Guild Halls

At last night's GOSSIP #2, we got into a mini-discussion about the potential political associations with the word "guildhalls", the context being Philip Larkin's poem "Going, Going":

I thought it would last my time -

The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon

It was these lines that made us think:

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

Some, in hating the poem, singled this stanza out as evidence of a deeply deadening conservatism. That the list given here is full of lifeless things, lifeless and quaint and enemies of progress. There are no people in that list (enhanced by shadows without the things that make them). There are (presumably empty) meadows and lanes, and carved choirs - still, heavy objects, an impression compounded by the inevitable associations readers will have with choirs - a group of people, singing, perhaps even joyously - juxtaposed with the rigid createdness of "carved", something hewn out of a lump of inanimate matter, perhaps a little crudely, not quite the real thing. The lively hand that did the carving, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen. That "carved choirs" can also refer to objects in a church further encourages this sense of solidity and solemnity.

But guildhalls?

I said that to me, guildhalls - and more specifically guilds - connect to a particularly English collectivity, a civic pride that is not conservative but actually something of the opposite. Not radical exactly, but certainly connected with a sense of an active culture of trade expertise. The guilds fit in my head with libraries as services for the people, as seen in this film of the Sheffield City Library. So I thought I'd look them up, to see whether my associations have any basis.

The Wikipedia page on guilds describes them as:

"an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society"

As those three descriptions suggest, the guild doesn't neatly fall into an idea of right-wing conservatism nor left-wing collectivism. Whilst they were organisations of workers, they conspired to keep their trade secrets secret, and appear to have been more associations of individuals than a genuinely collective group. Nevertheless, in some senses they could be seen as opposing a capitalist idea of mass production, and certainly in some areas of contemporary culture, the idea of the master craftsman is seen as a positive alternative to cheap, mass produced products. See for instance the artisan and organic food movements.

Of course, these movements have faced criticisms - that they privilege individuals with enough time and money to buy the products these artisans produce, as well as seeing solutions in individualistic endeavours that have no potential for mass application. The amount of land needed for all farming to be organic, for instance, is so large that any idea of Britain being able to sustain that sort of production remains dead in the water. (Not to mention the de-toxification process the soil would need to undergo, as well as the complete silencing of global mega agri-business corporations).

But to counter that again, one could suggest that the guild idea is worth retaining for an idea that can seem both more abstract and more practical: the idea of the master craftsman ensures that trades continue in some form and do not become conscripted into a global corporate economy that makes shoddy products cheaply and quickly, and without any real connections being established between the crafter, the materials and those that use the product. That people remain that know what blacksmithing is, or cobbling, or being a butcher, or a furniture maker. If a prominent effect of globalisation has been to separate people from their immediate environments, and to discourage meaningful contact between people and the food they eat, the tools they use and so on, then the master craftsman or woman and the guilds may be a way of re-establishing these connections. In books, for instance, in a market where Amazon has pretty much any book anyone could want, often for extremely cheap prices and available at the click of a button, it is refreshing and encouraging that small presses aware of the history of book-binding and proficient in its skills are re-appearing.

It doesn't seem, then, in the end, that guildhalls have particular associations with any specific political viewpoint. I suppose in a way that complicates Larkin's mourning. What complicates more, though, I think, is to compare the things/ideas that he is ostensibly mourning in the poem with the things/ideas movements like the slow food movement, the green movement, DIY culture and the like are championing, and to wonder whether the words "conservative" and "progressive" have the same meaning as they did in 1972, when "Going, Going" was written, or even if they have any meaning at all anymore, whether they are even useful words to invoke when talking about political aims.