EACH SPRING, Sissinghurst clicks back into its public life. Before it opens to the public in March, there is a flurry of preparation. The garden beds are forked over, the lawns are given their first mow of the year. Paths are swept, the sign asking people not to tread on the flowers is wiped down and put out under the arch. The shop is restocked, the new restaurant staff are trained up in the arcane and complex systems of the kitchen and self-service counter, the warden has ensured that no tree is about to fall on any visitor, the stewards are asked to learn or re-learn about the contents of the rooms where they stand guard and the volunteers in the car park are trained in asking for the £2 parking fee. There is a sort of pre-party buzz, a place reawakening from its winter ease and privacy. It is a highly evolved and interlocking system, with over 200 people working here as permanent staff, seasonal staff or volunteers. You only have to walk around this preoccupied, busy place to see that changing it was never going to be a question of simply having an idea.
Throughout the spring of 2006, the meetings on the farm project rolled on as before. Meetings! I have never sat around so many tables in my life. Jonathan said he had never taken part in anything that had involved so much consultation since closing down a factory with a workforce of four hundred. From time to time, someone would voice the idealism of it all. Caroline Thackray, the Trust’s regional archaeologist, said that ‘The garden is there because the landscape is there. The setting is what lit up Vita’s mind.’ Sarah Roots, the Trust’s head of marketing in the south-east, told us all one day that ‘people should be walking through cowpats to get to the garden. They need to smell the farm as they go into the garden.’ Katrin Hochberg from the Soil Association said we should be ‘steered by a sense of community’, and Sally Bushell that we should try to feel we had ‘the freedom to experiment’.
The anxiety about change was never far away. I often felt I was trying to push a fat clay-mucky lump of otherness into the neat and productive workings of a clock. Ginny Coombes, the restaurant manager, was at full stretch, with 115,000 people coming through the restaurant over six months, a third of them in the six weeks between the Chelsea Flower Show and mid-July. The head gardener, Alexis Datta, although she said she was keen on the project overall, didn’t like the idea of vegetable-growing. ‘Commercial horticulture is not as pretty as what we’ve got now,’ she said at one meeting. ‘I would prefer grass. Horticulture won’t enhance the farm. I don’t like the idea of polytunnels. But I don’t want it looking deliberately old fashioned either. I don’t want to attract more people.’ She made a careful list of her worries: visitor numbers, housing the people who were coming to work here, buildings, where they were going to be built, water supply, car parking, the capacity of the lane, what it was all going to look like, the effect on the surroundings. ‘I feel we are rushing into it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to sound negative. I don’t really mind veg but I do mind the view from the top of the tower. And we don’t need any more people. When we had two hundred thousand people here every year at the beginning of the nineties it was wrecking the place. I just wish this was a smaller, less high-profile property.’ Had we, she asked, thought about squirrels in the new orchards? We were going to need netting, and what would that look like? There were lots of cherry growers around here anyway, so why grow more? Later she told me she was worried that some of the smaller fields I was advocating were going to look like ‘one of those privately owned stately homes where the owner is trying to get the punters in by having a few rare breeds in a little paddock’.
Difficulties clustered around the business questions. The NT likes to see a 40 per cent return on its restaurant turnover, the source of much of the money that funds their properties. Anything like that was looking very difficult under the new scheme. Could Sissinghurst be allowed, within the National Trust system, a special derogation so that it did not, at least for a year or two, have to generate quite such a high percentage of profit? That might be difficult, it was said, because other properties would complain.
Phil Stocker of the Soil Association produced some figures which laid out precisely what sort of farm resource the restaurant would need. The surprising fact to emerge was just how productive the land, even when managed on a low-intensity, organic basis, could actually be. The restaurant, with 115,000 customers a year, could be supplied from:
86 chickens laying eggs
2 dairy cows in milk at any one time
25 beef cattle
3 sows
a tenth of an acre of lettuce
half an acre of potatoes
a fifth of an acre of carrots
3 acres of wheat
The problem was not that Sissinghurst was too small; it was too big. But the economies of scale meant that a farm working with the quantities needed by a single restaurant would never be viable. A single sausage would cost ten pounds. The farm had to sell more elsewhere in order to reduce the cost of the produce sold to the restaurant to a reasonable price. To make the farm viable, it would also need to sell 48,000 eggs, 3400 kilograms of beef and 170 tons of grain. We all thought that much of this could go through a farm shop. But a farm shop with nothing but eggs, beef and flour would be a sorry thing. So most of the farm shop would have to be stocked from elsewhere, which would mean that the village shop in Sissinghurst would have a competitor on its doorstep, tails would be wagging dogs and a local crisis would erupt. I may have thought that what was needed at Sissinghurst was a little more connectedness. What each of these exercises revealed was the intricately knotted and knitted condition of life as it was.
