6

Memory and the city

Simon Sleight

Introduction: memory lane

Memory is spatial. ‘Let us close our eyes’, proposes Maurice Halbwachs, the
sociologist and philosopher, ‘and, turning within ourselves, go back along
the course of time to the furthest point at which our thought still holds clear
remembrances of scenes and people. Never do we go outside space’ (Halbwachs
1980 [1950]: 157). Fellow French thinker Paul Ricoeur agrees: ‘“things” remem-
bered are intrinsically associated with places’, he notes. ‘And it is not by chance
that we say of what has occurred that it took place’ (Ricoeur 2004: 41; my empha-
sis). Such indeed is the accepted symbiosis between reminiscence and space that
in English the phrase ‘memory lane’ is a commonplace for thinking about the past.
‘I am with you, wandering through Memory Lane’, croons the American singer
Irving Kaufman on a 1924 recording; ‘Living the years, laughter and tears, over
again.’1 As this chapter will elaborate, Kaufman’s twin expressions of joy and
sorrow are often equally apt in assessing the topic of memory and the city.
If memory and space are closely associated, might it also be said that the patterns
and pathways of an individual’s memory resemble those of a city? Psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud certainly thought so, at least for a time. Pondering the persistence
of ‘memory traces’ in his patients, he settled on Rome – the ‘Eternal City’ – as an
appropriate simile. Freud saw in the Italian capital the ‘vestiges’ of earlier phases of
development, the older remnants juxtaposed with (or obscured by) subsequent
additions. In a similar way to gaining an understanding of Rome’s streetscape
through personal exploration, Freud determined that acquiring first-hand
knowledge of the architecture of the mind would help explain the lingering presence
of the past, and the powerful hold on his patients of the recollected fragment. Later,
Freud left aside the city comparison, deciding that urban space could not support
so many coexistences in the same location as the mind allows (Pile 2002: 111–13).
Nonetheless, the much older (and still popular) ‘memory palace’ and ‘memory
theatre’ mnemonic techniques for associating things worth remembering with a
sequence of locations attest to the endurance of the city analogy. Author Italo
Calvino’s fictional metropolis of Zora is described in just such terms: ‘The city . . .
is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he
wants to remember’ (Calvino 1997: 13). Selectivity as well as storage emerge here
as key features. Urban memory, it will be shown, is always partial.
 Memory and the city  127
This chapter examines the processes by which some aspects of the past are
physically and emotionally inscribed into the urban landscape while others
are overlooked, or forgotten. In offering pathways, methodologies and case studies
for understanding memory and the modern city, the discussion ranges across
city settings on five continents. More ‘transurban’ than transnational in approach
(Roger 2015), the analysis is premised on the utility of a comparative method as
described in recent writing on cities. Through comparison, it is held, what is par-
ticular and what is shared can be more sharply appreciated. Picking up on older
accounts by the likes of Fernand Braudel (1981) and Asa Briggs (1963), historians
including Andrew Brown-May (2008), Nicolas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin
(2015) have enhanced an intellectual rationale for comparing city settings, be they
‘precincts’ within cities considered similar or whole cities markedly different in scale
or function. For our purposes here, it is to cities – and most often to the longstand-
ing centres of cities – that we can look to perceive the work of memory in space
particularly clearly. This chapter turns to such localized settings to take in urban
memories both built and intangible, memories shared and memories contested,
memories performed and memories lost.

The urban palimpsest

In order to evaluate how memory functions in urban settings, we first need to
think about how we perceive the city as an entity. Here I want to introduce the
notion of the city as a palimpsest. A palimpsest is a multilayered written record, an
object of accretion that still bears traces of its earlier form. One of the first scholars
to propose reading urban space in this way was Geoffrey Martin, an archivist and
historian. Martin argued that:

Successive generations leave their mark upon [the town], and some of the
marks have proved surprisingly durable; they stay there to be read if anyone
cares to read them. The visual evidence which is our concern here is the
evidence that presents itself when we look at the town: the patterns of its
streets and buildings, the blemishes upon the uniformity of the present that
remind us of the past. If we think of what we see as a text, we recognise very
soon that it is not a simple one: beneath the characters that we first trace,
there are other words and phrases to be read: the town is a palimpsest.
(Martin 1968: 155)

Martin’s references to ‘blemishes’ and words beneath words are important – the
evidence of the past in cities is always over-written, smudged and partly erased
(May 2016). The layout of streets and lanes can provide an enduring framework,
sometimes lasting centuries even as the buildings around them are replaced, but
such configurations are also vulnerable to alterations or complete erasure. Reading
memory at the surface of the city is hence only a first stage, albeit an important one.
Metaphors of peeling and excavating are useful in this context. One might, for
example, imagine the city as akin to an onion, its surface layers amenable to
removal through analytical incisions. Reflecting on his turn-of-the-century
128  Simon Sleight
upbringing in Berlin during a period of exile to 1930s Paris, German-Jewish
intellectual Walter Benjamin conjured the analogy of the archaeologist. ‘He who
seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging’,
Benjamin declared (Benjamin 1999: 611). Those investigating individual or
collective memory can follow Benjamin’s advice, figuratively removing and sifting
city strata through close observation and careful research. Investigating words as
well as objects is central to this activity. As interdisciplinary scholar Andreas
Huyssen argues, although the notion of the palimpsest is tied to writing, the
‘texts’ with which those researching urban memory are concerned are both literary
and built (Huyssen 2003: 7). Or put another way – in the phrasing again of Italo
Calvino – ‘the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And
yet between the one and the other there is a connection’ (Calvino 1997: 53).
It is sometimes said that the past lies buried in the present, or else that the
past is not really the past at all. Unexpected finds can lay this point bare. After
a large-scale demolition of buildings in the Rocks district of Sydney, an archaeo-
logical dig in 1994 revealed the former dwellings and possessions of convict
labourers brought to the infant colony from the late 1780s (Karskens 1999).
The youth hostel that now sits atop this site rather wonderfully makes an attrac-
tion out of this once-buried history by presenting arriving backpackers with
displayed finds and information panels on ‘Fragments of a lost neighbourhood’
(see Figure 6.1). More recently, tunnelling beneath London to create the Crossrail

Figure 6.1 Layers of living history at the Rocks youth hostel in Sydney. Photograph
courtesy of the author, 2013.
 Memory and the city  129
train link has uncovered a number of mass graves, some associated with the Black
Death of the fourteenth century, others with the later Bethlem or ‘Bedlam’
asylum. Up to seven metres of soil rests between the surface of present-day
London and the Roman city of Londinium (Museum of London Archaeology
2011). How many more artefacts, one wonders, must lie below the city’s streets
and buildings?
The analogy of the palimpsest, however, entails something more than the
isolated recovery of old bones and quotidian treasures lurking beneath or behind.
If urban memories resemble layered scripts those scripts also reference each other,
meaning that wider contexts must be evaluated. Individual and collective memory
hence draws on and is constantly re-shaped by memories circulating elsewhere, in
public discussions, for example, or among peers. Urban palimpsests of memory,
then, run beneath ground as well as behind facades; they are subject to alterations
through time and operate in often crowded settings of competing recollections.
Thick with history, cities also play host to dense, interconnected and shifting layers
of memory.

