The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

London, War, and the Architecture of Remembrance
With the rapid dismantling of key areas of welfare provision, most visibly
the termination of municipal housing programs, such architecture increasingly
failed to hold its intended meanings, representing instead discredited
symbols of nationhood. In Patrick Wright’s memorable phrase, the municipal
housing block was demonized as the “tombstone [ . . . ] of the entire
Welfare State.” 20
Yet though the original intended meanings of these concrete monuments
have now been largely destroyed, the power of the Second World
War to generate pervasive cultural meanings has not been diminished. On
the contrary, established values and myths attached to the war remain potent,
and new historical interpretations have specifically questioned them.
In the mid-1980s Correlli Barnett’s Audit of War sought to blame postwar
British decline in its entirety on exactly the wartime political leadership
that later led to the establishment of the Welfare State. 21
This change has been accompanied by new forms of memorial culture
that invest the war and victory in it with a wholly different vision for
contemporary London. The old understanding that the experience of war
had provided the foundation for a new social justice, based on statesponsored
policies of societal reform and progress, has been superseded by a
new polemic. Now the characteristic free-market cult of individual endeavor,
untrammeled by the “nanny state,” is celebrated.
THE NEW HERO
What has visibly emerged as the new memorial culture has involved reconfiguring
particular fragments of the city into museums: the reconstruction
of spaces that are genuinely endowed with historical remembrance, but are
now filled with new visions and interpretations. Boyer has christened such
places the “new public theaters of late capitalism.” Simultaneously these
spaces have served to turn the memories and images of conflict into a bland
and fictive commodity, for passive consumption by an unknowing and uncritical
audience.
In 1984, on the instructions of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
the Cabinet War Rooms deep under Whitehall were unsealed and thrown
open to the public, to provide (according to the director general of the
Imperial War Museum) “a permanent reminder of how our embattled government
survived and operated in the Second World War.” 22 Echoing
contemporary debates about the correct empirical content of school history,
this statement explicitly celebrates the leaders in this conflict, and not its
common participants. However, we are told that this site was ultimately
dedicated to the remembrance of just one hero: “Above all else they are Win-