What is heritage? When was it invented? What is its place in the world today? What\n\nis its place tomorrow?\nHeritage is all around us: millions belong to its organisations, tens of thousands\nvolunteer for it, and politicians pay lip service to it. When the Victorians began to employ\nthe term in something approaching the modern sense, they applied it to cathedrals,\ncastles, villages and certain landscapes. Since then a multiplicity of heritage labels\nhave arisen, cultural and commercial, tangible and intangible – for just as every era has\nits notion of heritage, so does every social group, and every generation.\nIn Heritage, James Stourton focuses on elements of our cultural and natural\nenvironment that have been deliberately preserved: the British countryside and national\nparks, buildings such as Blenheim Palace and Tattershall Castle, and the works of art\ninside them. He charts two heroic periods of conservation – the 1880s and the 1960s –\nand considers whether threats of wealth, rampant development and complacency are\nsimilar in the present day. Heritage is both a story of crisis and profound change in\npublic perception, and one of hope and regeneration.