Prism cities
Three cities figure especially prominently in recent scholarly understandings of
memory and the city, and it is worth assessing the interleaving histories of each
before opening out the discussion into a more thematic analysis. Hiroshima,
Berlin and New York have all witnessed shattering upheavals in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, with each city serving subsequently as a prism through
which debates about history and memory are refracted.
On the morning of 6 August 1945, the first atomic bomb used as a weapon of
war fell on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Cataclysmic damage resulted; at least
80,000 people were killed instantly and some 62,000 of the 90,000 buildings
in the city were destroyed. As the dust cleared, up to five square miles of the city
centre lay in ruins (Atomic Heritage Foundation 2016). Such bald figures are
mere approximations of an event that continued to unfold years later as city-
dwellers succumbed to radiation sickness, as damaged buildings collapsed or were
torn down, and as debate raged regarding how to rebuild.
In the aftermath of the attack on their city, Hiroshima’s survivors harboured
what historian Lisa Yoneyama calls ‘dark’ memories (Yoneyama 1999: 44). In this
context, decisions regarding what to do with the skeletal frames of ruined build-
ings and the harrowing sites of medical treatment became contested matters.
While some of the Hibakusha – the Japanese collective noun for survivors of the
atomic bombing – welcomed the preservation of key locations, others wished not
to confront sites of horror as they continued their lives (Yoneyama 1999: 72–5).
As a case in point, the remains of the former exhibition hall now dubbed the
‘A-Bomb Dome’ elicited painful flashbacks for many city-dwellers during the
period of post-war reconstruction (Utaka 2009: 37–8). Saved from demolition
through the fostering of consensus, and reinforced by added steel, this edifice
130  Simon Sleight
now stands amidst a Peace Memorial Park. According to Yoneyama, the preserva-
tion of the building and the creation of the park around it served to ‘tame’
memories of the bombing. By hiving off just a small portion of the city for intense
reflection, surrounding neighbourhoods – many left equally desolate by the
bomb – could hence regenerate without such permanent reminders (Yoneyama
1999: 43–65). ‘People built this city to forget’, observed a journalist, visiting
in 1962 (Zwigenberg 2014: 228).
The park itself continues to be an extraordinary place of memorial culture. Over
50 sites of commemoration dot the landscape, including a memorial cenotaph
(unveiled in 1952) that houses in a coffin-like object the names of all of those
who perished, a circular memorial mound containing the ashes of up to 70,000
unidentified dead, and a Children’s Peace Monument (unveiled in 1958), fes-
tooned with folded paper cranes in memory of origami practitioner 12-year-old
Sadako Sasaki, killed by radiation poisoning in October 1955 (see Figure 6.2).
The significance of this site for what historian Ran Zwigenberg calls ‘global mem-
ory culture’ is attested by the granting of ‘World Heritage’ status to this location
in 1996 (Zwigenberg 2014), as well as, one might add, by the necessity for offsite
storage of the countless thousands of paper cranes sent to Hiroshima from around
the world for intended display. The presence of the past is keenly felt in other ways,
too; volunteers (some of them Hibakusha and their descendants) offer readings
of oral history survivor accounts to visitors and teach overseas tourists the art of
folding paper cranes. Zwigenberg finds the Peace Park and associated museum
to be constrained, ‘perhaps even too calm’ given the destruction visited upon the
city and the continued threat of nuclear war (Zwigenberg 2014: 1–2). Arguably,
though, it is the contrast between contemporary tranquillity and abiding trauma
that makes visiting Hiroshima’s Peace Park all the more memorable. Attesting to
the enduring complexities of changing attitudes regarding the nuclear attack, only
recently, in 2008 and 2016, have high-ranking American politicians (including
President Barack Obama) been invited into this memorial space for organized
commemorations.
While central Hiroshima is now internationally significant as a site for reflecting
on the horrors of war, another city ravaged by conflict harbours its own ghosts.
Berlin has been termed a ‘paradigmatic public memory space’ and ‘a city text
frantically being written and re-written’ (Huyssen 2003: 9, 49). Subject in the
twentieth century alone to the rise and fall of dictatorship, expulsions, warfare,
physical partition and reunification, Berlin has hosted the vigorous playing out of
remembering and forgetting for decades.
As with Hiroshima, what we might term the ‘burden of absences’ is an enduring
concern in Berlin, nowhere more so than at architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish
Museum Berlin, opened in 2001. The central axis for the building is a blank space
bereft of collected objects, a cavernous void suggesting the rupture and loss occa-
sioned by the Holocaust. Although other areas of the museum address the
longstanding and substantial contributions of Jewish citizens to Berlin’s history,
the void must be crossed and re-crossed by visitors – in the words of Libeskind it
Figure 6.2 The Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima. Designed by Kazuo
Kikuchi, the memorial depicts a young girl holding aloft a golden
crane in a prayer for peace. Note the display cases containing garlands
of donated paper cranes in the background. Photograph courtesy of the
author, 2014.
132  Simon Sleight
is ‘an absence that will never go away, no matter how much is built there; an
absence which is always going to be part of the city’ (Libeskind 2009: 71). Further
historical cleavages associated with Nazi persecution can be encountered across
Berlin. At a train station in suburban Grunewald, for example, an empty platform
has since 1991 hosted an iron walkway with raised letters detailing the number of
Jews deported, the dates of departure and their destinations. No trains ever leave
this particular platform, notes Svetlana Boym; instead ‘the past is stored here in
its unredeemable emptiness’ (Boym 2001: 194). Nearby, a concrete wall featuring
hollow human forms frozen in the act of walking underscores the point, these
seven exemplars representing some 50,000 individuals who trod the same path to
oblivion at this single railway station (see Figure 6.3). Back in central Berlin, gazing
downwards at the Bebelplatz next to Humboldt University reveals yet another
absence. An empty room beneath a transparent viewing panel bears shelves that
hold no books, a commemoration of the festival of book burning orchestrated by
the Nazis in May 1933. Loss of culture is again the overriding motif, with such
absences designed to force connections with the past in the minds of those looking
on.
‘Library’, as the Bebelplatz memorial is called, was unveiled in 1995. That
decade proved especially important in Berliners’ responses to their past. Not only
did these years see the city address publicly its role in the Holocaust (the decision

