The ‘when’ of memory: Contemporary memorials to distant and violent pasts

The spaces in-between

While much work in memory studies tracks who or what is being remembered and by whom, the issue of when remembrance takes place has not been a primary concern. The ‘when’ of remembrance is important for a number of reasons and the gap between an event and its remembrance is influenced by a number of factors. Particular historical instances illustrate the process of moving from silence to official remembrance. Incomprehension, denial and guilt meant that it was not until the 1980s that Germany began to address the past and instigate the talks that would generate a wealth of discourse and new memorial building. Practical concerns can also dictate when memorialization takes place; the policy not to return soldiers’ bodies during the First World War placed time constraints on the processes of remembrance. Classification laws exist to ensure that a certain time period has passed before some information can be made public, and declassification often prompts a re-engagement with historic events, as with the reopening of Stasi files in 1992. The time for remembrance is governed by practical, political and ethical factors, and this corresponds to a ‘presentist approach’ associated with Maurice Halbwachs (1992), which emphasizes how the past is shaped by the interests of the present rather than by those of the past. Raymond Williams’ concept of the ‘selective tradition’ explores similar terrain by demonstrating that the ‘structure of feeling’ is ‘governed not by the period itself, but by new periods, which gradually compose a tradition’ (2001: 66).

Memory’s fragile status as re-presentation is a central concern within memory studies. While Pierra Nora (1989) bemoaned the waning of a direct link with the past via the living memory of lieux de memoire, Andreas Huyssen acknowledged that the ‘fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable’ (1995: 3). There cannot have been, as Nora suggests, a pure, whole or direct memory before any of the technologies of memory. The essential nature of remembrance, its ‘afterwardsness’, excludes it. (Laplanche, 1998).

Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ (1999) and Alison Landsberg’s ‘prosthetic memory’ (1995) provide more complex arguments that are particularly useful in relation to the question of the ‘shelf-life’ of memory and the status of cultural memory. The two concepts suggest that ‘collective memory’ is not limited to the past that is shared together, but also includes a representation of the past embodied in various cultural practices. Hirsch uses postmemory to analyse the experience of children of Holocaust survivors, and to ‘convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, it’s secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness’ (1999: 8). Similarly, prosthetic memory describes memories not directly experienced but received through cultural forms, such as the cinema and the museum. Both authors suggest that memory does not have to be connected to a surviving individual and can have a shelf-life that outlives those who participated in events. We experience a past that is collectively commemorated not collectively experienced. This foregrounds the disconnect between an event and its remembrance and how that gap can be used and misused. Despite their awareness of the complex politics involved in memory work they are largely positive about their studies in comparison to theorists Jean Baudrillard (1994) and Fredric Jameson (1991), who seemed to inherit the position of Critical Theory of memory as increasingly reified and commodified. These analyses show a concern with the nature of postmodern memory, linked as it is to notions of retro, nostalgia and heritage, which includes an anxiety about the speed at which we now memorialize events. Here, the time between an event and its commemoration is thought to have shortened and our rush to commemorate is seen as a result of the speed of communication technology.

The work of Hirsch and Landsberg represents the growing number of texts that have challenged a negative postmodern stance on the status of memory, and which celebrate the deep engagements offered by cultural memory and its potential to increase the shelf-life of memory. Their interest in the temporal distance of memorialization provides theoretical frameworks that suggest memory can reach across multiple generations. But can we stretch this to five centuries? Given that the Tower has been at the heart of British History for 1000 years the question arises why has it now seemed that a memorial was appropriate and even necessary, and why has the Historic Royal Palaces (HRP, the independent charity that cares for the Tower) decided to commission its first permanent contemporary visual artwork? To answer this question the article considers three factors in memorial practice and their impact on current curatorial practice.

Memorial art: memory in vogue

The success of Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North (1998), Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled Monument (2001) and Kathryn Gustafson’s Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain (2004) show how memory-orientated design currently dominates public artwork in the UK and is seen to increase the artistic and cultural status of an area or institution. The commission for the Tower memorial required that it display, ‘scope for public engagement and imaginative use of scales and materials’ and that it ‘interpret the Execution Site in a dignified and sympathetic way’ (HRP, 2006a). These criteria show that the curators wished to commission a contemporary design so that the Tower might be re-experienced through, and enlivened by, recent concerns and themes in the aesthetics of memory.

