Security walls often futile: A lesson from history

Jonathan Glancey Guardian News Service London

What do walls have a habit of doing? Cracking. Falling. Tumbling. Being breached, climbed over, written on, or even ignored altogether. The next time he gazes on his own wretched wall, or "security fence", Ariel Sharon might yet learn a lesson from history; from the Old Testament even. Before the gates of Jericho, the Lord instructed Joshua to "compass the city seven times" with priests, rams' horns, the Ark of the Covenant and the people of Israel.

"So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: And it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city" (Joshua 6:20).

Walls built to keep people from where they deservedly, or determinedly, wish to be never last. History, mythical or real, repeats this message like an old gramophone needle stuck in a well worn groove. Hadrian's wall, separating Hibernia from Britannia, lost its purpose when imperial Rome imploded in the face of barbarian invasions and legions stationed at this lonely northern outpost were called home, or otherwise dispersed. At least two other walls built near here for the same purpose have been all but forgotten.

Perhaps the Great Wall of China can be seen from the moon but, no matter, it ceased to be a defense against invasion a long while ago. Today, it is gap-toothed, and many stretches are crumbling. The Berlin Wall that cost the lives of so many escapees from East Germany was torn down in 1989, fragments sold as souvenir postcard novelties. It had seemed, right up until the last moment, that the wall and the Soviet-backed communist system that propped it up would last if not forever, then for decades to come.

The Saudis have been building a wall to keep out the Yemenis. A fragmented, but deadly, wall divides the U.S. from Mexico; since 1995, at least 2,000 people have died, largely from exposure or drowning in trenches, trying to cross it.

Virtually nothing at all remains in Inner Mongolia of Kubla Khan's palace at Xanadu where, according to Coleridge, "twice five miles of fertile ground/With walls and towers were girdled round". These walls may never have existed and the great khan would have lived in lavish, fur-lined tents, but the idea of a king walling round his exclusive kingdom is a powerful one. Resonant, too. No regime can hide behind walls forever, whether Jericho, the German Democratic Republic, Rome or present day Israel.

There was something ingloriously futile in Saddam Hussein rebuilding the walls of Babylon, the same walls witnessed by Daniel in the equally fateful reign of Belshazzar, 2,500 years earlier. Something rather tragic in the French building the Maginot Line, a great concrete wall, bristling with huge guns, designed to repel some future German invasion after the first world war. In the second world war, the German generals Rommel and Guderian simply drove around it, and on to Brussels and Paris.

Walls can give pleasure; the walls of Carcassonne rebuilt by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century; the faux-gothic walls of Cardiff Castle, designed by William Burges; the walls of handsome buildings and our own garden walls embroidered with honeysuckle and wisteria. Political walls deserve to go the way of Jericho's, leaving successors to repressive regimes building bridges and beauty instead.