The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
86
4
87
Joe Kerr
reconstituted together in the warm nostalgic glow that increasingly colors
all of the past, they offer the tourist an uncritical and easily consumed version
of London’s heritage. As with so much else of our own city’s history, the
past has become a seamless text no longer ordered by chronology, in which
real and simulated memory cannot easily be differentiated, but which can
be “experienced” and consumed equally by all. This devaluing of collective
memory, and the reconstruction of London’s fabric as essentially a theme
park of itself, threatens to render our own recent past as the ultimate seductive
spectacle for a passive and depoliticized citizenry.
As a recent book has suggested, historians and politicians are still
“re-fighting World War II,” and as yet there is nothing resembling a definitive
account of that conflict. 28 At the risk of preaching another kind of instrumental
history, we cannot allow the memory of war to become a passive
act. “Lest we forget” must remain an imperative, both because the fight
against fascism is a permanent one and because this truly is our history. The
ease with which memory has been appropriated by the forces of capital, and
reproduced in its commodified form of nostalgia, not only serves as a barrier
to the past but does equal harm in obscuring the possibilities of the future.
THE FUTURE OF THE PAST
Distance in time, and the diminishing of firsthand experience, does not
seem to be making the problem of creating an appropriate memorial culture
for the Second World War any simpler. Indeed, in many European cities the
difficulties of publicly rendering this particular period of history in a form
that also satisfies contemporary ideological priorities are currently proving
challenging to solve. For instance, in Dresden the bombed ruins of the
Frauenkirche, which for nearly fifty years were conserved as a memorial to
the city’s destruction, are now undergoing a controversial reconstruction.
Despite the obvious questions that this act raises about remembrance, as
well as considerable reservations among some citizens, its promoters claim
that “re-erecting this great church does not mean a failure to confront our
history.” 29 In Berlin, meanwhile, attempts to construct a vast holocaust
memorial are currently beset by controversy on an international scale.
Rather more optimistically, in the East End of London a campaign
has been gathering force to erect a monument to the 2,193 local civilian casualties
of the Blitz, in what was the most heavily bombed area of any
British city. 30 The Civilians Remembered Campaign is particularly interesting
because despite having attracted widespread support from political
leaders and royalty, it does appear to have started as a genuinely local, popular
agitation. Furthermore, the battle to claim a particular site overlooking