Figure 6.3 Karol Broniatowski’s 1991 ‘Memorial to the Jews Deported from Berlin’
at Grunewald Station. The sign to the right points towards the Track 17
memorial. Photograph courtesy of Philipp Ruff, 2017.
 Memory and the city  133
to build Berlin’s stark Holocaust Memorial was also taken at this time), but
following the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 city-dwellers also
faced a complex series of decisions regarding what to retain from the more recent
past, and how – or even whether – to commemorate division. Renewed capital
city status and a desire to acknowledge difficult histories in formerly Soviet East
Berlin (the chosen location of the Holocaust Memorial) amplified the tone of
public discussion. Attention focused strongly on the one hundred miles of the
Berlin Wall, officially known as ‘the antifascist protective rampart’ and later as
simply ‘the border’ in the Socialist East (Ladd 1998: 18). Erected from August
1961 onwards by the East German authorities, the security zone had sliced
through the heart of Berlin for nearly 30 years by the time of its breach in
November 1989. Official demolition began the following summer, concluding
in 1992, with various sections and fragments donated to public institutions around
the world, souvenired by locals and sold to tourists. During this time, many
choices had to be made: what to do with the crosses commemorating those killed
while trying to flee across the Wall to the West; whether to keep the stone
monuments marking the deaths of East German border guards; whether to
preserve the political graffiti adorning sections of the Wall; how (or if) to mark
the former route of the boundary; and whether to leave any sections in place as
permanent reminders (Ladd 1997: 24–31). The public debates around these
issues – debates coterminous with the rise of Wall tourism and concerns regard-
ing authenticity – provide particularly rich pickings for scholars of history and
memory.
East Berlin’s buildings, statues and plaques also focussed attention follow-
ing the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Obvious targets
included the former headquarters of the Stasi (the state secret police; now a
museum) and busts of hated figures displayed in public. From March 1992
an independent commission considered the case of East Berlin’s monuments
(Ladd: 196–9, 201). Not at risk were the Soviet memorials commemorating the
battle for Berlin; under the terms of an international treaty in 1990, Germany’s
leaders had pledged protection in part-exchange for securing unification (Ladd:
194). A different fate eventually befell the Palace of the Republic, home at the
height of the GDR to the East German parliament as well as eateries, an art gal-
lery, bowling alley, concert hall and ballrooms. For many East Berliners, the
building inspired ambivalence – it embodied state power, but it had also offered
welcome attractions and a taste of modernity. Furthermore, in 1990 free elections
had taken place in the Palace, and it was there that plans for reunification were
announced (Boym 2001: 187–8). Amidst public protests, politicians decided in
2003 to demolish the Palace before agreeing to construct in its place something
hardly less controversial in nature: a part re-creation of the Prussian Stadtschloss,
or Berlin Palace, a building originally dynamited by the Socialists in 1950 for its
imperialistic overtones. The site’s history might be especially convoluted, but in
this city such is the norm. Fanning out across Berlin, past and present collide
at locations ranging from iconic buildings to domestic residences with stories to
tell, or to forget.
134  Simon Sleight
Our final ‘prism city’ takes us to a third continent. New York has long show-
cased a particularly rich ‘memory infrastructure’ (Mason 2009: xxv–xxviii). Waves
of immigrants have left their mark and been remembered; buildings and memorial
representations flag local concerns as well as national milestones. Since at least
the 1890s, argues historian Randall Mason, progressives and preservationists
have sought to add or protect memorial fixtures amidst the flux of a heightened
modernity of change, redevelopment and property speculation (Mason 2009:
xx–xiv), entailing that by the close of the twentieth century the 22.7 square miles
of Manhattan Island ranked among the world’s most thickly populated areas for
formal memorialization. On all of this there is rich and insightful scholarship (see,
for instance, discussion of Ellis Island elsewhere in this volume). But a survey of
such writing is not my purpose here. Instead I turn my attention to the effects
of a dual intrusion into the fabric of New York, and Manhattan in particular.
The deliberate collision of two passenger airliners with the twin towers of the
city’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 is an event of such significance
that it generated its own shorthand name, ‘9/11’, as well as a military conflict and
a period of agonized debate about how best to remember the victims. Unlike the
examples of Hiroshima and wartime Berlin, this was a defining episode that could
be watched live on television and later replayed to infinity via documentaries and
by video-sharing websites such as YouTube. As with the case of the Berlin Wall,
discussions about potential means of public memorialization were held while
recollections were still very raw. The challenge, as outlined by Huyssen, was how
to reconcile the desire to re-use a prized piece of real estate in lower Manhattan
with the need to commemorate the dead and to memorialize a portentous
historical event (Huyssen 2003: 158).
Such large-scale concerns mattered little in the immediate aftermath of the
attacks. Even as underground fires continued to send plumes of smoke across
the New York skyline, city-dwellers created their own ‘vernacular’ memorials,
partly in the hope of eliciting information about missing loved ones, and partly
as commemorative acts in the absence of recovered bodies. Urban anthropologist
Elizabeth Greenspan and historian Kay Ferres have assessed these ephemeral
memorial sites, recording their own personal reflections as well as the reactions of
those around them (Greenspan 2005; Ferres 2013). Visiting the cordoned-off
perimeter around the collapsed buildings to take field notes in the weeks after the
destruction, Greenspan observed clusters of homemade memorial objects such
as posters, poems, photographs and drawings. Boundary fencing also carried
thousands of inked messages, turning what was intended as a barrier into a ‘col-
lective project of remembrance and grieving’, and simultaneously initiating a
heritage site (Greenspan 2005: 374–8). Some memorials recorded individual lives,
Greenspan observed; others expressed ideals transcending national concerns and
suggested that ‘Ground Zero’, as it became known, was a global memory place
(Greenspan 2005: 379–80). Writing more than a decade on from the events of
September 2001, Ferres locates the people’s tributes (commemorations long since
removed and in some cases retained by museums) as a preliminary stage in an
unfolding process of memorialization. To this end, the first anniversary of the
 Memory and the city  135
attacks initiated a change, with greater official oversight of commemorative
impulses hereon in – bells tolling to mark the times of collision, for instance, and
politicians and surviving family members invited down into cleared land at Ground
Zero to bear witness to a solemn roll call of the dead (Ferres 2013: 48).
The question of what to do with the site itself remained. Architect Daniel
Libeskind, by now famous for his work in Berlin, assumed responsibility as master
planner amidst considerable public rancour. His original designs referenced
memory in multiple ways: a new ‘Freedom Tower’ was to top out at 1776 feet
(the number matching the date of the American Declaration of Independence);
the original footprints of the Twin Towers were to remain visible; surrounding
buildings would echo the upward sweep of the Statue of Liberty, casting no
shadows over the area (Libeskind 2009: 80–81). Little remains of Libeskind’s
detailed vision on site today, though two significant aspects of his ‘Memory
Foundations’ plan persisted through multiple revisions and the hiring and firing
of new architects. A new skyscraper, One World Trade Center, retains the height
originally envisaged, and the footprints of the Twin Towers survive as memorial
spaces. Some 5,201 submissions were received from 63 nations for the design
of these spaces, another treasure trove of contemporary (and global) responses
to memorialization.2 Michael Arad’s winning entry, opened to the public in
September 2011, features cascading waterfalls and the names of the deceased cut
into metal sheets flanking square pools (see Figure 6.4). As in Berlin, the presence
of absence is again prevalent. An attempt ‘to express the inexpressible’, notes
Ferres, the trope of the void ‘stands for unintelligibility as much as for loss’ (Ferres
2013: 50). Deciduous trees planted nearby – including a surviving pear tree from
the original World Trade Center site – soften the memorial precinct, and are
intended to signify rebirth (Arad and Walker 2003: 526). Visitors can also tour
the 9/11 Memorial Museum, descending beneath ground to take in artefacts
including twisted steel girders and the possessions of the deceased. There are
striking similarities here with Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, with the site as
a whole offering a bounded yet nonetheless global space for affective connection
with the past.
Voids; absences; suffering; renewal: it would seem that Hiroshima, Berlin and
New York each foreground the idea of memory-as-trauma, trauma to which
contemplative spaces aim to confer a form of therapy. With post-9/11 books on
memory and the city bearing such titles as Wounded Cities, Traumascapes, Among
the Dead Cities and Heritage That Hurts (Schneider and Susser 2003; Tumarkin
2005; Grayling 2006; Sather-Wagstaff 2011), it can be tempting to conflate urban
memory with an inventory of horrors. This would be short-sighted. As Huyssen
argues, to collapse memory into trauma alone is excessively narrow because it
unduly limits the role of human agency. ‘Memory’, Huyssen implores, ‘whether
individual or generational, political or public, is always more than only the prison
house of the past’ (Huyssen 2003: 8). A particular definition of urban memory is
useful here in extending our scope and suggesting further avenues of inquiry. In
an edited collection on the topic, architectural historian Mark Crinson suggests
that urban memory commonly ‘indicates the city as a physical landscape and
Figure 6.4 ‘Reflecting Absence’: memorialization at the site of one of the Twin
Towers in New York. Each year flowers are placed into the metal sheeting
on the birthdays of those remembered here. Beyond the trees the new
One World Trade Center building climbs skywards. Photograph courtesy
of the author, 2014.
 Memory and the city  137
collection of objects and practices that enable recollections of the past and that
embody the past through traces of the city’s sequential building and rebuilding’
(Crinson 2005: xii). In suggesting things as well as activities, Crinson’s deline-
ation promises a more thematic approach, an approach pursued in the remainder
of this chapter.

