2013, pp. 25, 251). In 2013 the then Culture Secretary Maria Miller set out a new direction for English Heritage which split the different functions and instituted an English Heritage charity which would look after the National Heritage Collection properties and sites, with the statutory functions being assigned to a new organisation called Historic England. The English Heritage charity was to be supported on its way with £85 million public money for funding ‘vital conservation work at our most vulnerable sites across the country and much needed improvements to our visitor facilities’ (English Heritage, ‘English Heritage has Changed; DCMS/Miller, 6th December 2013). A stated goal was to ensure English Heritage is ‘financially independent by 2022/23’ (English Heritage, Our Priorities’).

An early response to this policy direction was to do ‘much needed improvements to […] visitor facilities’ at Clifford’s Tower and specifically to site a visitor centre in the Tower’s motte. The visitor centre, to be paid for out of Miller’s £85 million initiative, would include ‘visitor facilities, i.e. interpretation, WCs, staff facilities, storage, membership and ticketing’ (CYC Planning Committee, 2016, 4.16). The plans for the visitor centre were passed by the City of York Council Planning Committee on 27 October 2016.

What then followed was a significant uproar. The main objections related to the impact the visitor centre would have on the appearance of the motte. The formation of the Not in the Motte Campaign Group led to a Judicial Review and supported by a petition signed by 3748 and crowdfunding which raised £27322 (Not in the Motte Campaign, 2016, 2017). The Judicial Review ruled in favour of English Heritage (Hayes v City of York Council [2017] EWHC 1374) but nevertheless English Heritage withdrew their plans for the visitor centre (Laycock, 2018) due to the local opposition and has since shaped alternative approaches to the internal and external conservation of the tower and to welcoming visitors.

This brief sketch indicates a wide variety of policy and governance mechanisms at play, from national government policy, national law related to scheduling and listing, national planning law in the form of National Planning Policy Framework (2012), local authority executive decision making and Planning Committees and the national mechanism of Judicial Review. It also indicates the politics of contest, of activism and of crowdfunding. At the very minimum it indicates the difficulty of setting a direction in abstract and expecting it to hold when it meets the ground.

‘Local at all points’ (Latour, 1993, p. 117)

In the case of Clifford’s Tower there were a variety of ‘nationals’ at work, from the national organisation English Heritage that was being formed in 2013 to the funding being made available for this transition and to the legislative frameworks that designated the site as a scheduled monument.

Bruno Latour has made a series of interventions over the years to shift the assumptions around scale, including challenging the idea that the national is necessarily bigger than the local, in order to argue that everything is ‘local at all points’ (1993, p. 117). Speaking of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Latour argues for the localisation of the global, to make it specific, to trace how it is made up and to locate where it happens (2005, pp. 173–4):

…whenever anyone speaks of a ‘system’, a ‘global feature’, a ‘structure’, a ‘society’, an ‘empire’, a world ‘economy’, an ‘organization’, the first ANT reflex should be to ask: ‘In which building? In which bureau? Through which corridor is it accessible? Which colleagues has it been read to? How has it been complied?’ (2005, p. 183)

Writing with Michel Callon, Latour argues that no entity is in advance bigger or smaller than any other. What makes an entity such as English Heritage bigger than a community heritage group is its ability—always uncertain—to enrol and contain other people, ideas, feelings, buildings and money:

A difference in relative size is obtained when a micro-actor can, in addition to enlisting bodies, also enlist the greatest number of durable materials. He or she thus creates greatness and longevity making others small and provincial in comparison. (Callon & Latour, 1981, p. 284)

As an entity changes in size these enlisted materials are then put, Callon and Latour argue, in ‘black boxes’ with the hope that the connections no longer need to be examined: ‘The more elements one can place in black boxes—modes of thought, habits, forces and objects—the broader the constructions that can be raised’ (Callon & Latour, 1981, p. 285). The aim is that these macro actors standing on their black boxes ‘do not have to negotiate with equal intensity everything’ (Callon & Latour, 1981, p. 285). They can take things for granted, using the abstractions they have built, and move on to other matters.