We were confronting head on precisely the problems which had produced the sort of landscape from which small farms, and even mixed farms of any size, had largely disappeared. These intractable difficulties were what lay behind the erosion of the world I had known as a boy. On top of all this, there were deep suspicions from some parts of the Trust about the viability of an organic system. Some people thought organic farming was worse for the environment. The commercial arm said their customers were not interested in organic produce. In 2005 the Trust had sold a million pots of local jams and honey and it was clear from market research that most people thought the Trust was organic anyway. Wasn’t going organic in danger of putting the whole Sissinghurst scheme at risk? What was the point in upping the ante when so much else was uncertain? One member of the NT Regional Committee, an agricultural finance specialist, said ominously at one meeting that ‘The loss-making potential in horticulture and top fruit are both huge’. She spoke about ‘volatility in the markets’ and ‘hyper-wobbly figures for organic top fruit’. Her conclusion was that we needed ‘to interrogate the numbers’.
I was driven into paroxysms of frustration by all of this, but on the whole kept them to myself. My ideas would be no good if they did not fit real-world conditions. It was all very well recovering the atmosphere of medieval Sissinghurst, but what good was that if the modern world could not accommodate those ideals? These were real objections, not mere anxieties or neuroses. The Trust understood the virtues of what I was suggesting, but they didn’t want to end up looking stupid, and I had to understand that myself.
Early in June I went to a meeting held in London by the National Trust for all its donor families. It was a beautiful early summer morning when the sunlight stuck out from the side-streets in diagonal mote-filled slabs. We were to meet in Spencer House, the great eighteenth-century private palace in St James’s, restored by Jacob Rothschild. I walked there from the station through the richest streets in Europe. Swallows cruised the length of the tarmac and early white roses were in flower on the edge of the park.
Spencer House is in the part of London where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries every great family used to live, in a narrow street but with a façade looking over Green Park. It is like a palace in eighteenth-century Rome. A stone hallway. Upper-class men in soft, well-cut suits, their skin as pampered as the wool. Ties that start out at the horizontal buckle beyond the knot and dive for gold pins. Cufflinked cuffs, tugged and adjusted. Burnished, pointy, black lace-ups. The deepest level of the English establishment which, for all the changes of the last century, seems to be as established as it ever was. Some women in their own wool suits, sub-Chanel. Giant diamonds. A gathering of the most ancient of England. I talked to an old friend of my father’s, the woman with the most wonderful name in England: Mrs Horneyold Strickland. She had been having trouble with the Trust over the flag at Sizergh Castle in Cumbria. On a table were badges for everyone, a catalogue of the peerage and its wives, ranks of earls and viscounts, with their properties named beneath them, or to be exact their ex-properties, their ancestral places, which now belonged to the Trust. I had never seen so many titles gathered together. It looked like the Congress of Vienna or Agincourt. I pinned my badge on: ‘Adam Nicolson – Sissinghurst’.
The NT high-ups were there: Fiona Reynolds, the director-general; Sir William Proby, the chairman; Simon Murray, the director of operations; Sue Saville, our regional director. ‘I always introduce people at this thing,’ Sue said to me, ‘but they always know each other already. Freddy? He’s my mother’s second cousin. None of them have the faintest idea who we are.’ So, indeed, I met my first cousin once removed, John St Levan, who lives on St Michael’s Mount, a National Trust house in Cornwall. And my second cousin once removed, Robert Sackville West, my oldest friend, who lives at Knole, a National Trust house in Kent. A colonel of the Grenadiers asked me, ‘How long have you put up with the Trust?’ A couple of years, I said. ‘You wait,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long before you’re not quite as cheery.’ Coffee came round. Jacob Rothschild saw me. ‘How’s the scheme?’ Fine, I said. Paintings from the Italian Renaissance on the walls, a perfect private palace, like a hotel that wasn’t scuffed in the way of hotels. We sat on rows of little chairs in the great dining room. Robert and I were together in the front row, a wonderful team feeling to have him there. Simon Murray said the Trust wanted to delegate, to push decision-making down to the regions. Then the grumbling began.
