The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Joe Kerr
ston Churchill’s War Rooms, the place where, had the expected invasion
ever happened, the final defence of Britain would have been mounted.” 23
Thus Britain’s great war leader, the personification of the defiant
nation mounting its last desperate defense, was once more invoked, just as
he had been a short while earlier during the Falklands conflict. This new
spatial link with Britain’s wartime experience did not evoke the familiar
Blitz imagery of different classes thrown together in the public shelters, of
ordinary people conjoined in a common endeavor, but directly revealed the
commander’s lair. It leapfrogged the more recent, problematic past to tap
into the rich vein of nostalgia represented by Britain in its last moments of
world power.
THE PLACE FOR WAR
The Cabinet War Rooms are spaces that genuinely resonate with the memory
of their historical import. It is still impressive to enter the site of such
significant action, half a century later, a point emphatically made by the director
general of the Imperial War Museum:
Some historic sites are redolent of their history, the air charged with
the spirit of the past. The Cabinet War Rooms are in this category,
and I know of few places which convey a period so immediately and
so effectively. It sometimes seems as if the wartime workers have just
left and the Rooms are waiting for the next shift to come on duty. 24
So it must seem to its expected audience, who are unattuned to the subtle,
instrumental manipulations of historical fact and place that have reinvested
London’s wartime history with such powerful contemporary meanings. But
as Lowenthal christened it, this is the age of “heritage ascendant,” which he
dates from 1980, and the rise of “Thatcher’s Britain.” 25 For him, history and
heritage differ in that the former is an interpretation of the past, while the
latter aspires to be a replica of the past, a copy of what has happened. In the
case of the Cabinet War Rooms, visitors might not realize that what they see
is as much simulation as reality, and the attendant literature certainly does
not try too hard to explain this.
To the critical eye, even the excitement of penetrating a space so
embedded in personal and collective cultural identity is already diminished
by the ersatz sandbags framing the entrance—one of many artificial embellishments
intended presumably to meet public anticipation, as if the real
space would not be enough on its own, or people’s imaginations could no
longer connect with events of fifty years previously. A further diminishing
of experience occurs inside, when the realization dawns that much on view