The Wall That Was Entered In A Register

AWhen the city of Halvenden began, in 2003, to keep a register of the painted walls inside its inner ring road, it counted one thousand two hundred and forty. A second survey in 2019 could locate three hundred and eleven of them. The disappearance caused no scandal at the time: the works had been made illegally, in materials chosen for speed rather than for permanence, by people who had generally expected them to be gone within a season. What has changed since the late 1990s is that municipalities across Europe have begun to list such walls, clean them and, in a few places, prosecute those who paint over them. The argument that followed is not about whether particular murals deserve keeping, but about whether the apparatus of heritage protection preserves an art form whose defining condition is that it can be lost, or quietly replaces it with something that merely resembles it.

BUrsula Basara, a conservation scientist at the Marchetti Institute, holds that protection does measurable work, and that the evidence lies in duration rather than in appearance. Between 2012 and 2022 her team followed the fate of some eleven hundred documented works in nine cities, rather less than half carrying a municipal listing. Listed walls were photographed in better condition at the end of the decade, with less fading and fewer overpaintings, but Basara regards this as the weaker of her two findings, since a wall selected for listing was likely to have been in good order to begin with. The figure she treats as decisive concerns survival: the median listed work was still legible eleven years after it was made, against three years for the unlisted. A difference in recorded condition may be an artefact of selection; a difference in how long a fragile object remains present at all suggests that something about its situation, and not merely its rating, has altered.

CHer explanation is deliberately mundane. A listing in itself is a line in a register; what it sometimes brings with it is a named custodian, a small maintenance fund and an owner who can be telephoned when a hoarding goes up. If that is the mechanism, works whose listing arrived attached to those things ought to outlast works listed on paper alone. Of the four hundred and eighty listed murals in her sample, the two hundred and seventy that had both a custodian and a maintenance budget accounted for the whole of the survival advantage; the remaining two hundred and ten lasted no longer than comparable unlisted work, and in four smaller towns they lasted slightly less. Basara therefore describes a listing as a receipt rather than a remedy: it records that somebody has accepted responsibility, and where nobody has, the document protects nothing.

DMarcus Debreu, a social anthropologist at the University of Ghent, does not dispute the survival figures; he asks what survives. Drawing on permit records and on interviews with two hundred and six painters in fifteen cities, he reports that in the six years after a district was designated, the proportion of new works made without permission fell from seventy-one per cent to twenty-four, while the average size of commissioned pieces roughly doubled. Protection, on this account, does not preserve a practice so much as domesticate it: what is conserved is the surface, and what is lost is the condition under which the surface was worth looking at. Debreu concedes two difficulties. His interviews reach painters who are still working, so those whose careers ended at designation are precisely the people missing from his sample. And in two of the fifteen cities, both places where the walls were vested in community trusts rather than in the council, unauthorised work continued at close to its former rate, an outcome his account does not predict.

EThe quarrel is made harder by the state of the record. Nothing was photographed systematically before somebody decided that these walls mattered, and the archives that do exist were assembled by enthusiasts who favoured large, legible, signed pieces over the scrawl around them, so the years that matter most are the years for which the evidence is thinnest and most skewed. Basara's unlisted comparison works are an attempt to get round this, and she accepts that they are imperfect, since a wall standing on the same street as a listed one may be treated more carefully by its owner. Debreu notes, uncomfortably for his own case, that the painters hardest to trace are those who never applied for a permit and never gave a name, so the practice he can document is the least clandestine part of it. What exasperates both is a habit neither has managed to dislodge: councils reporting the health of a mural district in photographs posted online, a figure that answers to a new cafe as readily as to a new wall.

FA settlement of a kind is taking shape, in which the two accounts answer different questions rather than compete. On whether listing keeps individual works in place, Basara's figures stand once her restriction about custodianship is granted, and Debreu does not contest them. On what listing does to the practice that produces such works, Debreu's permit records are the only series anybody has, and Basara treats the shift he describes as a matter for planning policy rather than a fault in her model. Neither has answered the question raised by the cameras: since 2018 most large works have been recorded photogrammetrically before they are lost, and it is not yet clear whether a district holding faultless images of its vanished walls will still trouble to keep the walls. What both reject is the assumption behind the first generation of schemes, that a wall entered in a register has thereby been saved.