LEADING ARTICLE: Selling our heritage down the river

Knight, Frank and Rutley has just sent us its latest estate agent's brochure. Who are this happy couple, smiling broadly from the inside cover? None other than Virginia Bottomley and Michael Portillo. And it is hardly surprising that they are beaming. The Secretaries of State for Heritage and Defence have a distinctly des res to sell; they are not flogging off council houses. This time they are into serious real estate: the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

It is, however, difficult to share the good humour. The Royal Naval College, originally intended to be a palace, was begun by Charles II as a rival to Versailles and became a naval hospital before the Admiralty took it over in Victorian times. Classically elegant and munificently sponsored by the state, it is a reminder of a period of British history which stands out as adventurous, self-confident and forward-looking. While Wren and Hawksmoor were going about their work, Britain was becoming a great maritime nation and the state was being transformed The monarchy was reined in and the foundations of liberalism laid down.

Yet ministers are now prepared to sell the lease on the college for the next 150 years. The ministerial statement which accompanies the estate agent's blurb speaks of requiring tenants "to demonstrate enduring long- term proposals sympathetic to the character of the site" and rightly insists that any change of use should permit ready public access.

That means, presumably, that there will be safeguards against the more garish possibilities. We shall be spared shopping malls and bouncy castles, perhaps. But the point is that once again, the Government shows itself to have no imagination or purpose beyond the wielding of the auctioneer's hammer. It is a failure which outstrips by a wide margin the one that is now allowing County Hall, sometime home of London's local government across the river from Parliament, to be converted into luxury flats rather than a distinguished new home for the London School of Economics. As Jonathan Glancey argues in Section Two of today's paper, the Greenwich college is in architectural terms a site of global importance.

These buildings should be preserved and their usefulness enhanced as a celebration of the values which the site has marked for three centuries: innovation, science, art and the importance of Britain's relations with the outside world. If the Government has no specific ideas, perhaps readers of the Independent would like to offer some. An obvious next step is to take forward the idea of Greenwich forming one of the main sites for Britain's millennium celebrations.

The danger of the Government's present stance is that Wren's masterpiece will come to stand as a bitterly ironic tribute to the fading gods of the Eighties, marking a point when government lost the ability to judge when a good idea - privatisation - had run out of steam and when it misjudged our mood about the balance between commercialism and public values. Even a nation of shopkeepers can do better than this.