Brian Catling’s winning design, which replaced an existing aluminium plaque, consists of a clear glass pillow resting on two polished discs, one of glass and one of granite. Catling has described the glass pillow as ‘a replacement for the block; a gesture of repentance, a shadow of kindness’ (HRP, 2006b). By borrowing from the standard aesthetic repertoire of contemporary memorializing the new work encourages a reflective and mournful remembrance appropriate to events in recent memory. It utilizes the markers of contemporary memorializing by incorporating minimalist forms showing a dependence on light and glass and a commitment to involving the viewer.

In order to read a poem, also by Catling, which circles the memorial the visitor must walk around the memorial, ‘thus making movement part of the work and adding an implication of ritual’ (HRP, 2006b). The tradition of monuments that include names of the dead is repeated here with the names of the victims running around the circumference of the memorial, again inviting movement and participation. The indent in the glass pillow suggests the absence of the dead and echoes the metaphorical style of other recent memorials, including the 168 empty chairs of the Oklahoma City Memorial (2000) and the 52 steel pillars of the 7 July Memorial in Hyde Park (2005). The memorial, and the way the artist sees it being approached, demonstrate how it fits into a tradition of memorial language and design.

These aesthetic choices are influenced by shifts in memorializing engendered by the Holocaust. Memory-orientated design presented a convincing response to the difficult call for a post-Holocaust memory. The self-reflexive nature of counter-monuments showed a generation of artists, such as Maya Lin, Horst Hoheisel and Rachel Whiteread, grappling with the burden of inherited history that produced ethical and often deconstructive memorials. These new visual forms allowed for a mourning that realizes the futility and reality of death, and acknowledge unnecessary suffering without supplying a framework or narrative of closure and moralizing. James Young points to the way in which memorials such as Esther and Jochen Gerz’s Monument against Fascism (1986–93, Germany) dispense with traditional rules of remembrance and instead aim to ‘provoke … change … demand interaction’ (1994: 30). Michael Arad’s winning design for the World Trade Center memorial, Reflecting Absence, shows that recent memorial work still clings to the motifs established by post-Second World War memorializing at a time when new forms might have been expected to develop. These approaches, which once represented the radically new but now seem commonplace, may have reached their aesthetic limits and exhausted their potential for generating active remembrance. A level of standardization has been established in relation to themes of trauma and atrocity and the continuing growth of artist competitions for memorial projects has contributed to the homogenization of memorial aesthetics.

What is unusual about the Tower memorial is that these contemporary techniques are used to commemorate events of half a millennium ago. The use of these established memorial aesthetics in relation to events that took place so long ago seems curious and misguided. Other contemporary memorials to distant and violent pasts do exist in the UK: the blue plaques in London initiated in 1867 mark over 800 spots where significant events have occurred; the murder sites of Jack the Ripper’s victims are now marked by plaques; in 1986 the Company Bakers erected a plaque that accepted responsibility for the actions of the baker, Thomas Farrinor, who caused the Great Fire of 1666, and apologized on his behalf. In contrast to the memorial at the Tower these plaques are modest and information is relayed in a neutral fashion. They do open up spaces in the city in a new, reflective and historical way, but they do not require or encourage an emotional or empathetic engagement as the memorial at the Tower hopes to do.

The success of memorial art is reflected in the number of new commissions that deal with themes of memory and explains the prominence of architects such as Daniel Libeskind, the ‘memorial guru’, who stated that architecture was the ‘future of memory’ (cited in Doss, 2010: 7). Washington DC ‘markets its memorials aggressively’ (Finkelpearl, 2001: 43) and as a result the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the top tourist attractions in the state. In a document which explains his vision behind the project, Chief Executive of the Tower, Michael Day (2004) argues that the previous marker was not visible enough, did not encourage engagement and ultimately reflected badly on the management of the Tower, and stresses the importance of the project for their global reputation:

we have chosen to interpret [the site] with a mean-looking plaque and a prosaic plastic panel.… Worse, many people record images of this to take around the world, which becomes a poor advertisement for our guardianship and presentation of the Tower.

