The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Joe Kerr
is actually a careful reconstruction, or even enhancement. Waxwork marines,
cardboard evacuees, reproduction newspapers, and the taped noise of bombs
and sirens—which could never have been heard in this underground bunker
in 1940—are required to orient people, to jog the necessary set of historical
references. It is this denial of imagination and interpretation, the predigestion
of the past to allow uncritical consumption in the present, that is most
worrying about these new urban tableaux. Their meanings are fixed and
unassailable, at least in their own space.
The ultimate accomplishment of such fragmentary pantheons is
their ability to distance the reality of remembered experiences by presenting
simulated participation in dramatized historical events, to be enjoyed as
if they really were near-perfect re-creations of what actually happened. In
the process, all sense of the problematic nature of this wartime experience,
of suffering and of conflict, has been censored—a continuation of the careful
process that had ensured the destruction of the Lenin Memorial forty
years previously.
THE “EXPERIENCE” OF WAR
London is increasingly represented in spectacles that have no discernible
connection with authentic sites or events at all—the total simulation of a
nonexistent past. Under railway arches in Waterloo and next to the “Jack
the Ripper Experience” can be found the grandiosely titled “Winston
Churchill’s Britain at War Theme Museum,” containing the “Blitz Experi-
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