S2 - The Place of the Urban Past

Author(s)

Rebecca Madgin (University of Glasgow)

Keywords

Urban Heritage Movement, Senses, Emotions

Abstract

The development of ideas surrounding why the past matters in the UK is often temporally located in the nineteenth century and attributed to a number of key thinkers such as John Ruskin and William Morris. Contained within this discourse is a veneration of the physical fabric which gave rise to a much-contested debate concerning how buildings should be preserved. These debates have focused on the degree of intervention into buildings as decisions are made surrounding their future. Other discourses have explored the values of historic monuments and sought to rationally categorise why we should preserve the past. These debates have retained their longevity and continue to attract much scholarship. Questions surrounding why historic monuments should be preserved have attracted much less attention. This paper draws on the findings from an AHRC Leadership Fellows project to argue that bringing together theories surrounding preservation with the everyday experience of the city can shine a different light on the motivations for preserving the past. More specifically, the paper will foreground the sensory/emotional reactions of key figures such as John Ruskin and Lord Cockburn to question the ways in which this influenced both the development of cities and the theory and practice of the preservation movement. To achieve this, the paper will conduct a sensory and emotional analysis of a corpus of documentary sources, including the writings and letters of Ruskin and Cockburn, and newspaper articles concerning urban change in the city of Edinburgh during the mid to late nineteenth century. In so doing the paper opens up an argument that the history of the heritage movement in the UK cannot solely been seen through the lens of the technocratic, the rational and the rural but that sensory and emotional reactions to changing cities were a key component of the desire to preserve the past.

Author(s)

Mikko Toivanen (European University Institute)

Keywords

Public Ceremony, Urban Space, Dutch East Indie

Abstract

My paper examines the efforts of the Dutch colonial administration around the middle of the nineteenth century to use ceremony and public spectacle to construct a narrative of the past and present of Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. My analysis focuses on two specific events: the elaborate official reception for the newly appointed governor-general Jan Jacob Rochussen upon his arrival in the city in 1845; and the three-day celebrations held in 1869 on the occasion of the city’s 250th anniversary. The carefully planned programmes of these events were designed to represent an idealised vision of the city’s position in space and time through a simplified narrative of the long imperial history of the city and of the Dutch presence in Asia; the cultural position of the city between Asia and Europe; and the historical relations between the various Asian and European groups that called it home. These intricately choreographed ceremonies extended throughout the public spaces of the city, inscribing elaborate historical meanings and associations into a cityscape that had undergone a significant renovation since the 1820s, and I am particularly interested in examining the relationship between notions of the past and the present as represented in an ever-changing cityscape. In my paper, will discuss how public processions through the streets and open-air performances mapped out the history of racial hierarchies and relations in spatiotemporal terms, with reference to so-called “new” and “old” towns and their respective structures; and the purpose-designed statues and monuments unveiled to celebrate carefully chosen snapshots and protagonists of the past as embedded in the cityscape. During the 1869 anniversary, specially arranged theatrical and musical performances were also put on to narrate a carefully calibrated version of the city’s past, performed in different spaces for different audiences. Finally, I will also discuss how this vision of a multicultural city and its harmonious past was contested by competing Asian and specifically Javanese narratives, and its celebration disrupted through active protest and passive non-participation alike.

Author(s)

Sarah Mass (Sam Houston State University)

Keywords

Commercial Heritage, Urban Space,  J.B. Priestley

Abstract

This paper explores the heritage imaginary of popular writer J.B. Priestley. For literary and cultural historians, Priestley embodies the voice of “the people” in 1930s Britain. As novelist, journalist, and critic alike, he rooted “England” in populist opposition to the financial and elite culture of London: the national spirit resided in the provincial communities in the North and Midlands that were defined by their democratic, cross-class, and productivist characteristics.

Priestley used the contested ownership of shared urban space to work through this dichotomous relationship between capital and province. Open-air markets, market halls, and other spaces of collective consumption were often his preferred stage. These literal palimpsests of the urban past -- spaces given to the populace by medieval royal charter, regulated by nineteenth-century municipal reform, and used by the itinerant and impoverished classes of interwar Britain -- rooted what was consistently “local” about the urban public sphere. Yet in an era of American-style shopping and the first waves of modernist urban redevelopment, neophiles also considered them to be sites of “underdevelopment.”