Here, Day, who initiated the project (which was then facilitated by Interpretation Project Managers, building surveyors, and curator Jane Spooner), is self-conscious about the role, function and importance of the right sort of memorializing. He proposes that while something like a simple carved memorial plaque would be an improvement, such an approach would ‘fail to take advantage of the potential of the project’ (2004). His aim here is to press home a central outcome of the project – that a more ambitious work would be ‘newsworthy and capture public imagination’ through its commission and installation (2004). The unveiling was indeed marked with a memorial concert held in the Chapel Royal on 15 September 2006 and the Tower of London’s flashlights turned red for two weeks after dark.

The business of art has been recognized by Sharon Zukin (1996), Rosalyn Deutsche (1996) and Malcolm Miles (1997), who have observed the way in which it is used as a tool for economic revitalization. Its importance has generated an industry in art consultancy (in the case of the memorial at the Tower, the HRP used the London-based independent agency, Modus Operandi) that works to provide clients with a database of memorial practitioners. The advantages of the acquisition of a memorial piece can be understood in terms of the recognized role of art in tourism and regeneration schemes – memorials are one way of expressing cultural and economic capital and making it visible in public environments. This means that memorialization and remembrance are not always the sole object. The motivation behind many commissions is to transform the life of a public space by encouraging its greater use, this seems to have been partly the case with the Tower’s memorial. Recent Site Management Plans do mention ‘intellectual accessibility’, but many more pages of the document are dedicated to the ‘physical accessibility’ of the site (HRP, 2007). Catling recognized that the surrounding architecture at the site ‘makes the movement of people across its open areas look a little unfocused and confused’ (HRP, 2006b) and he felt that the visitors who stopped in front of the old plaque ‘just stood and didn’t know what to do’; so, he added, that they ought to be given ‘something to do’ (Moss, 2006). The memorial was designed to act as a counterbalance to the ‘stoically rectilinear’ nature of the Tower’s architecture and to lead visitors toward and around the memorial (HRP, 2006b). As it is only 1 metre high, most visitors sit on the surrounding railings to view it closer to eye level and so it is one of the few resting places for visitors between the queues to view the Crown Jewels in the Jewel house and the Iron Maiden in the Bloody Tower. The surrounding environment means that the memorial’s position – in an open space between these two key buildings – controls crowd movement and provides extra seating.

The fashion for using memorial public art to transform public space and add cultural capital has influenced the decision to include a memorial at the Tower, meaning the initial motivation behind the project may not have been one of memorialization. The use of contemporary memorial aesthetics is also problematic and interpellates the visitors not as tourists but rather encourages them to be contemplative and thoughtful, and suggests their implication, however tenuous, when they may be unwilling or unable to accept the position of mourner. The article now considers the growth of legal discourses around memory and how these might be changing our relationship with the past.

Truth and reconciliation: the development of a new sensibility

All memorials, including the memorial at the Tower, ask us to take responsibility for the memory of others, but that is not to say we are responsible for the crimes or fates of others. While Catling sees the memorial as ‘a gesture of repentance’ and a ‘side step to the act of violence’ (HRP, 2006b), it would be too strong a claim to suggest that the memorial at the Tower of London asks us to feel responsible for the crimes committed. However, the language of repentance and forgiveness has entered into popular discourse.

Patrick West includes apologies for historical wrongs alongside minutes silences and charity bands as part of a ‘conspicuous compassion’ and ‘mourning sickness’ that sees us participating in ‘ostentatious caring’ symptomatic of postmodernity (2004: 2). West is right to note a shift in sensibilities – memorializing may well be a secular version that replaces belief in original sin and man’s universal guilt before God. Confronted as we are, again and again, by memorials (often to mass death), we feel the sadness and regret at the inevitability of man’s inhumanity to man. Memorials are one form of memorial discourse but the invocation of memory within a number of other broader identity discourses, political, ethnic and juridical, has become a dominant method for groups to contest the past. Memory in the law courts is mobilized to construct, rebuild and legitimate identity in places where people have undergone suffering and, in this new climate, is seen as something to be contested and fought for. The curators may have picked up on the current quasi-penitential obsessions around memory and responsibility.

