The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

4.9 | “Theming the war: the new battleground.”
ence.” Here a pathetic collection of objects—“actual relics, from toilet rolls
and soap to a complete Anderson Shelter, that you can sit in and hear air
raids” 26 —are placed in crude tableaux of wartime pubs and shops, as well as
the simulated aftermath of a bombing raid, so crudely rendered that they recall
fairground attractions rather more than museum displays.
Being allowed the role of witness, indeed of active participant in
this new reconstituted experience of warfare, leads one to question not just
the possibility but the very need for any permanent memorial. The danger
is that this degree of immediacy, this apparent engagement with the past,
may in fact prove to be the most effective block to memory and thus to useful
knowledge of the recent past. Raphael Samuel has argued that “heritage
culture” is not necessarily the enemy of history, which itself stands accused
of being an elitist activity devoted to esoteric knowledge. He claims that
simulated museum displays such as the one described above are an authentic
part of the modern “art of memory.” 27 But to deliberately confuse popular
memory and knowledge with these considered constructions of populist
sentiment surely runs the risk of diminishing the real significance of common
experience and memory in the city.
The historical episodes that can be visited here—Jack the Ripper
and the Blitz—are not even remotely connected with this actual place. But