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This paper analyses the myth of the Blitz spirit in British newspaper discourses of the City and economy after the London bombings on 7 July 2005. The Blitz spirit is a popular story of Britain during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance and resilience to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. Through Barthes’ model of myth, this paper discusses the myth of the Blitz spirit in memories of wartime London. A critical discourse analysis then explores the ideological impact of Blitz spirit discourses in hyperbolised coverage of City traders and the economy in 2005. I argue that the ideological complexities of Western economics and the free market were suppressed by a myth that sought to bind social classes together through evocations of British, wartime solidarity and defiance. But, this paper also argues that Blitz spirit evocations among City traders were contradicted by discourses that discussed British citizens as consumers through anxieties about the economy after the bombings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the use of the figure of 'Troynovant' in seventeenth-century London's mayoral pageants. The connection made in the pageants between the ancient city of Troy and London-as-New-Troy extended well into the century, and stood in apparent defiance of prevailing historiography. In the present paper I argue that the image is knowingly used as a stand-in, drawing attention to areas of civic discourse which might not be overtly stated within the context of the mayoral pageant itself. As one of early modern London's most popular and most public entertainments, the mayoral pageants' depiction of the city rewards investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The wave of interest in the Great Famine generated by the 150th anniversary commemorations in Ireland and across the diaspora indicates that public memory of the catastrophe remains vital to the formulation of Irish identities. The sesquicentennial not only focused popular, official, and scholarly attention on narrating the Famine, it also initiated ongoing debate over whether public acts of Famine remembrance produced meaningful or contrived connections to this painful past. In much of the commentary produced in the two decades since the sesquicentennial, sceptics and supporters alike have described Famine commemoration as a new cultural phenomenon – one that broke public memorial silence on the subject. Yet, there were various memorial practices and commemorative narratives long before the mid-1990s, most notably the acts of remembrance of Irish diasporic communities around the time of the Famine's 50th anniversary. This article addresses this issue in relation to Liverpool and Montreal – the busiest British and Canadian urban ports of entry during the Famine migration. Both cities were flooded with destitute and often ailing Famine migrants in the summer of 1847 when officials and residents struggled to contain a typhus epidemic that killed thousands despite quarantine measures. Though many of the Irish newcomers to Montreal and Liverpool out-migrated subsequently, Irish Catholic groups in both cities kept its memory alive through political rhetoric, religious rituals, and historical commemoration, often recalling it as the traumatic genesis of Irish emigration, and periodically mobilizing its remembrance in support of various forms of Irish nationalism. This article considers how public memorial sites and commemorative narratives were constructed in Montreal and Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century to entrench local ethnic solidarity in the context of sectarian strains and fraught socioeconomic circumstances, and to reinforce Irish national and diasporic connections amidst political contestations over Home Rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the organization, nature and content of historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on four pageants at St Albans, Hertfordshire – in 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968 – it considers the selection of historical episodes that were depicted, the role that pageants played in the life of the community, and the ways in which the relationship between past and present was presented. Pageants functioned as both education and entertainment, and were significant events in the creation of the public image of the city, although they could also provoke local controversy and dissent. They promoted a strongly local sense of identity, and civic pride was perhaps even more important to the post-war pageants than to those staged in the Edwardian period, as communities such as St Albans negotiated a period of rapid development and change in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the large-scale civic pageant that characterized the first half of the twentieth century rapidly declined in the late 1950s and early 1960s, proving less adaptable in the context of the cultural upheavals of the period. Subsequent pageants were on a much smaller scale than those that were staged before the mid-1950s, and adopted a different attitude to the national and local past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'No Diving' was a site-specific oral history and moving image installation funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund that examined the lido at Hilsea, Portsmouth as a locus for memories and recollections by the local community. The project set out to recover archive film of the building and record oral history interviews contextualising this found material, which would eventually be re-projected on to the building as a site-specific event. The project brought the artist to a personal, and the community to a collective moment of catharsis as the images and voices played over the lido superstructure. For the artist: a moment where personal and family history colludes with the sense of belonging embodied within an architectural space. For the community: a moment of reflection and re-projection of collective memories in which archive films and oral histories relocate the past within the present. The project was designed as an experimental/experiential documentary system that would engage with the community as producers of their own historical identity. The project questioned the nature of documentary since the real documentary could only be shown at the lido as a live performance event in which the audience participated as observers and the observed. In this way, the building served as a bi-directional apparatus, which simultaneously captures and re-projects historical identities through the camera lens of the project process. This project model is transferable and can be pointed at any building or architectural location. It turns a building into a living museum; a site of community practice that produces history and re-circulates identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author expresses his views on non-religious peace memorial rituals being conducted worldwide. He offers information on a ritual conducted in Leeds, England on annual basis wherein the locals would sail memorial lights at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The author also talks about the exhibition "Kokeshi: Stand Up, Speak Out, Make a Difference!," featuring an organization formed by the classmates of atom bomb victim Sadako Sasaki. There are several peace memorials in Bradford, England including an independent peace library, a university Peace Studies Department, and a Peace Museum.

This article describes the work undertaken by the public authorities of Bristol to construct, for this old slaving port, a collective memory of the trade in Africans. It shows how the use of urban space is necessary to resurrect that past and implies a visual model to inform a new gaze on the city. Through intensive action on the memory of slavery, the author suggests, from the work of Paul Ricoeur, the passage from silence to 'too much memory'. This excess can be viewed as the result of a political instrumentalization linked to the requirements of the British multicutural model. Further, these actions on memory reveal distinctly divergent intentions for the different communities of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]