Who?

I was sure there used to be a bank here...

Like it or not, unless you are some off-grid anarchist (and if you are, you are very welcome, but how on earth did you get in here?), your life is enmeshed with institutions. These might be schools, banks, shops, manufacturers, utility companies, broadcasters, universities, your employer, the social services, charities, national and local government, the armed forces, the legal profession, trades unions, whatever: for better or worse, these "corporate bodies" are how society works. They are how power and wealth are consolidated and privilege is protected, but also how these inequalities are challenged, and useful stuff like water, electricity, and broadband is delivered to your house. Which was most likely built by some well-established building firm, and if you own it, paid for by a building society [1].

This is no more than to state the obvious, really. But the thing is as I get older I find I am afflicted by an urge to carry out retrospective fact-checking, which means I'm increasingly aware that our journey through the many institutions we will have encountered over the years is very patchily documented, ranging from occasionally superb to generally non-existent. For example, I was astonished to discover, in one recent bout of fact-checking, that my current medical practice holds paper medical records dating all the way back to my infancy, and that these have patiently followed me through numerous changes of location and practice over nearly seven decades. My doctor and I had some fun paging through them, discovering what ailments I had suffered as a child. Ah, the dislocated thumb in primary school! The many earaches leading to the removal of my tonsils! I remember it all so well and, evidently, so does the NHS. But did they have any record of the rather more recent event I wanted to follow up? Nope. Why not? It seemed that, unlike that ancient sheaf of paper records, it had simply not survived the journey from the GP's computer upstairs to the admin staff downstairs to the "permanent" file on some server somewhere else.

Similarly, a few years ago, when it seemed that we might be contemplating a permanent move to Bristol, I thought it might be handy to get a reader's ticket at the university library there, where I had worked for a total of five years in two stretches: special privileges are available for alumni and ex-staff. However, a search in the digitised staff records drew a blank: it seemed lowly assistant librarians weren't deemed worthy of the disk space. Someone actually had to take the trouble to venture into the literal basement where the old paper records were in storage, to prove I had ever been employed by the university. Never mind fire, flood, or enemy action, all it would now take is an administrative decision to discard the paper records – they've all been digitised, after all, haven't they? – and any trace of my passage through that institution would be lost. That, after all, is what happened to the records of the 19th century Irish censuses: the statistics had all been extracted from the raw data, the thinking seemed to go, so why clutter the place up with all that useless paper?

Ironically, in an era when obsessive data-cumulation in the form of digital snooping is burgeoning – unless you have taken steps to protect your privacy, be sure that Facebook, Google, et al. know rather more about you than you might like – it seems the memory of institutions is getting weaker; a faculty strongly correlated, I think, with an institution's pride, or lack of it, in itself as an institution. People used to write histories of government departments, firms, schools, and colleges, in the same way that the buildings that housed banks, businesses, and even cinemas and factories used to be constructed to last and to impress. I own several volumes celebrating the publisher J.M. Dent's Temple Press in Letchworth, for example, where my grandparents happened to work, which are typical products of a corporate self-consciousness that now seems quaint, or even hubristic ("My name is Woolworth's, shop of shops..."). Today's institutional world seems more like a fairground: brash, inescapable while the money is flowing, then quickly disassembled, and gone with the wind.

Not all institutions are equal, however. One Sunday morning a while ago, half-awake, I was listening to BBC Radio 4's "magazine" programme Broadcasting House. The speaker was talking about the differences between state and private schooling, and how – much as he disapproved of the private school system – he couldn't help but admire individual schools as exemplars of educational excellence. So far, so routine. But he then said something interesting: that he especially admired the way the private sector, unlike the public sector, invested in the sense of a school as an institution, with a history and a sense of self.

