A crisis too big to waste

Learning from the past will ease our way into the future. So to mark CABE’s 10th anniversary, we invited Professor Simon Schama to talk about what history can teach us from national responses to austerity.

St Pancras station. © Aardvark / Alamy

His inspiring lecture, laced with historical examples, showed how crises can provide opportunities for unpredicted improvements to the public realm.

The financial crash of 1825, uncannily like our own in so many ways, brought about a big shift in social vision and priorities, but not a retreat.

Money was diverted out of a speculative building boom and into new sewer systems to combat the cholera epidemic, and into better gas lighting and new streets in poverty stricken districts. The campaign to keep London’s Hampstead Heath open began in earnest in 1829, right in the midst of multiple crises.

With his speech, Professor Schama is provoking a public discussion about the relationship between investment and social result. He reflects on how the contemporary financial crisis, due partly to a cult of individual self-enrichment, can be flipped to develop a culture of social community. He suggests we would “cut off our nose to spite our face” by starving funding for parks and public projects and public places.

Professor Schama illustrates the value of working with sites of memory and earlier use, giving them a new life. The restoration of places like St Pancras and Tate Modern has generated a new social energy as well as economic viability.

Read the full text of Simon Schama's lecture.