The only reason these people were there is that they had been taxed into these chairs. The NT mechanism had provided them, or their fathers, with a way of continuing to stay in their houses, to pretend that the world remained as it was before 1911, before modern tax laws began to redistribute the extraordinary wealth this room had once represented. Now these dinosaur donors had the illusion of significance but not the substance or the power. The low whine of impotence came from the ranks behind me. The NT staff were hopeless because they were poorly paid. The NT was taking a purely commercial attitude with its estates and should understand something about communal coexistence. One famously cantankerous lady could barely contain her rage, about what was not clear. Someone asked how the Trust could think of buying new properties such as Tyntesfield, the huge Victorian country house near Bristol, when they couldn’t pay their property managers enough. Murray explained the difference between grant-funded capital expenditure and daily running costs.
It was a pitiable scene. What was intended, I suppose, as an airing of views, even a gesture by the Trust to show that the dinosaurs mattered, felt in the event like a demonstration of their irrelevance. The very meeting in this glamorous London palace set up the Trust as a large, powerful, centralised body, and the lords and ladies assembled in the room as an old, nostalgic and emasculated audience, saturated in self-pity. I thought, first, as I sat there, how much I would prefer to be at the National Trust table looking at us than in one of our little chairs looking up at them. But then I remembered that every occupant of every chair in that room had their own Sissinghurst, their own book like this one bundled up inside them, written or unwritten, thought or unthought, and that these thin, wheedling complaints were only the voices of attachment and the love of place somehow translated into the wrong tone and the wrong language. I wondered then whether the Trust’s relationship to its donors was correctly framed. There was so much buried passion in this room, but apparently so little engagement. It was framed as an opposition, but could it not be framed as a partnership? Perhaps these crusty men and women could become in effect ‘inheritance consultants’, the experts in buried meaning, in the folding of the past into the management of the future? If the Trust didn’t do that, the result was this: complaint, a jangled joylessness, the old, long-repeated idea that things weren’t what they used to be.
At lunch, on one side, I was next to a high-coloured lady with angry opinions and antediluvian views, loathing the Trust on class grounds, making no pretence that she didn’t, as she ate their lunch, and describing at length the ‘agonies’ of building an extension to her house. On the other side was Sarah Staniforth, the Trust’s Historic Properties director, wife of Jonathon Porritt. She talked about how houses had to be slept in if they were to be known. I talked to her about Gaston Bachelard and his idea that the purpose of a house was that it allowed one to dream in peace. If you got that right, everything else would be right. Maybe the tenancy of the Priest’s House at Sissinghurst, I said, might become the prize for an arts competition? A year’s tenancy with a poem or a painting as the rent? She wasn’t completely averse.
After lunch I talk to the Cornish colonel again. He and his brother had twinned estates. They were too rich to feel comfortable in the position they were in but not rich enough to do anything about it. It was clearly best either to be a Rothschild – with enough money to call the shots – or a Nicolson, with no money and happy in the end to receive whatever might be on offer.
Later that week, Sarah and I had what Claire Abery, the gardener, called our ‘famous day’. We invited a cluster of people to come to Sissinghurst to discuss the ideas we had been chewing over: garden designers, chefs, experts in retailing and restaurants, journalists interested in the new food culture, organic growers, people with a passion for the meaning of the landscape. It was in effect a company strategy day, an attempt to enthuse Sissinghurst and the people who work there with the sort of thinking which all these outsiders were dedicated to, and who in their different ways represented new attitudes to land, food, people and the connections between them. Was it naïve to think that Sissinghurst might take to their suggestions with alacrity? In retrospect, I think it might have been. People really don’t want to be told to do things differently, whoever is doing the telling.
The outsiders all gathered at Sissinghurst on a beautiful evening early in June to spend the night here and talk the following day. It was a strange summer. The irises and the roses were out at the same time, which was rare, playing havoc with the colour system in the garden. But the southern end of the White Garden was in full fiesta, the lovely white Sibirica irises, the white poppies, the little white rose like something from a Persian miniature all covered in bees. The orchard was thick with sorrel and buttercup-sprinkled grass.
