UK Confirms It Has Too Many Landmarks to List Conveniently; Stonehenge Alone Raises Questions Science Has Not Answered in 5,000 Years; Everybody Seems Fine With This

Nation With 33 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 400,000 Listed Buildings, and a Medieval Castle in Almost Every County Asks Visitors to Please Not Touch Anything

Welcome to Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — the satirical heritage guide to a country that has been building remarkable things for five thousand years and has run out of room to put them.

The United Kingdom has 33 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, approximately 400,000 listed buildings, over 6,000 scheduled ancient monuments, approximately 1,500 registered parks and gardens, and Stonehenge, which is in a category of its own because nobody is entirely certain what category it belongs in. This density of heritage — the consequence of five thousand years of continuous habitation, several waves of conquest and construction, and a Victorian preservation movement that decided to keep rather than demolish things that previous centuries had simply built on top of — produces the specific tourist experience of walking through a British city and encountering, around a corner you were not expecting, something that has been standing since 1642 next to something built in 2019, both occupied and both operational. It is the most compressed architectural history available anywhere on Earth and it is, by most measures, completely overwhelming if you try to approach it systematically.

Stonehenge: Still Mysterious After 5,000 Years; English Heritage Respectfully Requests That You Stay Behind the Rope

Stonehenge is a stone circle on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, constructed in phases between approximately 3000 and 1500 BCE by people whose specific intentions historians describe as “unclear,” “contested,” and “the subject of ongoing research,” which is the academic community’s way of saying “we genuinely do not know and the people who built it are unavailable to clarify.” The largest stones weighed up to twenty-five tonnes and were transported approximately 200 miles from Wales using methods that the engineering community describes as “impressive” and “not fully understood.” The resulting structure has stood for five thousand years, which is longer than the Roman Empire, Christianity, Islam, and most of the world’s currently operating governments, all of which have had opinions about it. English Heritage now manages Stonehenge, sells admission tickets, and maintains the rope beyond which visitors cannot go, because five thousand years of survival followed by being touched by 1.5 million tourists annually is the specific threat that the rope exists to address. English Heritage’s Stonehenge page covers visiting, including the summer solstice access when the rope is temporarily removed.

London’s Landmarks: The City as a Three-Dimensional History Textbook That Also Charges Admission

London contains so many landmarks that the city has had to develop a specific vocabulary for managing visitor expectations. “Free entry” (the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the V&A, the Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery): these are world-class institutions whose free admission is the most extraordinary act of cultural generosity in international tourism and which are consistently undervalued because they don’t cost anything, which is a psychological quirk of pricing that London’s cultural sector politely accepts. “Paid entry” (the Tower of London, Kew Gardens, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Shard): these are genuinely worth paying for, and the prices, while not trivial, are lower per square metre of astonishing heritage than almost any comparable experience in Paris, Rome, or New York. “On the street for free” (Buckingham Palace exterior, St Paul’s exterior, the Houses of Parliament exterior, Tower Bridge from either bank): some of London’s most photographed landmarks cost nothing to look at, which is either a gift to visitors or evidence that looking is the appropriate relationship with a building that has been there for three hundred years and has seen everything. For satirical UK heritage journalism, visit The London Prat.

More satire: NewsThump | The Daily Mash

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

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