Monumental memory
Mention monuments as a category of analysis, and thoughts might turn towards
ruins like the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima. But most likely one will think first of
statues – these are ossified or frozen history, representing (in the words of jurist
Sanford Levinson) deliberate efforts ‘to stop time’ (Levinson 1998: 7). As
discussed by Keir Reeves in Chapter 3 of this volume, French historian Pierre
Nora conceived such objects as ‘lieux de mémoire’, sites of memory that aimed
to trigger recollections. Importantly, Nora argued that such encouragements to
remember blossomed in France at a time when the collective context of memory
in modern society – the milieu de mémoire – was declining (Nora 1989). One
could buttress Nora’s grand theory by considering a veritable boom in the erec-
tion of statues in many world cities from the late 1800s. Producing a detailed
catalogue of Queen Victorias across the former British Empire, for example,
would be revealing in this regard, allowing the dates of construction to be com-
pared and explained alongside such aspects as local context, scale and the inclusion
of representational regalia.
Statues and monuments, of course, are mere stand-ins for broader understand-
ings of the individuals and causes they represent, though their existence and the
intentions behind them – intentions often helpfully elaborated at moments of
unveiling – can provide insights into historical preoccupations. Power dynamics
surround the construction of statuary and these forces warrant examination, too.
‘Public monuments do not arise as if by natural law to celebrate the deserving’,
argues Kirk Savage; ‘they are built by people with sufficient power to marshal
(or impose) public consent for their erection’ (Levinson 1998: 63). When
regimes change and relations of power alter, statues can often serve as awkward
reminders of a past many people would rather forget. Note here Coronation Park
in Delhi, for instance, which houses a diminishing gallery of notables associated
with the British Raj, relocated there in the 1960s and recently largely broken
up (McGarr 2015), or the treatment accorded to statues of Lenin in cities like
Vilnius since the sweeping political changes of the early 1990s. ‘Written in stone’
these figures may have been, but initial prominence does not necessarily entail
permanent survival.
Discerning public reactions to contemporary or historical statues is far from
straightforward. Historians can sometimes locate tantalizing suggestions, like
evidence of the ‘hundreds’ of personal messages left at the base of London’s
Cenotaph war memorial in the 1920s and 1930s (Michalski 1998: 80), but
following urban historian Graeme Davison we are entitled to ask plainly: ‘do
statues (still) speak?’ (Davison 2000). ‘If cities are characterised by any one mood,’
138  Simon Sleight
argues Steve Pile, ‘then maybe it is indifference’ (Pile 2002: 122). Feelings of
exhaustion – or at least very delayed journeys – would surely result, so the argu-
ment goes, if citizens engaged meaningfully with all the triggers for reflection that
cities yield. Author Iain Sinclair goes further still, contending that ‘Memorials are
a way of forgetting’ (Sinclair 2003: 9). Perhaps there is some truth in this claim.
One could point as evidence towards a 1960s survey of Liverpool’s residents
that found only patchy knowledge of the existence of statuary outside the city’s
central St George’s Hall and general confusion about which figures were remem-
bered there. Half of those interviewed also failed to recall the presence of statues
flanking the entrance to the Queensway Tunnel, opened only around 30 years
earlier amidst huge crowds and royal fanfare (Lynch 1998 [1972]: 63). Certainly
there is something to be said, then, for researching the changing pulling power
of statuary through time.
Yet public indifference cannot explain the contests that periodically flare around
existing statues. For the American city of Cleveland, historian John Bodnar
demonstrates that such tussles are not confined to the contemporary era. It was
here, in the early 1890s, that proposals to replace a memorial erected in 1860 to
commemorate the Anglo-American War of 1812–15 with a monument honouring
Union fighters in the subsequent American Civil War met with stiff resistance.
After increasingly militant proponents of the new monument (including Civil War
veterans) staked out their claim with fencing, defenders of the existing statue
gathered to tear down the fence and display their hostility to change. Public
speeches and the letters pages of local newspapers became arenas for the dis-
pute to simmer, with nothing less than an Ohio Supreme Court intervention
required to force the removal of one memorial and its replacement with another
(Bodnar 2004: 78–9). In this city at least, the representational value of public
statuary was hardly disregarded. I shall return to this theme in a later section of
this chapter, updating the story and explaining why the presence, absence or
design of public statuary continues to spark lively debates.

Signified memory
Aside from cohering around prominent statues and monuments, memory
operates in the city in more subtle ways. Scholars who pursue ‘semiology’ – the
study of signs and symbols, most famously as advocated by French theorist Roland
Barthes (1967) – have helped initiate alternative ways of reading city spaces.
Such signs can say much about the relationship of memory and history for those
who care to notice. Street names, for instance, often signify people considered
notable, or else record for intended posterity events, activities or places. To this
end, Shoe Lane and Petticoat Lane in London recall commercial activities
while the grand and sweeping Boulevard Haussmann in Paris is named after the
influential urban planner of the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Baron’ Georges-Eugène
Haussmann. In Australia, by contrast, the suburb of St Kilda in the city of
Melbourne (appellations bearing Scottish and English origins respectively) plays
host to raft of Ukrainian-inspired street names referencing the Crimean War of
 Memory and the city  139
1853–6. The aftermath of battle coincided with suburban expansion, and colonial
loyalists looked to recent history for inspiration. Indeed, in settler societies such
as Australia, Canada and New Zealand one can find an abundance of names taken
from elsewhere and intended to offer a sense of rootedness in a European past.
Indigenous placenames were also commonly adopted for smaller districts and
towns, albeit in frequently altered or misspelled formulations (for instance the
suburbs of Cardup and Yangebup in Perth, each word a mishearing of local
Aboriginal names for particular flora and fauna). The ultimate indication of the
power of urban naming is revealed when shifting historical contexts prompt whole
cities to be retitled – hence Salisbury’s renaming as Harare, capital of Zimbabwe
(formerly Rhodesia) in 1982, the transformation of French colonial Saigon into
Communist Ho Chi Minh City (in 1976), or Saint Petersburg’s evolution from
its earlier titles of Leningrad and Petrograd. India alone contains dozens of
examples for the post-independence period, perhaps most famously the alterations
of Calcutta to Kolkata (2001), Bombay to Mumbai and Madras to Chennai (both
1996). Earlier examples in the immediate aftermath of British withdrawal include
Cawnpore’s new designation as Kanpur (1948) and the switch from Ellore to
Eluru (1949). Over 80 streets in Mumbai also bear new titles.
Within the carefully named streets of deliberately named suburbs of purpose-
fully named cities, one can sometimes find heritage walking routes, another form
of signified history. Boston in America has its Revolutionary ‘Freedom Trail’,
while Shanghai promotes the Bund, a 1.5 kilometre walk stitching together many
important colonial buildings from the later 1800s. Each route features plaques
to aid navigation and to indicate waypoints. In London and other British towns
and cities, blue plaques mounted on walls are a common sight, scattered across
city centres and suburbs to indicate the dwelling places of people considered
‘eminent’ or the location of events regarded as foundational. Periodic walking
tours take in collections of the plaques, with the attribution scheme – currently
overseen by English Heritage – stretching back to 1866. Websites and apps offer
further aids to peripatetic connoisseurs of history and memory in Britain and
beyond, part of a broader digitization of public and personal reminiscences.3
Urban epitaphs can also be less prominent. Park benches denote often touching
personal memories of lives lead and absences felt; by June 2016, some 4,223
such memorial plates, each ‘with stories to tell’ and benefactors to pay for them,
could be found affixed to benches in New York’s Central Park alone (New York
Times, 17 June 2016). As with gravestones in cemeteries, the inscriptions operate
at different levels; their affective power is clearly heightened for acquaintances
and loved ones, and not necessarily noticed by others. Weathering or neglect
can take their toll, too – be they personal or public, memorials need tending to
remain legible. So-called ‘vernacular’ memorials might be more ephemeral still,
encompassing flowers and cards taped to a lamppost to commemorate a tragic
road death, white spray-painted ‘ghost bicycles’ at the scenes of fatal collisions, or
‘love locks’ attached to fencing or railings to signify relationships (Ashton et al.
2012). Signified urban memory can be accidental, too, constituting ‘unintentional
monuments’ in Boym’s helpful categorization (Boym 2001: 78). Examples of the
140  Simon Sleight

Figure 6.5 Attempts to ‘fix’ memory: ‘love locks’ attached to the Passerelle Léopold-
Sédar-Senghor in Paris. Photograph courtesy of the author, 2017.

latter include faded shop signs recording former trades, abandoned or repurposed
industrial buildings (sometimes retaining in name a former activity), outdated
graffiti bearing political messages, or old bill posters for events now passed. One
select group of intrepid urban explorers, psychogeographers, take special delight
in recording such traces, sometimes relating them to their own recollections of
the same neighbourhoods (Self 2007; Micallef 2010; Sinclair 2003). Following
their lead, rather than studying memorials in isolation, it can be especially effective
to study landscapes of different types of commemoration across city spaces,
though the balance between breadth and depth of analysis has to be weighed.
And, as ever, it is also important to ponder the memorial signs not permitted or
seen – in the Belleville quarter of Paris, for instance, no street names recall the
radical weeks and bloody end of the Paris Commune of 1871, nor is the important
role of the neighbourhood’s municipal building marked at the site (Zederman
2014: 114–16). Absences and erasures can be accidental or deliberate – city texts
of history and memory do not write themselves.