Yet these boxes are always ‘leaky’. The national is always being produced somewhere local, a national-local which acts as if it isn’t local. Until, that is, the leaky boxes of the ‘national’ can no longer be shut. This includes the inability to sustain into practice a policy vision produced elsewhere, as happened with English Heritage and the plans for Clifford’s Tower Visitor Centre.

Legitimacy and Scale

The dispute of 2016–2017 was unfortunate because it was clear from their published priorities that English Heritage saw new relationships with people as necessary in achieving the goal of becoming financially independent. Alongside ‘inspiration’, ‘conservation’ and ‘financial sustainability’, English Heritage stated ‘involvement’ as a key priority area: ‘We’ll find new ways to involve more people in our work. Our heritage is for everyone and people are keen to participate in protecting and illuminating it’ (English Heritage 2016 ‘Our Priorities’). If looked at from a distance everyone involved—English Heritage, the councillors on the planning committee and the activists—shared a fundamental desire: to involve people in the sustainability of Clifford’s Tower. Yet how people and sustainability might be combined was imagined in diverse ways. These differences reveal quite different mobilisations of legitimacy, scale and abstraction and contrasting political ontologies. There was little agreement on what Clifford’s Tower was, where it was, what the ‘public’ is, what ‘harm’ might be or what might make any decision legitimate.

In 1915 Clifford’s Tower was incorporated into the then still emerging idea of national heritage when it was ‘taken into state guardianship’ to be then managed via the Office of Works and Public Buildings (Thurley, 2013). Since 1954 it has been registered in the National List for England as ‘Grade 1’ and as a ‘scheduled monument’ (Historic England, ‘Clifford’s Tower’). There are very strict restrictions on developing Grade 1 listed building and scheduled monuments (NPPF, 132, p. 31) and it is advised that ‘substantial harm […] should be wholly exceptional’ (NPPF, 132, p. 31). While it is a central concept in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), ‘harm’ is contingent on ‘significance’. Significance is defined as ‘the value of a heritage asset to this and future generations because of its heritage interest’ (NPPF, Glossary, p. 56). The first task for English Heritage in securing planning permission was to prove that there was no substantial harm. The National Planning Policy Framework states that if there is harm to significance then it can potentially be justified, but only in terms of a second contingent term, that of ‘public benefit’ (NPPF 133, p. 31).

Oddly, given its crucial contingent importance in the NPPF, ‘public benefit’ does not appear in the glossary and no other definitional help is given elsewhere in the framework. On their website Historic England, as the statutory advice body, do offer some additional interpretive work on ‘public benefit’ stating: ‘Public benefits in this sense will most likely be the fulfilment of one or more of the objectives of sustainable development as set out in the NPPF, provided the benefits will ensure for the wider community and not just for private individuals or corporations’ (Historic England online, ‘NPPF’). Yet what is clear is that ‘public benefit’ relies on the classic formulation of ‘on behalf of’ a wider common good and relies on local planning authorities to interpret what ‘public benefit’ might be.

As such at stake in the contest over Clifford Tower—via the nebulous ideas of ‘public benefit’—was a question of who it was for. In the case being made by English Heritage and in the arguments put forward by protestors, different constituencies were produced and enrolled: visitors, ‘local residents’, those who see it from the street, publics who might benefit and future generations. English Heritage advanced their case for the visitors’ centre, through a very specific reading of ‘public benefit’. The English Heritage chain of logic runs that more people paying to visit and more people becoming members of English Heritage for repeat visits will ultimately secure the sustainability of Clifford’s Tower and other properties for future generations. This economic logic worked to politically justify both the short-term public investment of the £85 million promised by Maria Miller but also, in effect, the overarching plans for disinvestment and reduction in public funding. The English Heritage argument sought to lock down the meaning of ‘public benefit’ as that secured via people as paying visitors (and effectively as consumers) in order to sustain Clifford’s Tower for future generations and, through this, the new charity of English Heritage as the legitimate producers of ‘public benefit’. From there it is not much of a leap to simply see ‘public benefit’ as being delivered through the visitors’ centre and, in the terms of planning policy, as justifying any perceived harm.