The speaker was journalist Robert Peston, who was educated at a North London comprehensive, and is as proud of that as he should be. He then told a very striking anecdote. During his time at that school, there was a sense of pride in the achievements of ex-pupil Laurie Cunningham, the first English footballer to sign for Real Madrid, and the first Black footballer to play for England. On his recent return to the school, Peston had wondered why there wasn't, say, a building named after Cunningham? The current headteacher's response was, "Who?" [3]

"Who?", indeed. For those of us who were educated at public expense, the chances are that your primary and secondary schools have been renamed, merged, demolished, rebuilt, reorganised, and even moved to a new site, so that any sense of history or institutional pride will have been broken decades ago. Uniforms will have been abolished and reinvented several times over, games fields sold off and built over, and – in a best case scenario – any remaining archival material dumped into the care of an overstretched and underfunded local authority. So when it comes to enquiries about previous heads, teachers, and pupils – their names, their achievements, their reputations – the answer will inevitably be, "Who?"

The endless churning of policies, reconfiguring of priorities, outsourcing of services, and abolition, combination, recombination, and renaming of institutions in the public sector, mean that there is also no longer any continuity from generation to generation for the "clients" of public services. A community needs a sense of its own narrative to exist as a community, to have a history; at its extreme – I think of the mining villages of South Wales and North-East England – this constant disruption amounts to an erasure of identity.

The environment and infrastructure are in constant flux, too. Our water, gas, electricity, and telecomms are no longer supplied by dedicated national utilities. The banks and even the Post Office have closed most of their small local branches as "underused" – at least according to some crude, self-serving metric – and therefore "inefficient". In the name of competition and market forces and in the mad pursuit of ever-lower taxes, continuity has been replaced with endless empty "choice" between one unknowable quantity and another, each brightly wrapped in the same PR hype. It's all too faceless and too confusing to care about, so you choose the one offering the cheapest deal, and then they go out of business two years later, and you find yourself the client of one of the competitors you rejected last time round. My own copper-wire internet connection, for example, has so far been through five (or is it six?) purely nominal changes of supplier since we originally signed up with Compuserve back in 1990s, like mediaeval serfs transferred en bloc to a new absentee overlord.

There is a common dream, which most people find upsetting, in which you go back to your childhood home, and the current occupants have no idea who you are. Bruce Springsteen even wrote a song about it, "My Father's House". For the majority who cannot afford to buy themselves out of the nightmare, that is our contemporary world. It is a place where you are always becoming a stranger, someone whose name is unrecognised, whose files have been lost, whose account has expired, and whose key no longer fits the door. Why bother to vote, when all it means is more empty change? Why care about your community, when the raw material of its history is regarded as nothing more than clutter to be dumped into a skip several times a decade?

I know, I know... As the ITMA character Mona Lott so wisely used to say: It's the bein' so cheerful as keeps me goin'. I spent a working career patiently adding to the memory of one particular institution, and I'm well aware that a degree of selective curation is needed: not everything can be kept. But I hate to see this throwaway attitude becoming the norm. It seems to me that institutions have started to mirror the computers and software on which they have come to depend. All it takes is an update to an operating system (read: change of government or senior management) to render reliable old packages inoperable; a few years is the limited, supported lifespan of even the most expensive kit. When replacement time comes or upgrade catastrophe happens, whichever is the sooner, then there is a golden opportunity for a bit of corporate retail therapy at senior management level. Out with the old, in with the new! Why would anyone keep an obsolete mainframe, after all, or the software it used to run, even if a significant chunk of that institution's history is bound up with it? In the Marie Kondo formula, let's chuck out anything that no longer sparks joy! Or anyone, come to that. Thank you for your service, now clear your desk, and remember to return your locker key. You're history! (but not for long...)

Do I know you? The face is familiar, but...

1. In the UK a "building society" is (or was) an alternative to a conventional bank, a safe place to accumulate savings and to secure a mortgage against the purchase of property, run on a "mutual" basis. Like so many evil things that happened in the 1980s, building societies were "de-mutualised" and allowed to function more or less as banks, just with friendlier names.

2. Of course, the up-side of this is that lying about your past, whether it be exam grades, jobs held, or whatever, becomes quite tempting, or at least a gamble worth taking.

2. My own school's main and probably sole celebrity claim to fame is Ken Hensley, of Uriah Heep. I know: "Who?"...