Performances of memory
Intended fixity characterizes the forms of urban memory assessed so far. Civic
performances showcase a different aspect: memory-on-the-move via processions
 Memory and the city  141
or parades through the streets, pageants and theme parks conveying versions of
the past, or personal provocations for reflection amidst the bustle of city life.
Scholars agree that grand-scale public commemorations reached a high point in
Europe, the United States and Australasia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, during an era of heightened nationalism (Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983; Davison 1987; Glassberg 2001; Brown-May and Graham 2006). Memory
specialist Paul Connerton, among others, references as an emblematic example
the fanfare associated with Bastille Day in Paris (commencing in 1880, and
recalling a key episode in the French Revolution) (Connerton 1989: 63). Whether
prompted by the convenience of the anniversary calendar or the desire to ‘invent’
something new based on something purportedly older, a classic itinerary for such
events consisted of mustering, processing with props through streets regarded
as significant, and listening to lessons of the day from speechmakers (usually
politicians, clerics or both). Social cohesion around a shared view of history –
often combined with a reminder about ‘traditional’ hierarchies of authority,
rooted in the past – was a common aim, likely amplified by city fathers’ anxieties
concerning accelerated social changes. One cannot assume, however, that the
intended message was received; studies show that group spectatorship and even
collective participation did not necessarily equate with shared sentiment (Glassberg
2001: 62; Sleight 2013: 197; Griffiths 2014: 153–82).
The processional message was as much local as national by the early 1900s,
sponsored by suburban ideals and city boosterism. In Ilford, a district then located
at London’s eastern periphery, a carnival in 1910 featured representations of rural
life including blacksmiths and milkmaids alongside floral motifs. This pastoral
emphasis was significant, argues urban historian Dion Georgiou, because it came
just as Ilford was being encroached upon by metropolitan sprawl. Amidst the
laying out of new streets, the procession can hence be read as at least in part an
effort to assert continuity with a slowly vanishing past, an emphasis also evoked
in selected press commentary at the time (Georgiou 2014: 228–39). A romantic
vision also characterized Philadelphia’s 1908 festivities marking the city’s 225th
birthday. One float, titled ‘City Beautiful’, presented to crowds a colossal Quaker
woman unifying through prayer the 28 pre-existing localities. Pointedly, descend-
ants of early settlers were invited to dress and parade as their forebears, while
representatives of later arrivals including the Irish, Italians and Poles were over-
looked (Glassberg 2001: 68). Addressing the selectivity of collective memory
is always critical in understanding such events. Belfast in Northern Ireland –
discussed in Ian McBride’s chapter elsewhere in this book – is a case in point in
this regard, its summer ‘marching season’ a tinderbox of competing claims to
history and territory (Gorby 2004).
Performances of memory can also take us to re-created streets bounded by
ticket booths and gift shops. Albeit often located outside cities (given the con-
straints of available space), so-called ‘living history’ museums are commonly
focused on urban themes. On the outskirts of Nikkō in Japan, for instance, sight-
seers can ‘step back in time’ at Edo Wonderland, taking in a re-created market,
sword-smith’s and courtesan procession, while at Sovereign Hill in the city of
142  Simon Sleight

Figure 6.6 Historical ‘activators’ at Ballarat’s Sovereign Hill. Re-created nineteenth-

century buildings line the street. Photograph courtesy of the author,
2016.

Ballarat the Australian gold rush of the 1850s is brought to life by costumed
‘activators’ venturing up and down a re-presented Main Street (see Figure 6.6) or
guiding visitors through recreations of underground mine workings.4 Offering
depictions of eighteenth-century Virginian life, Colonial Williamsburg is the larg-
est visitor attraction of this type, and one among dozens in the United States
alone. Such experiences help fulfil what historian Raphael Samuel calls ‘the quest
for immediacy, the search for a past which is palpably and visibly present’ (Samuel
2012: 175). Like ‘open world’ video games offering participant exploration
of historical settings rendered digitally, this is immersive history, available for the
price of an entry ticket.
That many more people engage with the past in this way than through studi-
ously footnoted library books can be a cause for consternation – and indeed
annoyance – among some professional historians, who worry about the authentic-
ity of living history attractions. ‘Real’ period buildings (or else sometimes
very carefully researched approximations of them) can lend a sense of verisimili-
tude, it is argued, but the complexities and inequities of urban living are usually
overlooked. Academic historians can hence be sniffy about what many perceive
as a sanitized version of an unchanging past (Evans 1991). As summarized by
Samuel:
 Memory and the city  143
‘Living history’ . . . shows no respect for the integrity of either the historical
record or the historical event. It plays snakes and ladders with the evidence,
assembling its artefacts as though they were counters in a board game. It
treats the past as though it was an immediately accessible present, a series of
exhibits which can be seen and felt and touched. It blurs the distinction
between fact and fiction . . .
(Samuel 2012: 197)

And yet, Samuel continues, the practice and ambition of living history actually
corresponds with several traditional scholarly aims, not least the desire to give
voice to the dead, to make ‘flesh-and-blood figures out of fragments’. Historians
similarly dramatize evidence, he observes, offering choreographed versions of the
past using a cast of characters that they themselves select (Samuel 2012: 197).
The academic art of ‘thick description’, one might add – namely the technique of
taking the reader direct to the unfolding historical moment through an informed
portrayal of the past – is perhaps also not so far removed from the re-created
Main Street, or the delights of Edo Wonderland. Certainly there is scope for rich
comparative analysis of the multitude of living history museums opened across the
world since the mid-twentieth century, and room to further evaluate what they
imply about the relationship between past and present.
The performances of the past showcased in processions, pageants and historical
theme parks are ephemeral: parades pass by and entry to historical theme parks is
time bound (pun intended). More fleeting still is a final category of performed
memories: pop-up enactments. Coinciding with the centenary of the First World
War, for instance, the British ‘we’re here because we’re here’ project garnered very
substantial public attention in 2016. On 1 July, a hundred years on from the first
day of the Battle of the Somme, some 1,400 volunteers dressed in reproduced
military uniforms appeared unannounced across the United Kingdom, clustering
together in shopping centres, car parks and train stations. Periodically breaking
out into song – ‘we’re here because we’re here’ was a caustic refrain in the trenches
– the volunteers marched or stood in silence, boarded trains (including the
London Underground) and when approached handed out small cards detailing
the particulars of one of the 19,240 soldiers from British regiments killed in
France on a single day in 1916. ‘Most memorials you have to go to’, explained
Jeremy Deller, the artist behind the performance piece; ‘This is a memorial that
will actually come to you just when you’re not expecting it.’5 Photographs of the
event capture a ghostly atmosphere of past and present comingling, lost legions
made flesh and blood in the form of mostly mute volunteers.
While town and city centres provided the most prominent settings for
Deller’s pop-up commemorations, ‘we’re here because we’re here’ was not solely
concerned with urban memory. Other artists tackle this theme directly, however.
As cases in point, a number of photographers have been prompted to produce
documentary interventions by the relentless demolition and construction within
Chinese cities since the 1990s. In Chen Shaoxiong’s 1997 Street series, for exam-
ple, three-dimensional photo-collages of Guangzhou are held by the artist in front
144  Simon Sleight
of matching locations around the city, and photographed again for posterity. The
task is hopeless, admits the artist: ‘I feel that the speed at which I photograph
the streets of Guangzhou will never catch up with the speed at which the streets
of Guangzhou are changing . . . For this reason I don’t dare to leave Guangzhou
for long’ (Jiang 2015: 46). To the north, in Beijing, Wang Jinsong’s One Hundred
Chai series (1999) also performs the work of memory within a rapidly changing
urban environment. The series features photographs of the Chinese character
chai (meaning ‘to demolish’) daubed by the authorities on domestic exterior
walls, doors and windows across the city as a prelude to destruction (Jiang 2015:
103–5). Wang’s images of these modest homes, homes condemned to make
space for high-rise accommodation, are an elegy to a disappearing age and docu-
mentary evidence of humble living arrangements. For the keen student of urban
memory, displays of such artworks, as well as chance encounters with historically
themed performances or visits to living history sites, provide important resources.
Cities are alive to possibilities for perceiving refracted versions of the past in the
present and a kaleidoscope of shifting scenes awaits those who stop to look,
and inquire.

