Beyond the Country House

Abstract

While many critics hold historic conservation or preservation in contempt for its complicity in gentrification, this article explores its continuing relevance as an aesthetic politics of everyday life. Interweaving vignettes taken from interviews with conservationists in London, the history of institutionalized heritage in Britain, as well as theories on aesthetics and everyday life in postmodern late capitalism, this article demonstrates the contradictory nature of conservation's aesthetic politics. Although conservationists normalize architectural and social histories, the author argues that they also mobilize a 'spatial politics of affect', appreciating the expressive, and potentially insurgent, power of material objects in the face of an increasingly banal everyday life under late capitalism. Finally, the author suggests that conservationists begin considering how Black and Asian Britons are injecting new spatial uses that offer new avenues for the relevance of conservation's aesthetic politics to Britain's increasingly culturally hybrid everyday life.