Yet ‘public benefit’ had a different set of meanings in the variety of speeches and statements from protestors. The protesters asserted various forms of ownership over Clifford’s Tower. For York’s Member of Parliament Racheal Maskell, Clifford’s Tower ‘belong[s] to the people of York’, going on to say ‘nobody has a jurisdiction over what is yours, yours to maintain for future generations’. In this statement to the Not in the Motte rally, Maskell combined both rights over and responsibilities for, a combination of ownership and custodianship. This sense of a right and responsibility was echoed by the local Councillor who initiated the campaign:

I am passionate that we have to try and come up with the best answer, that this building suggested is the wrong building in the wrong place. We need to get the right building in the right place and that should be our objective. We have a focus on the Judicial Review, focus on winning it, looking beyond that we need to be ambitious and come up with an ambitious plan for our very beautiful Eye of York area. (Not in the Motte rally, 10th March 2017)

‘We’, ‘your’, ‘people of York’ were convened by the protestors as the key constituencies for and actors within the political system of decision making of Clifford’s Tower. Yet how this constituency was connected to change—the desired outcome—was even more variously imagined. In different speeches at the rally quite different intensities of agency were imagined, for some participation was in the mode of ‘have your say’ and ‘get your voice heard’ where it was the politicians/the council/English Heritage who were positioned as the ones who need ‘to act on the will of the people’ or ‘do your bidding’. For others there was a clearer sense of community-led agency, ‘we need to be ambitious and come up with an ambitious plan’. Though not explicitly engaged with the contingent idea of ‘public benefit’ in the NPPF, the different speeches at the Not in the Motte rally provided alternative claims to what this term might mean.

Yet in the different political loops that interpreted harm and public benefit differently, something else was at stake. The language of Historic England designation asserts ideas of ‘national significance’, just as UNESCO has an international role to designate ‘world heritage’ (UNESCO). As noted above, in heritage designation there is a conceptual conflation between scales of value and geographic scale: heritage that is more important is seen as ‘world’ or ‘national’ and less important heritage is seen as ‘local’. This scaling up also underpins constituencies. ‘Humanity’, ‘public’, ‘everyone’ are imaginaries associated with world or national heritage in contrast to ‘community’ which is associated with local heritage. In the political loop traced by English Heritage the nationally significance heritage is ‘for the nation’ sustained via the public specifically as visitors who will economically support Clifford’s Tower for ‘future generations’. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has noted scaled-up claims of significance, geography and constituency tend to concentrate power in professional hands (2006, p. 20). The claim to significance, nation and ‘the public’ in this case is meant to secure the ability for English Heritage to act, to become a charity, to build a visitor centre in the motte and to justify both their role and implicitly justify the government disinvestment.

While the formation of a ‘people of York’ constituency was not voiced in one way but many by the protesters, this idea of constituency did not simply contest the visitor centre. By challenging the political work done by the abstraction of the idea of ‘public’, protesters were also contesting the idea of the abstraction of ‘national heritage’. In other words, the campaign prompted a sense that what matters about Clifford’s Tower was not that it was of national significance but that it was here, in this place and that the ‘public’ need not be an abstract concept or manifested only as ‘visitors’ but as particular people, present now and invested long-term in the future of the area.

Haraway and ‘situatedness’

The view from ‘the national’ is a version of what Donna Haraway called the ‘god trick’, ‘a from nowhere[…] of seeing everything from nowhere’ (1988, p. 581). As part of her ‘argument against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims’, Haraway argues for ‘situated and embodied knowledges’ (1988, p. 589). In thinking about the richer meaning of the local—not only as geography—but as a certain kind of epistemological and political commitment to particularity, Haraway offers us this: ‘Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular’ (1988, p. 590). Part of what being ‘somewhere in particular’ offers for Haraway is accountability, ‘one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement. Vision is always a question of the power to see-and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices. With whose blood were my eyes crafted?’ (1988, p. 585).

