WHY CERTAIN PLACES ENDURE

Made for One Thing

The Almanac’s entry for The Palm Beach Season says of the island, in one line, “The island was built for this and has never been used for anything else.” The line could be written of most of the places on the calendar that have lasted. The Bayreuth Festival is held in a theatre that Wagner built for his own works, and ten of his operas make the whole of its repertoire. Centre Court at The Championships, Wimbledon, seats fifteen thousand and is played on for only the fortnight. The course at Henley Royal Regatta is a mile and 550 yards because, its entry says, “that was the longest stretch of open water the reach would give in 1839.”

The argument here is that places like these endure for a reason that has little to do with age or beauty. They are kept for a single use; the people who keep them answer to that use rather than to the building; and so the building can be lost, closed or replaced while the place goes on. Preservation keeps a thing as it was. Use keeps it alive.

The Shape Is Kept

What a lasting place guards most closely is its shape. At The Palio di Siena the seventeen contrade each keep a church, a fountain, a museum and a club, and their boundaries “have not moved since 1729”. The rules of 1721 are the ground of the rules today. The San Martino corner has been padded with mattresses since 1841. The race lasts about ninety seconds, and almost everything round it is fixed.

The Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix has “kept much the same shape since 1929”, although the circuit does not exist for most of the year: building it takes six weeks, and taking it down takes three. The track that holds the Goodwood Revival began as the perimeter road of a wartime airfield; a chicane went in in 1952, brick walls followed in 1953, and “the circuit has kept that shape since.” At Saratoga Opening Weekend the grandstand designed in the 1890s has been extended to five times its first size, under the same slate roofs.

None of these places is untouched. Each has been altered, enlarged and repaired. What has not changed is the line the horses or the cars must follow, the boundaries the city keeps, the roofline under which the crowd stands. A place can take a great deal of change provided it keeps the outline people come back to find.

The Building Is Not the Place

The clearest evidence that use matters more than fabric is how often the fabric has gone. At Glyndebourne Festival Opera the old theatre had become too small by the 1990s. It was pulled down, and the new house built in its place opened on 28 May 1994, sixty years to the day after the first Figaro. Wimbledon itself has moved: the club began on four acres off Worple Road and went to Church Road in 1922, driven there by the crowds that came to see Suzanne Lenglen.

The Proms lost their building altogether. The Queen’s Hall, where they began in 1895, was destroyed in an air raid in May 1941, and they moved to the Royal Albert Hall, where they have been held every summer since. At Last Night of the Proms the Promenaders crown with laurel a bust of Henry Wood that, its entry notes, “was recovered from the ruins of the hall where the Proms began.” The hall is gone; the season, the standing places and the bust remain. It is hard to think of a plainer case of an occasion outliving its walls.

Lapses and Returns

Lasting places are not always continuous ones. Saratoga was closed in 1896, and again in 1911 and 1912 when New York outlawed betting, and each time it came back. Bayreuth lost a fortune at its first festival in 1876, and the house stood empty for six years until Parsifal in 1882. The Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, first held in 1929, ran fitfully through the war, then “lapsed for decades”, and came back in 1995. Goodwood held its last race meeting in 1966 and none for more than thirty years. When the Revival was proposed, “Not everyone wanted it”, and a supporters’ association helped win approval; the first was held in 1998.

What brought each of them back was that the place still had its shape and its purpose. The villa on Lake Como had been a hotel since 1873 and still had its terrace above the water. The Goodwood circuit still ran round the airfield as it had in 1952. A place that has kept its outline can be woken after a long sleep. A place that has been turned to some other use usually cannot.

When a Place Gives Out

Endurance is not guaranteed, and the Almanac records places that gave out. The Sundance Film Festival ran in Park City for forty-five years and held its last edition there in January 2026. Its entry is direct about why: “The festival had outgrown the town.” A ski resort of eight thousand could not take eighty-five thousand visitors, and the theatres there were shrinking rather than growing. The festival goes on, in Boulder. Park City kept the town and lost the occasion.

New York lost something older. Through the nineteenth century the beds of New York Harbor were the largest source of oysters in the world, the entry for The Oyster and Champagne Evening records. Overharvesting, disease, effluent and silt destroyed them; by 1916 most had been closed, and in 1927 the last. A place can be used up as well as kept. Since 2015 the Billion Oyster Project has gathered spent shells from the city’s restaurants to build reefs in the harbour again, which is a long way of saying that keeping is work, and that the work can be resumed.

The Objection

There is a serious case against the argument so far, and it should be heard in full. It holds that places endure because money and power pay for them to endure, and that talk of use and custody flatters what is really patronage.

The Almanac supplies the evidence. Wagner’s patrons’ certificates did not pay for the Festspielhaus, and Ludwig II of Bavaria lent him the rest. Under Winifred Wagner, a friend of Hitler, Bayreuth became what Thomas Mann called Hitler’s court theatre. Boulder won Sundance with thirty-four million dollars of tax incentives across ten years. The grouse moors behind The Glorious Twelfth cover about eight per cent of England and Scotland together, and The Spectator called them in 2008 “the ultimate trophy asset”. On this view a place lasts because those who own it can afford to keep it, and its endurance carries their interests forward with it.

Much of this is true, and none of it should be smoothed over. Money has been necessary to nearly every place on the calendar. But it has rarely been sufficient. Bayreuth had a king’s money and still stood empty for six years. Sundance lost money for two years in Salt Lake City and was saved not by a larger subsidy but by Sydney Pollack’s suggestion that it move to a ski resort in winter. What carried these places through was a use people kept returning for.

The darker point stands, and should. Endurance is not innocence. A place that lasts carries the whole of its history, including the parts its keepers would sooner forget, and Bayreuth reopened in 1951 under Wagner’s grandsons with that history attached. The Court’s view is that this is a reason to know a place well, not a reason to stay away from it.

The Keepers

Behind every lasting place on the calendar there is a body that answers to it. The Stewards of Henley have elected one another since 1885, and since 1987 they have held the temple on Temple Island on a lease of 999 years. Wagner’s great-granddaughter Katharina has run Bayreuth since 2008. John Christie’s grandson Gus has been chairman of Glyndebourne since 2000. Peter Russell has dressed the Goodwood Revival since the first. These are not owners in the ordinary sense. They hold a place on terms set by its use, and they are judged by whether it is still there, in its shape, the next year.

The Court keeps no house of its own; its own engagements are held in rooms, houses and fields taken for the occasion. It chooses its places as it chooses its dates, for what they are kept for and by whom.

At Bayreuth there is no bell. A quarter of an hour before each act, brass players come out onto the balcony of the house and play a fanfare on a theme from the opera, as they have since 1876, in almost any weather.