Sarah had filled the house with flowers from Perch Hill, sweet-smelling stocks, the firework alliums called Schubertii, creamy speckled foxgloves, some crinkled Iceland poppies and dark purple columbines. The doors of the house were all open and the light came flooding into spaces that all winter and spring had been dark. Just to look at it filled my balloon of optimism. Surely, here, from this, people could find their way to a better future.
But Sissinghurst seems inseparable from anxiety. We had first the worries over the seating plan at dinner. The scheme was to surround each of the people who work here with the people who had come from outside, hopefully with inspiring ideas. Katrin Hochberg from the Soil Association was convinced that this was going to backfire. The people who work at Sissinghurst, she told me over the phone, were going to think, ‘What the hell is going on? Who are these people swinging in here telling us what to do?’ There was the danger that after so much careful build-up and so much consultation the thing would explode in acrimony and resentment. Then we heard that afternoon that one Sissinghurst employee had refused to come to dinner with us, in a tent we had put up in the garden, because her partner had not been asked. We reshuffled the places and waited for the others to arrive.
There were drinks under and on top of the Tower. Kent was looking as beautiful as the day my father had showed it all to the secretary of the National Trust forty years before. The Italian chef Antonio Carluccio and his wife Priscilla Conran were warmth and encouragement. Jo Fairley, who invented Green & Black chocolate, said I should have courage. I said I was overbrimming with it. Guy Watson, who runs the Riverford organic box scheme in Dorset, and Will Kendall, who made a national success of the Covent Garden Soup Company, both said, ‘It’s just so obvious. None of us can work out why we are even here. Why don’t they just do it?’ I told my old university friend, the writer and gardener Montagu Don, what they had said. He said everybody thought the same. Here was one of the central aspects of this story. An individual entrepreneur would feel in his bones that he should just do it. But somehow institutions can’t behave like that. They have to commission studies, articulate the opportunities and risks, weigh the strengths of an idea against its weaknesses and bring every aspect of a scheme into fully examined light. That, to me, and these friends of mine looked very like sclerosis, a furred and clogged decision-making system, when what was needed was simple, quick decisiveness. But I couldn’t avoid a disturbing thought: institutions may be unable just to do it, but institutions, mysteriously, are what do it more than anything else in the end. None of these famous media and business entrepreneurs had 3.5 million members behind them, but the National Trust did. What was the relationship between these things? Was the Trust slow to decide because it was big and old? Or was it big because it was slow? Had it lasted because it was slow and careful? Was there a relationship between the viscosity of institutions and the power they wield? And was this lack of spontaneity the reason they survived? Or was it just big-organisation small-c conservatism: we’ve always done it like this, so there is no reason to change?
I sat next to Fiona Reynolds and for the first time had a talk with her about the deeper motivation for these ideas. She told me how when she was at Cambridge she had been entranced by The Making of the English Landscape, the book by W. G. Hoskins that had invented the idea of landscape history. It was a book I had fallen in love with at exactly the same time. And then I talked to her about Sissinghurst, what we were trying to do. It was a chance to encourage people into a new way of seeing things, I said. She undoubtedly saw the Trust as an organisation for leading people a bit farther, for providing the enrichment that comes from beautiful places. She had spent four years sorting out the Trust’s finances and governance. Now, maybe, I said, was the point when something else could come to the front, when the Trust could be renewed as something that reconnected itself to other, newer, older, more inspiring ideas, where it wasn’t just a middle-class comfort zone. Meaning? she asked. Would she consider, for example, experimenting with Sissinghurst as a place in which financial targets set from elsewhere in the Trust might be suspended? Where we could look to set up a garden-farm-shop-restaurant system that focused more on the place’s own well-being than on the straightforward bottom line? Where a glowing ideal of a landscape and a life wasn’t hung up on gross profit margins? Her reaction to that was an ‘Mmm’, but with a rising inflection …
An unlikely analogy came to my mind. I had been sent to Hawaii by a magazine a few months before and seen there the wreck of the USS Arizona, one of the battleships sunk by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor, on which nearly 1200 sailors had died. You can stand on a kind of bridge built over the huge ghost presence of the ship lying just beneath the waters of the harbour. Every now and then a spot of oil floats up from the Arizona’s drowned engines and spreads in a rainbow disc across the surface of the harbour waters. It is like a soul welling up from the drowned depths, every minute or so, a slow breathing, the release of hidden memories. That, I said to Fiona, is exactly what these places should have too: a steady, present flowering from the depths, a gentle and profound emergence of the sort of meanings we all need to remember. How far is that from people’s usual idea of the National Trust? But I think she heard every word.