It is not hard to see a version of Haraway’s ‘god trick’ at work in the political ontology of policy and in particular the government policy to create English Heritage, to invest public money to seek long-term economic sustainability through greater numbers of fee-paying visitors. As this policy vision met NPPF and planning law, it replied upon a number of enrolments—not least its definition of ‘public benefit’—being safely stored in the black boxes of abstraction. When these black boxes started to leak—as they did in contact with the protesters—there was initially no modest or locally accountable way of the policy vision adjusting to recognise its own situatedness.

Haraway develops the idea of accountability in terms which sees the local-global not as ‘dichotomy’ but as ‘resonance’ in a kind of force field of power and difference, drawing attention to ‘nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning’ (1988, p. 588). For English Heritage what was initially a top-down policy directive became horizontally caught in a contested field of motivation and meaning. What this ultimately meant was that as English Heritage ‘relocated vantage point’ from national policy to implementation they had to ‘become accountable for that movement’ and deal in particular ways with the different ‘nodes’, ‘inflections in orientations’ and differences ‘in material-semiotic fields of meaning’ that were active at Clifford’s Tower.

Multiple Clifford's Towers

To return to Clifford’s Tower in 2016, everyone involved agreed Clifford’s Tower was ‘significant’, yet it became clear that they did not agree over the nature of Clifford’s Tower significance or, really, the nature of ‘significance’. More fundamentally, they did not agree on the kind of entity that Clifford’s Tower was. While the key events that made up its timeline on the English Heritage website were not contested and often reinforced by protesters, there were quite different ‘Clifford’s Towers’ at play in the dispute. These different realities, these different Clifford’s Towers, enabled the divergent mobilisations of ‘significance’, ‘harm’ and ‘public benefit’ and therefore underpinned the different mobilisations of legitimacy and of scale introduced above.

In the City of York Council Planning Committee discussion on 27 October 2016 it became very clear that people who live in York only very rarely visit Clifford’s Tower. They pass it all the time. They catch glimpses of it. They use it to orientate themselves. They park next to it. They get drunk and scramble up the sides of the motte. But they rarely go inside it. As a local website York Stories noted, ‘Most of us appreciate the building from street level, down below, looking up […] I’ve been trying to recall if I’ve ever been inside. If I have, it was many years ago and I don’t remember it’ (York Stories, 2016). At the planning committee, Councillor after Councillor—in slightly confessional tones—admitted they’d either never been up or only once or twice or not since they were a child. When the ‘Not in the Motte’ rally on the 10th March 2017 was held on the grassy roundabout which marks the Eye of York, the speakers addressing the crowd with the part of the motte slated for development for the visitor centre clearly visible behind them. The motte from the outside was the point.

Annemarie Mol has argued that ‘reality is multiple’ (Mol, 2002, p. 77). Not just that there are different perspectives or standpoints but different realities, as multiple ‘ontologies’. In recognition of the multiple nature of realities, Annemarie Mol calls for an ‘ontological politics’, using ‘political’ to indicate that realities are ‘open and contested’ and that this requires different metaphors, not ‘perspective and construction, but rather those of intervention and performance’, which, she argues, ‘suggest a reality that is done and enacted rather than observed’ (2002, p. 77). As this suggests, the elaboration of multiple ontologies emphasises the active and productive role of anyone ‘describing’ in the realities being enacted.

Throughout the dispute, a number of images became part of enacting these different Clifford’s Towers. A key image for the protestors was a painting by L.S. Lowry which had been commissioned by York Art Gallery’s curator Hans Hess in 1952 (Lowry, 1952; Fig. 4.1).). It depicts Clifford’s Tower as it was in the 1950s and roughly as it still looked in 2016 and 2017. As the Councillor who initiated and has led the campaign against the visitors’ centre put it: ‘[L.S.] Lowry—and a whole series of artists—describe this beautiful asset of our city. […] Clifford’s Tower and the mound are truly iconic’ (CYC Planning Committee, 2016, 4.16). Often in reference to this Lowry image, the visitors’ centre in the motte was described by protesters variously as ‘in the wrong place’, ‘an act of vandalism’, ‘a bad joke’, ‘an act of sacrilege’ and, viscerally, as ‘gouging’ (Not in the Motte rally, 10th March 2017).

