The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Joe Kerr
technocracy and mass organization in preference to the humanist cult of
the individual spelled the demise of historicism and the classical tradition,
the very systems of representation that had sustained memorial culture up
to and including the First World War. Thus the conventions of the monumental
were increasingly redundant, with no desire to articulate an alternative.
As Alan Borg notes, “so far as sculptors were concerned, the 1940s and
’50s were a period of almost complete abstraction and their work did not
conform to the public perception of a memorial style.” 14
In modern war, itself one of the most developed applications of
mass production, the universal depiction of everything from the intimate
details to the great events of warmaking by the Picture Post and Pathé News
ensured that abstracted images of the wingèd angel or the petrified wreath
were no longer adequate to sustain their old meanings of victory, death, and
remembrance. On the rare occasions when a suitable means of expression
was attempted for memorials to the Second World War, the results were as
a rule highly unsatisfactory. Borg describes one notable failure, the Overlord
Embroidery, created to commemorate the Normandy landings:
The intention was to create a 20th century equivalent of the Bayeux
Tapestry, but the format, which was itself ancient 900 years ago, is
difficult to apply in the context of a contemporary and historically
accurate narrative. The result is that the embroidery, though a marvel
of workmanship, seems to have no clear purpose. No one who
wishes to know the story or see the action of the battle of Normandy
would use this as a source; they would rather read books and
look at films and photographs. 15
However, the idea that in the age of mechanical reproduction older
conventions of commemoration had become redundant implies the possibility
of a reproducible and hence universal memorial culture; and this is
precisely what was born out of the 1939–1945 war, the first large-scale conflict
to be fought wholly in the glare of the flashbulb. Thus the Battle for
London is “remembered” above all else through its photographs, those lasting
images that showed “London can take it.” Indeed recent research has
demonstrated how one image in particular has come to represent the abstracted
meanings generated by that battle and by enduring it, to stand as
the universally acknowledged symbol of the city at war. 16
Herbert Mason’s famous photograph, which showed the apparently
undamaged St. Paul’s Cathedral rising stoically above the flames of incendiary
bombs, was described as “the greatest photograph of the war”—not by
later apologists or historians, but by the Daily Mail on the day of its publication,
30 December 1940. The idea that this was more than just an extra-