‘Would you mind if I said something?’ she said to me quietly, and stood up to make a speech about fertility and fecundity, how The Making of the English Landscape had meant so much to her, and how this here now was that landscape in the making, a reinfusion of life and purpose into an ancient frame. Everyone had always known that Sissinghurst had ‘an iconic status as a garden’. But this new idea had rediscovered its wholeness as a wider estate. There were clearly mechanical things to be done in the way it was farmed, ‘but what’s so exciting’, she said, ‘is the positive vision, for reuniting the estate in a way that is not only historically resonant but deeply contemporary – feeding into all our modern search for the local, for slow food and so on, all of which is part of tomorrow as well as our past’.
We had our long, enjoyable and sometimes slightly angry talking-shops in the sunshine the next day. Everyone agreed that there should be no hint of the farm being a demonstration farm, with signboards or the rest of it. It should simply function and be, remaining subsidiary to the garden. Its new fields and buildings should have understood the historic form here but not be a slavish copy of them. It needed to work. Tom Oliver of the Campagin to Protect Rural England argued for the landscape as a place of life and mobility, nothing should be tarted up, and the landscape designer Kim Wilkie said that ‘The aesthetic framework should be poetry not painting – not just a seen picture but a whole-body, all-senses experience’. Decisions about Sissinghurst should be made at Sissinghurst; the landscape identity would then emerge from the place itself. The farm should be brought in ‘peninsulas’ – Kim’s word – close up to the garden boundaries. The connection should be visceral and felt. The garden should never be brought into the farm. The farm should always be its own self-motivated place.
That was the easiest of the groups. Others, talking about the restaurant, found it more difficult to reach common ground. The real-food champion Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made an impassioned speech on behalf of authenticity and freshness. How do you really bring the landscape into the restaurant? How can you make it feel as if the food comes from here? But the task was to accommodate 115,000 visitors a year inside that real-food ideal. It could never be a River Café-style experience. You couldn’t have waitress service with such numbers. Food had to be collected from a counter and food sitting on a counter had to be different from food served on a plate. But lots could be done about the ambience. Herbs could be grown in pots outside the door. The veg garden should be beautiful and visitable. There could be outside seating in the summer. In winter there could be special game evenings. The chefs could be trained up to relish this river of produce streaming in from outside. Ginny Coombes said the excitement in the team out-weighed the anxiety. ‘But please let’s have some support.’ Stuart Richards, the big wheel in National Trust Enterprises, confirmed that Sissinghurst no longer needed to turn in a 40 per cent net margin as profit. Fiona Reynolds had told him that. The Trust had decided in other words that the landscape benefits of the idea were worth buying.
The Soil Association now had to pull together a model for the farm/restaurant/shop. In one version, the capital cost would be £330,000 but even after five years it would be still be losing £50,000 a year. In another, the investment required was £650,000 and was projected after five years to end up a mere £6000 in annual profit. Neither was ideal, but the Soil Association had been working to some exceptionally tough NT ceilings. No increase in revenue was to be allowed from an increase in the number of people who might want to visit this new farm. And because of the demands imposed by a National Trust environment – beautiful materials, elaborate approvals, sensitive surroundings – a cow shed that might have cost £100,000 on an ordinary farm would cost £200,000 here. Overall, the total investment, if you included the use of working capital, came to £1.2 million. I couldn’t quite tell if we were in cloud cuckoo land.