South Africa’s 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Spain’s 2007 Law of Historic Memory represent important steps in the legal recognition of victims’ suffering and the attempts to provide juridical solutions. In America, African Americans and Native Americans have fought campaigns for formal apologies, land acquisition and monetary reparations. In 2000, the Roman Catholic Church, issued a document entitled ‘Memory and reconciliation: the Church and the faults of the past’ which outlined a framework for ‘seeking forgiveness for past errors without necessarily admitting responsibility for them’ (Robinson, 2000). Father Jean-Louis Bruguès, one of the report’s authors stated:

We have mentioned a few errors, but we could have had a very long list, too long a list. I fear the list will never be finished. The Christians of today are not responsible for the errors of the 19th or 16th century. We are not responsible for errors we did not commit.… We have had to find a way to liberate and purify memory without talking about responsibility. (in Robinson, 2000)

Bruguès’ comment is interesting for two reasons. First, he uses the word ‘errors’ to describe what others might see as corruption. To describe the persecution, abuse and neglect perpetrated by the Catholic Church as ‘errors’ is a massive understatement that takes us in quite the wrong direction. ‘Errors’ is too systematic a word, too cognitive, for actions that have such radical consequences for our moral and cultural values. Second, though he acknowledges the difficulty of constructing a firewall between responsibility and a ‘pure and liberated memory’, he insists on maintaining it.

The 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of Slavery has proven how some pasts, and our responsibility for them, cannot be forgotten. It engendered debate about the continued responsibility to the families of ex-slaves and the appropriate level of public responsibility. Questions were asked: should reparations be paid? Should the Prime Minister say sorry? He didn’t, but events were held nation-wide, from January to October 2007, peaking on 25 March, the day on which Wilberforce gave his historic speech. The reopening of the defunct Wilberforce Museum in Hull in the same year shows the momentum that had been gained by the memorializing interests. Historical events that had been commemorated and then neglected can be commemorated again, and presumably could well be neglected again. Who knows how long the new Wilberforce Museum will survive?

Public responses to the questions of responsibility and reparations reflected this ambivalence. For many, issues of responsibility can easily be avoided by dismissive analogies: why not ask for compensation for crimes committed by the Vikings, the Romans or the Moors? (BBC, 2007) Religious and political figures were more careful in their consideration of the issues. Archbishop Dr Rowan Williams displayed genuine concern regarding the Church’s involvement with the slave trade saying; ‘We are here, where we are and who we are partly because of the terrible things that our forebears did’ and ‘if you are living off that kind of historic legacy then, I think, you have a responsibility’ (Pigott, 2007).

The past is only mobilized when it speaks to present concerns. Racism is a persistent problem in contemporary culture that makes the slave trade and the conditions of its abolition of continued importance to our contemporary lives and identities. The Bicentenary was celebrated, and the Wilberforce Museum reopened, because the slave trade still exists – albeit under new forms of economic relations and human trafficking. Memorial events surrounding the Bicentenary not only allowed discussion of contemporary concerns and issues, they also served to mark the transitions and changes in economic practices and issues of human rights in the UK. The slave trade has had, and continues to have serious implications for the descendants of victims and for world economies. In this context there is a sense in which we must be committed to the acknowledgement of its continued effects and implications. However, how far similar claims can be made for the deaths at Tower Green remains unclear. It is difficult to see how the memorial at the Tower of London speaks to present political concerns or how it is of importance to processes of individual and national identification.