Intangible urban memory

My penultimate category of urban memory brings to the foreground our very
personal engagements with city spaces. Something intangible is something
without physical presence; it might be sincerely felt yet not seen, sensed by
some, but missed by others. As I define it, intangible urban memory is often
individualistic – reminiscences of an absent friend in a particular location, for
instance, or recollections of personal triumphs and misfortunes triggered by
return in thought or in person to the site of a former school, workplace or lodg-
ing. Although not necessarily shared, these reflections are nonetheless democratic.
As historian and geographer David Lowenthal observes, preserved buildings (and
indeed monuments) offer distorting views of the past; they are most often the
creations of the most prosperous social classes in the most prosperous times
(Lowenthal 1975: 29). Personal connections, on the other hand, can apply
anywhere and to anyone; they are also likely to be deeper (Lynch 1998: 60–1).
The notion of intangible urban memory opens the city to everyone as an intimate
memorial space, or perhaps more accurately to the city as a jumbled mosaic of
overlapping memories attached to particular places that harbour meaning.
How can historians seek to understand this endlessly rich assortment? A
number of research strategies have been deployed to bring to light what is usually
discreet or hidden. Autobiographical accounts of urban living in times past have
been scrutinized, for example, their findings regarding remembered sites of sig-
nificance read alongside diaries, semi-autobiographical novels and other so-called
‘ego texts’ like surviving letters (Chauncey 1994; Sleight 2013). For contempo-
rary history, scholars have also interviewed city-dwellers, sometimes asking
them to sketch out on paper places of personal attachment. Kevin Lynch’s The
Image of the City (1960) was pioneering in this regard, hosting within its pages
 Memory and the city  145
composite drawings of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles as remembered by
residents. He later extended the exercise, this time publishing the drawings of
individual interviewees, many of them adolescents, for five global cities (Lynch
1977). Carla Pascoe’s Spaces Imagined, Places Remembered (2011) extends
Lynch’s chronological scope, marrying analysis of twenty-first-century drawings
of recollected 1950s Melbourne with insights from detailed oral history
interviews.
Most recently, based on discussions with one hundred Australians, public
historian Anna Clark has assessed both rural and metropolitan attachments to
place. One interviewee, Sarah, spoke of the role of Sydney’s waterside landmarks
in prompting potent memories:

My dad was very closely connected with Sydney Harbour, and when he died
I had this, and my family, we just spent a lot of time around the harbour . . .
it was part of a sort of coming to terms with his life and the loss of him. And
now, Sydney Harbour and the Harbour Bridge powerfully remind me of my
dad. It’s a really, you know, strong connection.
(Clark 2016: 123–4)

Significantly, Clark discerned especially deep and multi-generational urban

memories among Australia’s Indigenous communities, for whom the concept of
spiritual attachment to the ‘country’ of one’s ancestors is foundational. Douglas,
for instance, felt particularly connected to the past in Marickville, an inner-western
suburb of Sydney. ‘There are so many different layers that have happened here,
including the Aboriginal population – there’s still a sense of their presence’, he
observed. ‘So . . . even though I’m not from Marickville, Marickville’s my home
and my place of connection’ (Clark 2016: 132). We shall return to this felt sense
of an Indigenous past in the last section of this chapter.
Acts of accidental or deliberate forgetting in city spaces coexist with moments
of concerted or coincidental remembering. Once the keepers of intangible urban
memories pass away, those memories are liable to fade without the presence of an
ongoing group to sustain them, or the efforts of amateur or professional historians
to recover them. Other factors of influence are also at play. Popular representations
of cities past and present supplement and mould conceptions, for example.
‘Envisaged London is a composite of personal experience, contemporary media,
and historical images ranging from Hogarth and Turner to Pepys and Dickens’,
argues Lowenthal. Hence ‘we conceive of places not only as we ourselves see them
but also as we have heard and read about them’ (Lowenthal 1975: 6). Over time,
and sometimes supported by such depictions, memories can also shade into
nostalgia, with difficult aspects subconsciously edited out, or outlying details
quietly left aside when those memories are reactivated. Even eyewitness accounts
of very recent events – so beloved of broadcast news organizations in the immediate
aftermath of urban calamity – are necessarily partial. These complexities offer
challenges as well as opportunities for scholars of urban memory. If, as Clark
observes, ‘the significance of place in our historical consciousness is relative, to
146  Simon Sleight
say the least’ (Clark 2016: 131), we need to seek to better understand why this is
so. We also need to consider appeals in public to reflect on the pluralities of
people’s backgrounds and orientations as well as on so-called ‘counter-memories’
– aspects of memorial culture running against the grain of dominant (often state-
sponsored) viewpoints (Boyer 1994: 28). I move next to addressing these matters
among others; I do so through tuning in to a number of recent and often
controversial discussions about memory in cities around the world.

