Burning down the (Crooked) House
Coincidence, my dear Watson?
I'm angry. Yet again, another beautiful historic building was bought by developers, and coincidentally burned to the ground before it could be listed as eligible for government protection. This time, it was the fabulous Crooked House in Himley, England.
For a number of years I lived fairly close to this masterpiece of a public house with a wonky bar, although a lack of transportation in rural England meant that I only visited a handful of times. It recently returned to my attention because there was a petition circulating in an effort to prevent it from being demolished after a recent sale. Allegedly, the kitchen and bathroom had been removed before losing, preventing it from being sold as an ongoing business, so the likelihood was that the land would be used for housing. An application was made for providing listed (protected) status, but before it could be granted, the place burned to the ground. Who could have predicted this completely random turn of events? Except…
This keeps happening. Again. And again. And again. A beautiful building in an area with valuable land gets bought by developers, and whoops… there goes that contagious fire again. I did some work with a former colleague on this, though I left academia before we published our findings - one of my few regrets of my departure. The coincidences in the data mounted up. Arson, electrical faults, accidental fires… all in historic buildings that had been bought up in prime development areas. It's seemingly an open secret that this happens, and has been since at least the 1980s, the earliest reference I found in official documents to a contagion of fire on valuable land.
The law is weak in this area. When an application for listed status is made, there is nothing at all to stop the owners from removing the important features before the application is approved. Where planning may be withheld because of locally important historic issues, there is a nasty habit of accidents occurring before the planning permission is even requested. Sometimes, developers are told to return the buildings to their original state, but this is rare and extremely difficult, especially without extensive documentation from before its destruction.
In this case, not only was the building hollowed out by fire but, allegedly, the road to the building was blocked, delaying the arrival of firefighters. Not only that, but the remains were totally demolished within two days - against the advice of the local authorities - by equipment that was hired a week before the fire.
All coincidence, of course.
I wonder what part coincidence plays in fantasy novels. How many fires accidentally burn down the protagonist's home whilst the antagonist laughs in the background, unprovably yet undeniably guilty? Perhaps at least in our fantasy world we could get justice for this wanton destruction of our heritage.
That sucks! ><