It is not only the design of the memorial, but the purpose and aims of the memorial that are unclear. The permanent memorial commemorates 10 people executed within its walls: Lord William Hastings (1483); Queen Anne Boleyn (1536); Countess Margaret of Salisbury (1541); Viscountess Jane Rochford (1542); Queen Katherine Howard (1542); Lady Jane Grey (1554); Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1601); Highlander Farquhar Shaw (19 July 1743); Highlander Samuel Macpherson (19 July 1743); and Highlander Malcolm Macpherson (19 July 1743). Why were these 10 people singled out for particular attention over and above the ordinary people subjected to public executions at various sites across London? Seven figures on the list are either royalty or nobility executed privately at Tower Green. Their deaths were controversial and had political implications. It is less clear why the three soldiers from the Black Watch regiment were included. This seems to be an attempt to be inclusive of these ‘ordinary’ men, who were shot on charges of mutiny while 100 men accused of the same crime were pardoned. All that those commemorated have in common is that they were executed in the same place. They were executed for different reasons, by different people, over a period of 250 years. The ordinary people burned as heretics at Smithfields, hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn or executed at Tower Hill are not recognized by the memorial, nor are the 12 men of various nationalities who were shot for espionage during the First and Second World Wars.

One could argue that those selected for commemoration were victims of the imprisonments and executions that characterized religious persecutions and political strife. The motivations behind the executions have certainly shaped the political life of the country and, specifically, the organization of religion. Contemporary English Catholics still identify with the martyrs of the Reformation such as Thomas More and John Fisher, and, correspondingly, contemporary Protestants still see the 16th-century struggle as part of the painful building of Protestant England. But even though these events reverberate in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, for most of the UK they are seen as a settled and uncontroversial part of the development of the country’s economy and social structure. The aftermath of the slave trade, on the other hand, is still working itself out in our society in disputed and potentially destabilizing ways. We are the troubled inheritors of its economies, cultures and attitudes and, for this reason, it is not fanciful to raise questions regarding this issue about our own responsibility for the past.

The issue of national guilt has become significant in recent decades, but English feeling about the deaths of 16th-century princesses does not have the profundity of the German Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (the struggle to deal with the past). Linked to the historical apology, which West claims is ‘completely meaningless’ because there is ‘nothing at stake’ and therefore acts only as a ‘cheap emotional fix’, the Tower’s contemporary memorial to past events can be seen as an attempt to inject deeper meaning into secular lives and as an effort to participate in a re-ordering going on more generally. In the recent book The Age of Apology, the editors suggest that post-war understandings of the relationship between the ‘powerful and the powerless’ have shifted, and that there has been a change in how we ‘perceive oppression and how to remedy it’ (Gibney and Howard-Hassmann, 2007: 2–3). This does not seem to be entirely beyond the remit of the Tower memorial, but the work of a memorial is dialogical and it requires participants. The usual functions of a memorial outside of remembrance might be to create social cohesion, community involvement and to work as an act of representation, in short memorials are usually intended to speak to a specific community. As Jay Winter has written, memorials ‘were built, as places where people could mourn. And be seen to mourn.’ (1995: 93). However, with such a large number of tourists of a wide variety of nationalities visiting the Tower of London, what sort of ‘community’ can the memorial hope to speak to?

Memorial museums: blurring boundaries and behaviour

The meaning of any memorial cannot be ‘read’ without understanding its location, but this is even more important when the memorial is incorporated into a tourist attraction, in this case one that includes a historic castle, an armoury and a Jewel House. With 2.4 million visitors in 2009–10 the Tower’s audience cannot be said to fit the model of the close community that Pierre Nora believed supports a living memory. As a UK World Heritage Site, it is a well-established tourist spot so it is expected that there will be the resources for different kinds of events to meet a variety of visitor expectations. The curators will be conscious of being inclusive of a culturally diverse audience and will be aware of differing motivations for visits. Faced with the responsibility of representing the Tower’s past, they must make ethical choices about how the site is framed and interpreted – a difficult job given the multifaceted use of the Tower throughout history.