Intersections of memory
In her celebrated 1995 book The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public
History, historian of the United States Dolores Hayden asked a direct question:
‘where are the Native American, African American, Latino, and Asian American
landmarks?’ (Hayden 1997 [1995]: 7) For over two decades now, those concerned
with urban memory across the world have been grappling with the implications
of this urgent query. A diversity of strategies has resulted: lobby groups have
sought to raise new memorials, students have led demands for icons of earlier eras
to be torn down, and historians have helped compose fresh information panels
for monuments regarded (albeit rarely universally) as problematic. Pioneering
research has also yielded new accounts of historically disenfranchised groups.
These efforts build on older campaigns to sponsor annual cycles of remembrance
and celebration such as National Hispanic Heritage Month (in the United States)
and Black History Month (also in the United States, as well as in Britain and
Canada). Competing in already crowded calendars, bookshops and city squares,
such activities are intersectional because they overlap with and cut across other
forms of memory-making, often acknowledging the multiplicity of historical
identities attached to places and people. A focus in what follows on Indigeneity
and then on sexuality bears out the possibilities and potential pitfalls of these
initiatives for a more rounded culture of urban memory.
The public recognition of Indigenous histories that have both pre-dated and
endured the establishment of settler colonial cities has been regarded as particularly
pressing since the turn of the century. As postcolonial Latin Americanist Gustavo
Verdesio comments, the histories of Indigenous pasts are often ‘invisible at a
glance’, disguised by dominant Western regimes of seeing landscapes (2010:
347–50). For the Native American and First Nations territories of North America,
historian Coll Thrush is among a growing cadre of scholars helping to bring to
light the suppressed and the hidden through painstaking research including
partnerships with local Indigenous communities. In Native Seattle: Histories from
the Crossing-Over Place (2007), Thrush assesses a city that would seem on first
encounter to buck a trend. Seattle, Thrush observes, has long emphasized its
Native American history – via totem poles, festivals, naming practices and the
motifs of urban infrastructure – but such recognition has commonly served only
to marginalize Native Americans as passive, metaphorical, anti-urban and lost to
the march of time (Thrush 2007: 3–16). In an effort to help counter practices of
widespread cultural appropriation, ignorance, misnaming and much more, Thrush
 Memory and the city  147
and linguist Nile Thompson consulted to create ‘An Atlas of Indigenous Seattle’.
This extraordinary document fully employs the concept of the palimpsest, ‘peeling
back’ decades of overlaying structures and memories to reconstruct complex
geographies of everyday life on the eve of white settlement. Intended as a prelude
to further mappings of subsequent Native American urban occupation, the atlas
flags the locations of former towns, fisheries, trails where canoes were carried,
and places with especially strong spiritual meaning (Thrush and Thompson
2007: 209–55).
As in North America, so in Australia and South Africa: among cities thick with
memorials to settler colonial endeavour, few sites of formal public memory con-
nect in meaningful ways to pre- or post-contact Indigenous histories. Occlusions
are manifold – Canberra’s national War Memorial, for instance, acknowledges
Indigenous soldiers who served Australia and the British Empire in global con-
flicts, but overlooks those Indigenous warriors who fought the white invaders
during Australia’s frontier wars. In post-apartheid South Africa, the gargantuan
Voortrekker Monument on the outskirts of Pretoria presents similar paradoxes.
Built between 1937 and 1949, the monument honours the memory of the ‘Great
Trek’ in which (white) Afrikaners colonized interior lands in the early nineteenth
century. Given its celebratory Afrikaner symbolism, and fearing its potential dem-
olition under the imminent rule of Nelson Mandela, Afrikaner cultural
organizations privatized the structure in the early 1990s to protect it. This turned
an object announcing national significance into something more parochial, argues
historian Albert Grundlingh, effectively ‘shrinking’ its representational power
(Grundlingh 2009: 164). While many black South Africans still find the monu-
ment highly insensitive and historically flawed, the declaration of black singer
Abigail Kubeka, performing at the site in the year 2000, that ‘the last inch of the
country is now part of the nation’ served to alter perceptions (Grundlingh 2009:
168–9). A new Freedom Park, telling an alternative history of the South African
nation, now stands directly across the road from the Voortrekker Monument,
further reducing that monument’s ‘political voltage’ in the telling phrase of the
site’s historical interpreter (Grundlingh 2009: 173). To the southwest in Cape
Town, the Langa Pass Office – a place where government passbooks allowing
limited movement were issued to black South Africans under apartheid – is now
a museum following a process of consultation among a multiracial group of herit-
age professionals and local residents (Nieves 2009: 198–205), while on campus
at the city’s main university a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes was
removed in April 2015 following prolonged student protests that have since
spread to Britain. Legacies linger, however, and across cities connected to fallen
regimes history in public remains especially hotly contested.
Artistic interventions constitute an alternative form of speaking back to the
absence of bricks-and-mortar memorials honouring non-white individuals and
groups, or else to monuments portraying only Indigenous loss instead of agency.
Spray-can slogans or sanctioned projections (like the nightly illumination with
Indigenous art of Sydney Opera House in 2017) represent one type of response,
personal performances another. Tahltan Nation artist Peter Morin’s ‘Cultural
148  Simon Sleight
Graffiti’ project, for instance, witnessed Morin transport First Nation songs from
present-day Canada to London’s monuments in 2013, singing Indigenous
spiritual meaning into the surfaces of stones regarded as living embodiments of
colonial power.6 Sound also accompanies visual acknowledgement at William
Barak Bridge in Melbourne. This pedestrian walkway, which carries the Anglicized
name of Beruk Barak (1824–1903), a Wurundjeri leader and emissary, is most
frequently used by spectators passing to and from the nearby Melbourne
Cricket Ground on match days. Since 2006 it has hosted ‘Proximities: local
histories/global entanglements’, a multi-channel sound installation that projects
the voices of some 53 nationalities – one for each Commonwealth nation then
represented in the Australian census – interweaved with an Indigenous sound-
scape of clapsticks, speech and song.7 The simultaneous sounds produced by
‘Proximities’ exemplify my points about intersectional urban memories,
introducing thousands of Melburnians, as well as interstate and overseas visitors,
to a diversity of voices in a single location every week, and perhaps in turn
stimulating urban memories anew.
Without similar care, however, memorial artwork can prove short-sighted.
Across town in Melbourne, for example, an apartment block that bears across the
balconies of its 32 storeys the face of William Barak has been criticized for its
location (on the site of a former brewery), its associations (luxury dwelling for
sale in the context of the Indigenous land rights struggles), and its superficiality
(see Figure 6.7). For art historian David Hansen, the ‘Portrait’ building uses the
patina of Aboriginality to mask motives of profit, glossing over ‘the painful truth
of Indigenous and settler history’ (Hansen 2012). Despite some similar
reservations, historian Christine Hansen is more generous, deeming the building
‘a poetic and welcome intervention in the cityscape’, reminding Melburnians of
meanings that underpin the contemporary fabric of metropolitan sprawl (Hansen
2015). Whether loved or loathed, the building has certainly inspired dialogue,
and perhaps such debate is another step towards a fuller appreciation of the city’s
deep history.
Switching attention from race to sexuality – though the focus could equally be
on gender, age, social class, disability status, religion or other social demarcations
– let us now revisit one final time some of the cities already introduced in this
chapter. This act of returning is important for my arguments about entanglement;
as I hope is by now clear, urban memory is complex, and only through repeated
engagement can sustained understanding of the many coexisting layers of urban
memory arise. In Chapter 13 of this book, Laura Gowing’s essay on queer histories
constitutes an essential companion piece to what follows; readers should turn to
that discussion for analysis of important terminology and assessments of supporting
case studies.
On 18 November 2016, pink filing cabinets and protestors appeared at carefully
chosen sites across London. From Vere Street in Camden (location in 1810 of the
White Swan molly house) to Piccadilly Circus (a historic gay cruising area) and
239 Kings Road in Chelsea (home between 1931 and 1985 to Gateways, a famous
lesbian nightclub), a coalition of LGBTQI+ campaigners had gathered – with
Figure 6.7 The Portrait building on Melbourne’s Swanston Street. Designed by
ARM Architecture for Grocon and unveiled in 2015. Photograph
by Chris Samuel, 2015. Licensed for use under Creative Commons.
See www.flickr.com/photos/chrissamuel/19810111189.
150  Simon Sleight
their handmade cabinets – to call for a new ‘Queer Museum’ in the capital. Of the
13 locations selected, none was at that time publicly memorialized for its
queer significance, hence the comment of activist Nadia Asri that ‘Even though
homosexuality is legal now our history is still being locked away in cabinets and
it feels very, very temporary . . . and I think it’s really important to make our
histories and collective memories accessible’ (Evening Standard, 18 November
2016). Inspired by the existence of such institutions as the Gay Museum in Berlin
(opened in 1985), and mourning the loss through gentrification of iconic lesbian
and gay venues like The Glass Bar outside Euston Station (in 2008) and The Black
Cap in Camden (2015), the pink filing cabinet campaigners desired a permanent
place to showcase the achievements and setbacks of a technicolour history.
Colour – or more precisely its absence – has also been central to recent discus-
sions about memorialization in New York.8 It is there that the hands and faces
of two white male figures depicted in the Gay Liberation Monument, installed
after protracted debate in 1992 to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Riots, were
painted brown and adorned with wigs in August 2015. An accompanying sign
declared that ‘BLACK LATINA TRANS WOMEN LED THE RIOTS STOP
THE WHITEWASHING’. Highlighting the complexities of intersecting identi-
ties, and the shifting memorial culture within which all statues are located, one
of the anonymous painters alluded to the purported shortcomings of a new
feature film, Stonewall, in getting its history right (Pink News, 19 August 2015).
‘What we did was rectification, not vandalism’, the activists argued – a proposi-
tion partly supported by the fact that two other all-white figures depicted in
the monument were left untouched, as well as by scholarship on the mythologi-
zation of the Stonewall episode (Armstrong and Crage 2006). Two months later
and the Gay Liberation Monument was again in the news, this time for the
appearance of a ‘Just Married’ sign at the feet of two of the seated women in
the sculpture. Cast in 1980 from the contours of Leslie Cohen and Beth
Suskind, the two real-life women had wed, prompting the tribute (The Villager,
5 November 2015).
Adopting and re-working approaches from black history, scholars of the
queer past have also moved beyond the focus on the individual statue or sculpture
as a locus of memorial reflection. LGBT History Month is now ensconced on
the calendar in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as in Berlin. In
London, the British Museum and Croydon Museum have launched onsite LGBT
history trails to encourage fresh interpretations of their collections, while in
Birmingham the National Trust supported queer readings of, and performances
at, its nineteenth-century back-to-back working-class properties between 2010
and 2012 (Vincent 2014: 113–14). Outdoor history walks including coastal
Brighton’s ‘Piers and Queers’ tour also aim to connect sites of significance, a
central purpose shared by the ongoing digital mapping project ‘Pride of Place’
(assessed by Gowing in Chapter 13). That buildings including playwright Oscar
Wilde’s former home in Kensington and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern have been
 Memory and the city  151
re-listed by Historic England in recognition of their queer heritage is further
testament to a growing willingness to protect and celebrate sites of simultaneous,
ever-evolving meaning.9
In The Power of Place, the book with which I began this section, Dolores
Hayden called for a more ‘socially inclusive’ urban history (Hayden 1997 [1995]:
11–12). Recognizing that cities host many coexisting sites – indeed landscapes –
of significance, and that addressing shared meanings through understanding
multiple intersections of the past offered a fruitful strategy, Hayden’s first con-
cerns were for broader appreciations of race and space, as well as the gendered
and classed patterns of urban memory (Hayden, 1997 [1995]: 11, 136, 235).
Scholars and campaigners have amplified and extended this remit in recent years
to encompass an expanding range of social demarcations. There is still much to
discover and to learn. What makes an intersectional approach so alluring for schol-
ars of memory and the city is that it promises radical new perspectives tied to the
distant past as well as to the always-changing present moment. Such an approach,
moreover, tethers research unashamedly to activism, recognizing that subjectivi-
ties cannot be ignored. By embracing specific urban settings, neighbourhoods and
even whole cities as the objects of study, more socially encompassing – and hence
ultimately more honest – histories continue to emerge.