The bulk of this paper will therefore lay out the stakes of Priestley’s heritage politics, focusing on the 1939 novel Let the People Sing and the screenplay for the film Look Up and Laugh (1935). In these two works, Priestley’s main storyline revolves around traditional commercial space under siege from cynical big business and an elitist middle class. Only through harnessing the dual power of local history and small business are a plucky group of traders able to overcome the threat of property development. This paper will therefore end by considering what nascent interwar heritage politics--both fictional and “real”-- tell us about the relationship between public history and anti-capitalist critique. As fights to save urban neighborhoods from international developers and neoliberal projects become more heated in cities across Europe, it is worthwhile returning to similar eras of income and regional inequality to think through the history of “preserving the past” as a form of social and economic solidarity. 

Author(s)

James Lesh (University of Melbourne)

Keywords

Architectural Heritage, Interwar Modernism, Public history

Abstract

In 1934, Melbourne celebrated 100 years since its foundation as a British settler-colonial and free-enterprising city. The Centenary Celebrations Council, created by an Act of Parliament, sought to boost civic pride by drawing selectively on the city’s illustrious nineteenth-century past while charting a way forward for a city in relative decline. This once-great Victorian city, formerly an eminent node of the British Imperial world, had not yet found its twentieth-century stride. The 1880s Marvellous Melbourne boom – an era of expansion, construction and wealth generation – was being forgotten as the city’s collective memory of the era receded and that generation of Melburnians passed on. The city’s atmosphere was shaped by the long shadow cast by the Great War, the economic repercussions and social fracturing of the Great Depression, a growing Aboriginal urban presence and political consciousness, and Sydney becoming Australia’s pre-eminent city. Still, more than 500,000 people lined the streets on 18 October 1934 when the Duke of Gloucester inaugurated a centenary festival which would last nine months, comprise more than 300 events, and involve the publication of four public histories and the dissemination of countless ephemera. Historians have interpreted the centenary celebrations of 1934–35 as marking a significant albeit melancholic juncture in the emergence of the city’s modern historical consciousness. Two consequential historic monuments resulted: Captain James Cook’s Cottage, acquired from Yorkshire, and the Shrine of Remembrance, a neo-classical memorial temple to the Great War. Yet the urban heritage consciousness which this moment in the city’s life inspired has not been examined. During the interwar period, Melbourne adopted emerging modern planning and architectural heritage principles which would not only safeguard the Shrine and Cook’s Cottage but also many other historical, national, civic, ecclesial and vernacular places. This paper contends that the proto-introduction by architects and planners of listed areas and structures, protected sightlines, restricted building heights and conserved boulevards and green spaces – none of which were under immediate threat of destruction – must be tied to the underlying historical, social and economic anxieties which equally characterised interwar modernism in Melbourne.

Author(s)

Magdalena Rek-Woźniak (University of Łódź)

Keywords

Industrial Heritage, City Museums, Socialist Cities

Abstract

In the presentation I would like to discuss the development of institutionalized memory policies in Łódź, currently the third biggest city in Poland. Grown rapidly in the second half on the XIXth century it quickly became a multi-ethnic centre of textile industry and island of modernization in a rural society. With highly polarized social structure and strong labour movement, it also gained labels of “Manchester of the East” and “red” city and became a cradle for avant-guarde artistic groups. However, in the 1930s, as a city of over 600 thousands inhabitants, it was still lacking academic functions.

In the postwar period, Łódź remained distinct with relatively big share of unskilled labour force and low quality of life, but it it entered the new stage of modernization, marked by the gradual diversification of industrial production but above all, by the establishment of academic and cultural institutions of supra-local level. The foundation of universities and art schools, stable and publicly-funded network of theaters including opera house or philharmonic hall, became the elemements of the socialist project. At the same time, under new political circumstances the city had to deal both with it’s capitalist origins, the specificity of the local war experience (second biggest ghetto after Warsaw, extermination of the local Jewish population), but also with the inherent divergence from the broader Polish social imaginary, hegemonically dominated by the post-noble intelligensia. The early postwar period thus marked a critical moment for the construction of the approach to the local history and to industrial heritage of Łódź.

The proposed paper will focus on the development of local museums within the urban landscape: Museum of Art, Museum of the History of Textiles and Museum of the History of the Revolutionary Movement within the years 1945-1960. I will try to reconstruct the configuration of actors, interests and ideas behind their emergence as well as to critically look at their agendas in their founding moments. 

It will be based on the ongoing study tracking class narratives surrounding development of Łódź since 1945 which special focus on the memory policies.