The Tower’s predominant image as a place of grisly torture and gruesome death has been fostered by architects, playwrights, novelists, painters and curators from the 16th century through to the 21st. The previously named Garden Tower began to be referred to as the Bloody Tower after the murder of two young princes, Edward V and Richard Shrewsbury, 1st Duke of York, and in the 17th century, the name of Traitor’s Gate began to be used. However, it was not until the mass tourism of the 19th century that the Tower began to develop a clear strategy. The site, which had become a little-used military store, was ‘re-medievalized’ in an effort to cater to the interests of Victorian visitors with an appetite for gothic and romantic styles (HRP, 2007: 31). Victorian restorers, Anthony Salvin and John Taylor, substantially remodelled the Tower to centre visitor focus on the medieval castle (Wilson, 1989: 229). Historians have noted that the Tower’s bloody reputation is chiefly an ‘invention of Victorian fiction’, which exaggerated both the torture (48 recorded cases) and the deaths (only seven before the 20th century) that took place there in order to tap new tourist markets (HRP, 2007: 83). The original 1866 memorial plaque marking the site of Anne Boleyn’s execution also contributed to this narrative, as, after its erection, the site came to be referred to as the ‘Scaffold Site’ or ‘Execution site’ (2007: 32). This Victorian framework has been largely successful in shaping the way the site has previously been interpreted and it continues to shape contemporary readings.

Parts of the site promote this relationship with the past in a way that meets the expectations of key target audiences – overseas tourists and British school children. Williams notes that foreign tourists are particularly interested in instances of state crimes carried out against home citizens ‘because of their lack of ties and everyday immersion in the foreign society tourists are free to speculate … about imagined dramas of hurt, accountability and retribution’ (2007: 142). When addressing its younger visitors, the Tower has adopted a similar approach to that of the popular Horrible Histories series (BBC), by focusing on unpleasant and gory aspects of the past. ‘Beat the Block’ offers school-aged children the chance of historical game play in which they can ‘take the upward path that leads to freedom or the slippery slope to the scaffold’ (HRP, 2008a). They are invited to vote on what happened to the two young princes (HRP, 2008b) and visit the site where Boleyn was executed by the ‘clean stroke of an expert swordsman’ and the death spot of Margaret Pole who was ‘less lucky’ as a ‘blundering executioner “hacked her head and shoulders to pieces”.’(HRP, 2008c).

However, curators also need to pay attention to more recent trends and expectations. External pressures in the form of current tourist and memorial culture will determine different modes of presentation at the Tower. The growth of ‘memorial museums’ and ‘dark tourism’ reflects people’s desire for narratives of trauma and catastrophe, and the memorial can be seen as part of this trend for tourism that provides a heightened emotional experience. As with Williams’ work on memorial museums, Lennon and Foley (2000: 10) claim that, to accommodate western mass tourism, a global ‘format’ has developed in response to traumatic events that has influenced curatorship more broadly. Recent work in the area includes a consideration of the following sites: the National Chernobyl Museum (1992), Oklahoma City National Memorial (2000), Srebrenica Memorial and Cemetery (2003) and Murambi Genocide Memorial (2004). This list, which includes some of the sites opened in the 1990s and 2000s, preceding the installation of the Tower’s memorial in 2006, illustrates that in their number and global reach they are effectively shaping historical public consciousness and producing a standardized response to death at tourist sites.

Williams (2007: 8) argues that the emergence of the memorial museums means that old distinctions between monuments, memorials and museums are no longer tenable. This move can even be seen in traditional war museums such as the London Imperial War Museum, which previously displayed armaments in a straightforward celebration of the nation’s military past and now includes two new permanent exhibitions on the Holocaust and Crimes Against Humanity. The addition of the Tower memorial contributes towards this trend, in which memorials add experiences of sorrow, emotion and subjectivity to those of pride, interpretation and objectivity usually offered at museums.

In terms of the surrounding memorial culture, the year before the memorial was unveiled, the terrorist attacks in the UK led to new memorial works and events being commissioned and widely discussed – the first memorial was unveiled only seven weeks after the July 2005 bombings. It was a time of much memorial activity in which representatives of the government, the monarchy, the Church and the Mayoral Office of London wanted to be seen as leading public mourning. In this atmosphere, memorializing became an act of citizenship so that, for many institutions, it has now become increasingly important to demonstrate some memorial impulse. Day stresses that the way the HRP ‘interpret[s] the site speaks about the[ir] values as an organization’, and he hopes that the deeper ‘emotional engagement’ brought by the new sculpture will ‘signal a new approach for HRP in our interpretation of historic sites’ (2004). When he suggests that the memorial project will help HRP to ‘learn about the potential of this approach for other projects’ as it may be ‘significant enough to motivate new visits to the Tower’ (2004), we can see that memorializing here is being viewed as a potential tool for promoting the new sorts of values he feels will attract audiences.