Figure 6.8 Flagstone installation by Slobodan ‘Braco’ Dimitrijević in Bern,

Switzerland (installed in 1984). Photograph courtesy of the author, 2016.
152  Simon Sleight
Conclusions
Densely populated, cities are also thickly inhabited by memories. As this chapter
has demonstrated, cities across the world are much more than mere mausoleums,
graveyards for lives once led. Memory in the city can be fleet of foot as well as cast
in stone, celebratory as well as sorrowful, contested as well as consensual. Once
one knows how to look and what types of sources to examine, cities become
ever more fascinating places for perceiving memorial culture. Here the personal
jostles with the communal, and the national inflects the global. Across diverse
metropolitan landscapes nothing is ever fully settled and the process of inscription
is open to all. ‘Human memory is both heightened and endangered in the urban
landscape’, surmises public historian Eric Sandweiss. ‘Etched into their hardened
fabrics of brick and stone, records of human interaction mark cities as sites
of endurance as well as of change’ (Sandweiss 2004: 25). As historians of urban
memory, our task is part recovery and preservation, and part decoding and
analysis. Through these activities we can seek to know how life was – and is –
understood, and approach both the present and the past on their own terms, ever
aware that between these temporalities runs a bustling two-way street.

Guide to further reading and online resources

The scope for investigating urban memory is vast, and an extensive body of
scholarship awaits the keen researcher. In addition to the works cited above, rec-
ommended texts on individual cities include: Catriona Kelly, St Petersburg: Shadows
of the Past (2014); Mark Peel, Good Times, Hard Times: The Past and the Future
in Elizabeth (1995); Allan Pred, Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the
Language of Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Stockholm (2005);
and Dirk Verheyen, United City, Divided Memories? Cold War Legacies in
Contemporary Berlin (2008). Especially insightful personal accounts include
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2006) and Walter Benjamin, Berlin
Childhood Around 1900 (2006). Significant treatments of Indigenous per-
spectives – a vital and growing field of research in recent years – include Victoria
Jane Freeman, ‘“Toronto Has No History!” Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and
Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City’ (2010), Coll Thrush, Indigenous
London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (2016) and Maria Nugent,
Captain Cook Was Here (2009). Among works addressing multiple cities are
Indra Sengupta, Memory, History and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora
in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts (2009), Jörg Arnold, The Allied Air War
and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany (2011), Jane M.
Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996), Marita Sturken,
Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to
Ground Zero (2007), Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Frank (eds), Memorials as
Spaces of Engagement: Design, Use and Meaning (2016) and Abidin Kusno, The
Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in
Indonesia (2010). Important interventions with general applicability are made
 Memory and the city  153
by Michael Hebbert, ‘The Street as a Locus of Collective Memory’ (2005) and
Umberto Eco, ‘Architecture and Memory’ (1986).
As this chapter has elaborated, urban memory is subject to rapid evolution.
Published book-length accounts should hence be treated as inherently time-bound,
and the same holds true for academic articles published in leading journals
like History & Memory and Urban History. For more immediate responses, local
and national newspapers are a vital resource, while websites and personal blogs
also showcase an abundance of useful information. Recommended examples of
websites addressing formal memorialization include London Remembers, Open
Plaques and Monument Australia. The website of the UNESCO recommendation
on the Historic Urban Landscape hosts updates on world cities on its website,
following an international agreement in 2011. On vernacular and unintentional
memorials in city settings, see for instance the Ghost Signs blog, and Pavement
Graffiti. Urbanists on social media also share resources daily. Melding digital and
real world encounters, podcasted walking tours can further supplement personal
observations of city spaces.

Notes
I wish to acknowledge my dual affiliations – to King’s College London (as Senior
Lecturer) and to Monash University (as Adjunct Research Associate) in the
writing of this chapter. I am grateful to my co-editors, as well as to James Lesh,
Mathilde Zederman, Dion Georgiou and Anna Maguire, for their comments on
drafts of this work. Thanks also to Philipp Ruff and Raj Patel for their assistance
with the Berlin photograph.

1 For usages of the phrase ‘memory lane’, including by Kaufman, see www.oed.com
and https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223590/whats-the-origin-of-
the-memory-lane (accessed 3 July 2017).
2 All of the submissions can be viewed on the World Trade Center website: www.
wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=683388.html (accessed 3 July 2017).
3 See, for instance, the Open Plaques website: http://openplaques.org/ (accessed
3 July 2017).
4 See http://edowonderland.net/en/ and www.sovereignhill.com.au/ (accessed
3 July 2017).
5 For information regarding the performance, as well as the quotation (taken from a
video interview), see the project website https://becausewearehere.co.uk/ and
a news report concerning its impact www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/
wearehere-battle-somme-tribute-acted-out-across-britain (accessed 3 July 2017).
6 Edited film of the performances, alongside Morin’s explanations of his ‘Cultural
Graffiti’ project, can be found in a short video: https://vimeo.com/119944337
(accessed 3 July 2017)
7 Further information, as well as sound clips from the installation, can be found online.
See for example www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000587b.htm
(accessed 3 July 2017).
8 My thanks to Agnes Arnold-Forster for sharing her insights on modes of com-
memoration in the city.
9 For further information, see https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/
england-queer-history-recognised-recorded-celebrated (accessed 3 July 2017).
154  Simon Sleight
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