Fig. 4.1
A painting of Clifford’s Tower. The tower is on a hill, a narrow path on the hill leads towards it. A staircase is at the right end of the hill. There are few people on the path near the hill at the right.

Clifford’s Tower, York. L.S. Lowry, 1952. Copyright: The Estate of L.S. Lowry. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2022

Full size image

Yet a series of other images were published on the English Heritage website (English Heritage Online ‘Clifford’s Tower Revealed’) and other images also starting to circulate on websites and social media (Fig. 4.2). These drawings, paintings and photographs showed just how often the motte had been changed over the last 300 years including a spiral path up the motte in the mid-eighteenth century and as a wooded gothic site for picnics in 1820s (York Stories, 2016). Most powerfully two photographs were enrolled, both showing Clifford’s Tower as it was between 1835 and 1934 (Fig. 4.1 City of York Council / Explore York Libraries and Archives Mutual Ltd (c1930) Asset ID: 1003529 and Asset ID: 1003483). During this period, there was a large wall around the bottom of the motte to aid movement around what was then a large prison area, itself encased with large walls. The motte as it looked in 2016 and 2017 and as it broadly looked in the Lowry painting was constructed after 1934.

Fig. 4.2
A photo of Clifford’s Tower. It is on the hill, and a wall surrounds the hill. There are many trees on the hill.

Clifford’s Tower in the 1870s. This was one of many similar images that circulated indicating that Clifford’s Tower had not always looked the way it looks in the L.S. Lowry painting of 1952. Copyright: York Explore Libraries and Archives

Full size image

The photographs of Clifford’s Tower with a wall around the base of the motte were significant in the English Heritage visitor centre design. The visitor centre was to come to a third of the height of the motte. This was seen as having benefits in terms of wayfinding and increasing access by staging the assent up the stairs. But it also mirrored the height of the 1835–1934 wall:

As the picture shows, the section of the mound where our new visitor centre will nestle is a relatively recent addition, dating from 1935. We will not be harming any archaeology by installing the visitor centre. Instead, we will be revealing the 19th century wall from the tower’s time as the County Gaol. (English Heritage, ‘Clifford’s Tower Revealed’)

As is usual before a planning committee meeting, there had been a site visit for the Councillors to view the plans in situ. Many of the councillors who went on the site visit mentioned how important this was to their decision making. They had been shown the images. They understood that ‘Clifford’s Tower’ was not fixed and unchanging. Additionally, through being there they had been interpellated, not in their usual guise as passers-by, but as visitors to the inside. They had been taken up and shown the view over York. They had been shown the lack of space for visitor facilities inside the tower itself. The councillors made the initial planning decision, having become inducted into a longer view, and they had experienced being a visitor rather than a passer-by. The councillors of the City of York Council Planning Committee made the planning decision based on a different Clifford’s Tower to that of the protestors.

If there was an ontological dispute over whether Clifford’s Tower was the inside or the outside and whether constant change of a site over time was a legitimate basis for further change, there was also an equally significant dispute about where Clifford’s Tower was. Clifford’s Tower is often described as a Norman motte-and-bailey castle first built by William the Conqueror. The term bailey describes a large walled area, enclosed by a water filled moat. Along with rebuilding of a wooden tower burnt down during the riots that led to the 1190 massacre of York’s Jewish community, in 1312 towers and more earth works were added to reinforce the bailey. The areas of the bailey became roughly the area of the Prison between 1835.

The question of the bailey was used by protesters to expand where Clifford’s Tower is and might be as a way of suggesting that the visitor centre need not be in the motte itself but could potentially be sited elsewhere. For example, the then Chair of York Archaeology and History Association suggested it could be sited in the now car park where the gatehouse of the bailey used to be (Not in the Motte rally, 10th March 2017). While the issue of land ownership was argued to prohibit any alternative siting of the visitor centre, the question of an alternative siting was regularly raised by a number of councillors and protesters. This was in large part because not long after the October Planning meeting the development of the whole Castle Gateway area was announced by the Council with the aim of transforming the carpark into public realm of some kind. The potential for a larger spatial scope—seeing Clifford’s Tower as a motte in the context of the bailey—was also supported by different senses of time. For the protesters the visitor centre was ‘premature’, ‘let’s wait and do it properly’, said another (Not in the Motte, 10 March 2017).