The obvious difference between the Tower memorial and the sites considered above is that they commemorate events that took place much more recently than those commemorated at the Tower. Chronological distance is something that, for Lennon and Foley, defines dark tourism. They do not include sites that commemorate events prior to the 20th century in the study because ancient and medieval events ‘do not posit questions, or introduce anxiety and doubt about, modernity and its consequences’ in the way that, for example, the Holocaust, the assassination of JFK or the sinking of the Titanic do (2000: 12). In his comparison of visitor behaviour at the Colosseum and Auschwitz, Chris Keil also sees a correlation between chronological distance and responses to death and trauma. He finds that tourists in Rome are ‘imaginatively engaging with the spectators rather than with the victims of the spectacle’, perhaps because the Colosseum’s association with ‘traumatic history has become highly attenuated over time’ and the ‘horrors are much further removed in time’ (2005: 481). He ends his discussion by arguing that memory at Auschwitz will never reach ‘the cool detachment of a visit to the Colosseum’ (2005: 491). It couldn’t because the ‘unease’ at Auschwitz is about the ‘project of modernity or progress’ (2005: 481).

At Auschwitz, understandably, the visitors behave with a certain solemnity; drinking cans of Coke, laughing, talking loudly, posing for photos all seem inappropriate. Keil notes that this is partly due to visitor expectation; the visitors desire a transcendent, for some intensely religious experience and prepare themselves for it – they will it. So what are visitors’ expectations of the Tower of London? If tourism can be seen as ‘reassimilating trauma’ at Auschwitz because, as an activity, it is a ‘mode of commodification and ultimately of reassurance, of normativeness, of value-transformation’ (Keil, 2005: 481), what does it do to events so out of time that they have previously only been considered as a kind of wonderful ghost story?

Death is central to the tourist experience at the Tower of London but, as with the Colosseum, it has until now been treated in a playful and ironic way. Information relating to the memorial now encourages us in ‘contemplation, reflection and remembrance’ (HRP, 2006a), and a task sheet recommended for Key Stage 2 pupils incorporates the new memorial by inviting children to find the ‘glass cushion’ and then asking them to imagine how Anne Boleyn felt when she was a prisoner in the Tower (HRP, 2011). The presentation at this site of collective memory now combines the playful with the sombre (the sacred/profane, the serious/fun) and shows the gradual transformation of meaning (Nolan and Nolan, 1992) from celebratory to commemorative. It can be seen as a response to the trend to add a moral framework to the narration of terrible historical events and it corresponds with a number of the Tower’s stated aims: to make ‘links to visitors’ own lives’ and to explore the Tower’s stories through ‘interpretation and learning strategies’ (HRP, 2007: 124–5). Given that the Tower receives no funds from government or from the Crown and takes around 60 percent of its income from ticket sales, it is surprising that the memorial was commissioned, with an initial budget of £65,000 (Day, 2004), particularly as many of the Tower’s projects were suspended in response to a drop in visitor numbers after the 2005 bombings (HRP, 2005b). The memorial must have been seen as a chance to embellish the site and add the ‘fatal attraction’ (Rojek, 1993) that might extend visitor experience and attract a greater range of tourists.