I went for magical walks that summer with the National Trust warden Peter Dear, a man still in his thirties, with whom I felt the closest possible identity of purpose and mind, and who knew more about the wild life of Sissinghurst than anyone else alive. He had made new ponds in which beetles and bugs proliferated. We scooped them out with nets. He guided me to a knowledge of the damselflies and dragonflies on a level I had never guessed at before: the Cinnabar moths and the four-spotted chaser, the black-tailed skimmer and the Beautiful Demoiselle, whose dazzling body Peter called ‘emerald blue’. He found a White Admiral on the marsh thistles, whose underwing was a rare and delicious creamy orange. He knew there were Purple Emperors in the wood, but they lived in the upper canopy of the oaks and so we never saw one. But he showed me where the trout were still hanging in sunlit pools in the Hammer Brook. He planned out, and would later plant, stake and fence with my whole family, a ring of twelve oaks in the field across the moat, as a memorial to my father. He wrangled with me as we walked through the shadowy thickness of the summer wood over the benefits and drawbacks of organic farming. He rigged up for me one evening a net of ropes – he climbs rocks in his spare time – in the oldest tree at Sissinghurst, a four-hundred-year-old oak pollard buried in the chestnut coppice, and I spent a day in that tree from dawn onwards, clipped to Peter’s webbing slings, enveloped first in the barrage of summer song, then drifting in the midge- and spider-thick world of a great silent tree, its skin of leaves a globe above me, while the pigeons walked about like beadles on the wood floor and treecreepers ran up the trunks, corkscrewing their way along one beetle-rich line after another. Black-and-white woodpeckers hammered crazily into the dry dead branches, unable to settle or decide. Squirrels skittered past without the first idea I was there, but still taut, quivering, looking over their shoulder. Rabbits played anxiously in the grassy open rides below: a second or two in one spot, a skip to the next. There was no ease in the wood. All life here flickered and jumped. I lay stretched out on the sloping branches of the oak in a world that knew nothing but tension. The great patience of the tree stood there in silence, an ideal nothing else could seem to manage.
I thought about what we had done in all our year of meetings and I knew that our solutions and suggestions only restated the problem: the beautiful idea looked as if it was too expensive. The application of real costings meant the world of Sissinghurst would remain diminished. The circle wasn’t square, and my instinct that we could do something new and good here was looking like an empty hope.
I was in Scotland when the answer came. It was towards the end of July. My mobile rang. Jonathan Light: ‘I just wanted to tell you the outcome of the Regional Planning Group’s meeting,’ he said.
Yes, I said.
‘The top and the bottom of it is that the Group are not going to recommend either of the schemes to the Regional Committee on the third of August.’ Sinking. ‘Yes,’ I said to him. ‘I thought that might be the direction you’d take. When I saw the £1.2 million low point.’ ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we might be able to salvage something – an orchard, some sheep and some new hedges, maybe some veg and chickens, and that would push Sissinghurst in the right direction, wouldn’t it?’
I put the phone down, devastated by the point we had reached. The idea I had floated a year before was straightforward enough: the landscape surrounding the garden at Sissinghurst could be made beautiful and more appropriate to the spirit of the place by using the farmland there to grow food for the tens of thousands of visitors who come to Sissinghurst each year. Mass-produced wheat and oilseed rape in a degraded farm landscape would be replaced by a detailed, various, mixed farm producing delicious, good food for 115,000 visitors each year.
Intuitively, viscerally, this felt right. It attended to the appetite for local food and real food, for a sense of authenticity in the landscape and the feeling that the best places are deeply fuelled by their own agendas, that they are richly themselves. The idea in its development had generated a great deal of tension but also some excitement and enthusiasm at Sissinghurst. It had become, to an extent, a shared view of how the future there might look. There was a lustre to it.
Now, at the end of all this, we had arrived at a rejection. Risk was the problem. The questions asked had defined the answers. It was as if the pilot of a plane, anxious about arriving at his destination, had loaded up with so much spare fuel that the plane had become too heavy to take off.
What it meant, though, was that the heart of the idea had been stripped out. Maybe there still would be some apple trees grown and chickens raised at Sissinghurst. But it felt as if a mediocrity filter had been applied. That it would be safer to supply food in vans from elsewhere. That the visitors could continue to be patronised, and that other unvisited farms could continue to provide the revenue on which the place relied. It was a victory of safety over imagination. That is why it was disappointing, because it set a frame of ordinariness for Sissinghurst. It didn’t feel like a missed opportunity; more like an opportunity carefully presented and wilfully denied.
I wrote an email to Jonathan, who was caught between fires and I knew was already looking for other ways forward.
There is a point at which carefulness becomes a figleaf for lack of enterprise. The greatest spur to success – and I mean success on a wider level than the financial bottom line – is the risk having been taken. Sue Saville has talked about the triple bottom line: money, conservation, social benefit. The planning group’s recommendation attends only to the first of these and even to that in a highly pre-defined way. A good idea has been skewered on a lack of entrepreneurial spirit.
In August 2006 the whole project looked like it was lying dead on the floor.