The time sense of the protesters was in stark contrast to the way the idea of the time-limited government investment had created a path dependency in the Council planning committee meeting: ‘we can’t expect English Heritage to wait until we get our act together’, ‘things move slowly in York’, ‘let’s get on with it’ and the ‘time factor is against us’ (CYC Planning Committee 27th October 2016). The location of significance on the inside of Clifford’s Tower and looking out from Clifford’s Tower had the effect of securing a property threshold and securing an easily managed point of sale. When read in the political loop generated by English Heritage, for ‘public benefit’ to be ‘public benefit’ it needed to pass over the threshold of the visitor centre door. It was crucially this question of timing—the idea that with Miller’s disinvestment came a time-bound investment opportunity—which required English Heritage to enact a number of ontological moves. For them to act immediately, Clifford’s Tower needed to be contained to the motte, had to be changing over time, and be from the inside and about views over the city. The protestors ‘Clifford’s Tower’ was a different thing all together.

Situated Policy in an Expanded Ontology

National policy—as we have seen—works through a series of abstractions and assumptions about cause and effect. It makes a claim that it is bigger, more significant, more important and seeks to secure this abstraction through the other abstractions such as the ‘public’ and ‘public benefit’. Yet in the case of Clifford’s Tower when these abstractions of ‘national’ and ‘public’ met the local—even when they were ontologically embedded in realities of government funding, of ‘inside’, of threshold and of urgency—they failed to hold.

Latour and Haraway read alongside each other offer a series of conceptual resources for thinking policy as ‘local policy’ and more specifically as ‘situated policy’. The first being that all policies—regardless of what it might claimiarelocal in the sense that it is being produced in a certain place and from a particular set of contingencies. National agencies seek to be national through building themselves up, making enrolments of people, buildings and ideas so they can stand on black boxes. But, of course, these black boxes leak when confronted with local circumstances where the abstractions crafted cannot be sustained. The Clifford’s Tower example shows how, in seeking to secure national agency for the new English Heritage organisation, the local and the particular needed to be enacted. The materiality of the inside, the boundary of entry and point of sale and a temporality of urgency were all need to support the abstract claims to ‘public benefit’.

Yet what was not successfully local was the initial inability of English Heritage or the councillors from the planning committee to also deal with alternative political ontologies. The alternative Clifford’s Towers of the protesters included the outside of Clifford’s Tower, it was focused on what Clifford’s Tower looks like to a passer-by, it was concerned with the whole of Castle and Eye of York area and it was shaped by the desire to take time to make the right decision. During the dispute there were both different Clifford’s Towers and different approaches to time and expediency at stake.

The dispute over the Clifford’s Tower visitor centre in 2016–2017 indicates the ways in which ‘situated policy’ might guide a fuller recognition of the material and social particularity of any national initiative. A situated policy might be one that still carries with it connotations of policy in the sense of Harney and Moten, the desire to guide others action elsewhere—such as is inevitably contained within national or world designation of heritage. However, what might make policy situated is the recognition that any policy desire will always be and become explicitly localised. A policy that is conducted as ‘situated policy’ would understand that it has been produced in a ‘local’ of national organisations and legislative organs and that, to become legitimate, it will need to be reworked and given meaning and life in the multiple locals of place and communities of interest and care. In this way policy that is situated would know its own particularity (that it has been produced somewhere) and knows that it will always need to navigate many heterogenous and multiple views to have effect. Situated policy would know it needs to de-Black Box itself as it becomes implemented. Accountability and legitimacy in situated policy—to return to Haraway’s terms—would, therefore, come from this local work of building resonance between the different locals of national agencies and their operational abstractions (such as significance) and what is happening on the ground. In these ways, thinking of policy as ‘situated policy’ retains the political desire to set a direction in advance, all the while actively creating the conditions for something else to emerge.