Dana Arnold
Recently I used the concept of a heterotopia to examine the rebuilding of Old London Bridge in the early nineteenth century.1 I demonstrated how this Foucauldian notion allowed us to understand the bridge as a kaleidoscopic pattern of meanings that reflected and inverted the socio-political and cultural climate of London at that time.2 Old London Bridge symbolized the identity of London. Its history as a focal point of the national road network, such as it was in the pre-modern era, had earned the bridge a certain fame. And it had been the only link between the city and the south bank for over 1,700 years. London Bridge was one of the sights of Britain, if not Europe, whose imposing presence to those arriving by road or river served to reinforce the centrality of London to the nation as a whole while acting as a physical barrier and a symbol of civic order and authority. The decision to rebuild London Bridge in the early nineteenth century brought with it all this historical baggage. The much altered and partially rebuilt medieval structure, where the severed and tarred heads of traitors had been displayed on poles as both warning and welcome to the city, was replaced by a plain functional structure with few architectural embellishments, designed by the engineer John Rennie.3 This structure was, in turn, replaced in the late 1960s by another functional structure in concrete.4 But, unlike Old London Bridge, the nineteenth-century version had an afterlife as it was transported across the Atlantic Ocean and reassembled in the middle of the Arizona desert.
In contrast to present-day concerns about preservation and history, Old London Bridge disappeared without trace (Figure 12.1). Seventeen hundred years of symbolic presence was swept away by demolition teams once the new bridge was opened in 1831 (Figure 12.2). The removal of this icon of London and well-known site in Europe was very much in the spirit of looking forward and not back. Increased trade, population and traffic in the City necessitated better infrastructure, making the new bridge a symbol of the modernity of the early nineteenth-century metropolis. These concerns, together with a desire for improvement to the aesthetic of the approaches into London, meant that not only was the bridge replaced but also the site of the new London Bridge was moved 180 yards further west; a decision that required the demolition of St Michael Crooked Lane, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, in order to construct the new bridge approaches. At this time there was little concern about issues of conservation. A medieval structure – one of the few remnants of pre-fire London was demolished along with a Wren church, which had been part of the rebuilding process of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666. In the context of the present day these acts are unthinkable – we see the preservation of architecture as a means of memorializing history. The site and the fabric of the building offer an experience of history – a kind of physical and spatial narrative of events. Ironically the preservation of architecture ends its ability to signify history as it is no longer living – its memorializing capacity is halted. Architecture becomes a time capsule, or rather time encapsulated by space, which we then experience as an historical event or narrative. In recent decades the compulsive return to the past – to national heritage or memory has been a dominant
12.1
William Daniell, view of London Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral, watercolour undated
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12.2 Thomas Shepherd, London in the Nineteenth Century, 1829, view of ‘New London Bridge’, engraving |
feature of western culture. The growth of museums as engines of memory and history are adequate testament to this. The linear backward glance creates a past that is rooted in a kind of national memory and the objects of this memory are imbued with specific kinds of historical significance. Indeed, (with apologies to Voltaire) if tradition did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.
But the story of London Bridge is not quite so straightforward, although it has the linear narrative of a ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’, as a symbol of the City and the nation. The space – the architectural entity – has had three different forms, and three different sites, one of which is on a different continent. These memories and histories of London Bridge are interwoven and are in a continual state of flux and change. The two versions of the bridge co-exist – the architectural entity and, indeed, the symbolic space, have two separate and distinctly different locations. What can this tell us about the relationship between memory, history and architecture?
My frame for exploring this broader range of experiences and histories of London Bridge is Pierre Nora’s concept of a lieu de memoire. In his expansive survey of the creation of a French national memory Nora suggests that a lieu de memoire is a material, symbolic and functional site that is the result of the interaction between memory and history.5 Although these sites symbolize a will to remember and record, their meaning is not fixed and
may change over time. Many of the essays in this volume demonstrate the volatility of the interpretation and meaning of sites that have been memorialized and historicized. This process of analysis offers the familiar ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ sequence of events that depends on temporal linearity. Indeed, Nora himself relies on the passage of time to explore fully the slippage between memory and history. This can be used to examine the appropriation of forms and spaces for political ends – for instance, in Nora’s own case the creation of a French national memory. It also allows an exploration of the relationship of colonial spaces in the pre – and post-colonial world through Nora’s identification of the politically dominant and the dominated in the context of lieux de memoire.6 This enables us to recognize moments when a reversal takes place between these groups. Nora uses the idea of ‘distorting mirrors’ to summarize how spaces can retain the memory trace of the immediate and distant past – telling this story from the perspective of the present. The extra dimension that London Bridge brings to this debate is its physical relocation and appropriation by a different culture. This raises the question of whose memory and history is refracted and experienced through the space of London Bridge.
In my essay on London Bridge I concentrated on the issues surrounding the design and execution of the nineteenth-century replacement of the medieval original. My story ended with the opening of what I called New London Bridge in 1831, and the current 1960s’ structure received only a passing reference. I argued that the nineteenth-century version was a symbolic space with a symbolic identity that represented at once both civic and national pride and the class-driven power structures of the metropolis. This Foucauldian reading is not incompatible with Nora’s framework. Indeed, Nora enables me to travel further along this trajectory of meaning. The distinction he makes between ‘imposed’ and ‘constructed’ symbols is a useful way of looking at the symbolic dimension – the relation between memory and history of a lieu de memoire. Official state symbols are ‘imposed’ – their symbolic memorial intention is inscribed in the objects themselves and it is possible to identify the various forms that intention takes. On the other hand ‘constructed’ symbols offer the opportunity to see how the passage of time, alongside human effort and unforeseen mechanisms, transforms objects, spaces or people into enduring symbols of national identity.7 My argument here is that London Bridge fulfils both these roles as an ‘imposed’ and a ‘constructed’ symbol of different kinds of identity. Here, its role as an imposed symbol or lieu de memoire is evident in its manifestation as a symbol of modernity and of both civic and national pride in the regency metropolis. In addition to this, the bridge operates as a ‘constructed’ symbol within the context of its relocation in the Arizona desert. Its historical meaning (‘imposed’ symbolic status) still exists, but the bridge has been appropriated into a different cultural milieu. The difference between ‘imposed’ and ‘constructed’ symbols is an essential part of Nora’s intellectual project as they cover the whole range of lieux de memoire and so enable a ‘category of intelligibility’ for contemporary history. In this way I aim to be able to make sense of London Bridge in the middle of the Arizona desert. But I want first to recap briefly on the ‘before’ and ‘during’ of its narrative before thinking about ‘after’.