The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

London, War, and the Architecture of Remembrance
name is needed. Monuments can be seen as the tangible trace of collective
memory, or perhaps as the mnemonic device that can reactivate accumulated
memories. 5
WAR
The simple process of abstraction and commemoration in the premodern
London of the late seventeenth century could not conceivably be compared
to the infinitely more complex sequences of event and ideology that have
given shape to the monuments of the modern city. Yet the desire to invest
urban space with public meaning, to render readable the text of the city, has
remained a constant ambition of urban societies, and it is certainly a highly
visible impulse of postmodernity. To one attempting to unravel the imperceptible
mechanisms by which the immaterial constructions of memory are
metamorphosed into the tangible architectures of commemoration, no instance
is more revealing than the wartime history of London and the process
of remembrance that developed during and after the Second World War.
For much of this century the experience of both world wars has
been a visible fact of everyday life in London. My own childhood recollections
are shared by countless others: the elderly men sunning themselves in
wheelchairs, their uneven distribution of arms and legs bearing eloquent
testimony to the brutal fashions of field surgery on the Western Front; the
khaki tunic, three stripes on the arm, found in the dark recess of the
wardrobe; the gaping holes of cleared bomb sites and the roofless churches
still remaining from the Blitz. Above all else it was this last, the deliberate
and catastrophic destruction inflicted from September 1940 to May 1941,
that has irrevocably transformed the physical and social fabric of London.
COMMEMORATION
The complexity of this matrix of events, memories, and places renders the process
of memorialization highly problematic, for to develop a memorial culture
requires that a restricted set of meanings be abstracted, a process that necessarily
implies that other meanings be forgotten. Interpreting how this has
happened, and indeed is continuing to happen, is essential if we are to contemplate
real resistance against received interpretations of the recent past.
These general lines of inquiry have emerged from a concern with
the Lenin Memorial, 6 a monument created in 1942 as a manifestation of Anglo-Soviet
relations and destroyed in 1948 as a direct result of obvious transformations
in that relationship. This extraordinary object, designed by the
celebrated modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin, is in effect a war memo-