The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Joe Kerr
of battle, a thread of commemoration that is wholly stitched into the greater
fabric of national identity. Indeed the Cenotaph, the Lutyens-designed
memorial in Whitehall in commemoration of the Great War, has been argued
to be the nearest thing Britain has to a national monument. That war
provided a memory system so powerful and pervasive that the remembrance
services on Armistice Day conducted at memorials throughout the United
Kingdom remain perhaps the last widely accepted and observed ritual of national
unity. Moreover, the monuments of that one war subsequently came,
through the merest addition of a couple of dates, to stand for all later conflicts,
obviating the need for more public memorials. 10
This does not mean that events and memories of the Second World
War as it was experienced in London weren’t memorialized, but instead that
memorialization has happened in a unique way—one that highlights the
problems associated with the control and propagation of public, collective
memory. So the central question becomes, Why no significant or general
memorials of World War II? My answer to this deals with two distinct issues;
first, why conventional forms of representation were not employed,
and second, what the new and changing ways were in which the war, but especially
the Battle for London, has been commemorated over the ensuing
half century.
PEACE
One answer to the first of these questions is that there was clearly a collapse
in accepted symbolic codes of representation in the aftermath of war. For although
Britain underwent no absolute political revolution after 1945, the
experience of wartime governance had led both major political parties to a
broad consensus on the necessity for radical programs of social reconstruction.
Thus the politicians acknowledged that victory could not be too easily
interpreted as a vindication of this nation’s institutions—unlike, for
instance, the Soviet Union, which constructed a profusion of monuments to
the “Great Patriotic War.” Postwar Britain was only too aware of the pyrrhic
nature of its victory, and in the general mood of reconstruction and reconciliation
there was little place for crowing triumphalism. The Western
victors were already plunging without pause into a new conflict, as the
untimely destruction of the Lenin Memorial vividly demonstrated, and one
that rapidly turned the taste of victory sour. The intent and title of Labour’s
famous 1945 manifesto was to “let us face the future” and not dwell on the
inheritance of the past, as Britain is wont to do. Doubts about the continued
relevance of previous value systems surely contributed to the wholesale