The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

London, War, and the Architecture of Remembrance
the River Thames has brought the campaigners into direct confrontation
with the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), an unelected
body created by the Thatcher government to oversee the commercial
redevelopment of London’s vast area of redundant docklands, which is
vastly unpopular with the local community. Thus this campaign to commemorate
a community’s experiences of war has simultaneously become a
struggle by those citizens to reassert some control over their physical and social
environment; they are resisting the construction of still more luxury
apartments in favor of reclaiming their own version of the urban cultural
landscape. Thus London’s wartime past may yet develop its own memorial
culture, and this recurrent, troublesome issue of commemoration may prove
to be a catalyst for resisting the appropriation of the places of popular history
and of public memory.
Ordered this year:
A billion tons of broken glass and rubble,
Blockade of chaos, the other requisites
For the reduction of Europe to a rabble. 31