Williams has described memorials as one method curators can use to engage sympathies as they make past events ‘close and pressing’ (2007: 158) and thus historical distance is breached to encourage visitor engagement and identification. Crucially, the memorial provides another opportunity to frame the Tower in terms of its Tudor history and make links to Anne Boleyn (the tragic and romantic embodiment of the age). A key argument in Day’s proposal is that visitors feel they know these historical figures ‘intimately, through television drama and contemporary literature’ and that ‘whatever the historical facts, the Tower has meant imprisonment and beheadings’ (2004). Although Anne Boleyn is buried onsite in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, Day realizes that the memorial makes events that have been imagined in numerous books, films and television series much more tangible. The subsequent 2009 exhibitions, Henry: Dressed to Kill and Henry’s Women, marking the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession followed the recent TV and film successes, The Tudors (2007) and The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), and continue to trade on the sensationalism of contemporary media culture and the obsession with past royal figures. The memorial is now listed as a ‘Historical Hotspot’ on the site: it marks an authentic site of death and as such improves the geographic precision of these historic events and provides another opportunity to prompt recollection as people physically move through Tower.

The Tower of London, like many other tourist sites offers multi-dimensional experiences through which meaning at the site undergoes various transitions. It is assumed that the visitor is able to experience simultaneously in one place macabre, blood-thirsty fun and reflective remembrance – unproblematically. There does not seem to be any concern that the site may leave visitors confused as to when the past must be taken seriously and sombrely and when it should be treated as dressing up. One might argue that we have grown adept at shifting between the different ways in which our environments are packaged. A culture of channel-hopping and internet-surfing is said to have cultivated a public able to move fluidly between different sorts of text and to read very quickly the types of responses and attitudes expected but here too great a demand is put on the cultural agility of visitors. The juxtapositions put into play make any real commemorative potential of the memorial seem dubious. In general, sites that deal with violent, but distant historical events, such as the Colosseum and the Tower, tend to encourage a playful engagement compared to reflective and mournful mode of representation found at sites to events in living memory such as Flanders or Auschwitz. The combination of these modes, in which tourists are asked to think about death and violence in quite different ways at the same site, produces an unsustainable tension that the memorial is unable to resolve. In his argument to promote the need for the new site Day insists that visitors kneel ‘as they think about the events of history in that place and perhaps about their own mortality’, and that the visitors are ‘reverential’ at this site, which ‘becomes sacred in the minds of all who contemplate it’ (2004). However, the site lacks a unified audience and so it seems unlikely that any of the traditions and practices carried out at memorials that make them culturally significant (laying of flowers, visitation on special days, prayer) will develop there. The goal of memorial museums to build empathy may be beyond the control of the surveillance gaze which sociologist Tony Bennett (1995) attributes to the museum.

The Tower may wish to borrow from the aesthetic and strategic repertoire of memorial museums and dark tourist sites and encourage visitors to think about themes of inherited guilt and moral responsibility. However, the goals of such sites are impossible here. Authors report the special relationship these sites have for survivors, their use for specific events or as research centres, their close alignment with truth and reconciliation commissions, and their emphasis on education; all these connect to issues of contemporary society in a way that is uncommon in standard museum presentations of history. While Lennon and Foley insist that there must be chronological distance from traumatic events so that a healing and educative experience can be provided, the massive chronological gap between events remembered at the Tower and now means that too much time has passed for the memorial to function in any of the ways traditionally assigned to memorials. If memorial museums and dark tourist sites can be commended for tackling difficult questions: ‘Are we/they still suffering? Are we/they still to blame?’ (Williams, 2007: 131) in an effort to right historic wrongs, if the answer to these questions is simply ‘no’ then we might have to accept the exercise as pure voyeurism.

Conclusion

Memorial public art, memorial juridical discourse and memorial museums, have helped to enact new memorial practices and, in some instances, they reflect a genuine desire to take ‘responsibility’ for past crimes committed by our ancestors. However, the lessons they teach cannot always be applied and the new memorial sculpture at the Tower of London is an example of the confusion we encounter when establishing an approach to particular pasts. The memorial is celebratory as well as mournful. It celebrates contemporary Britain, as a just, fair and safe place to live, where we are free of violence and tyranny. We are a society sensitive to the injustice of suffering, even suffering experienced by strangers 500 years ago. We are not a society that tortures or kills; we are a society that erects memorials. In this way, the memorial reflects the desire to communicate current values to future generations and supposedly reflects the changes the constitution of the country has undergone. So the example of the Tower of London memorial shows how our engagement with the past has taken on both a narcissistic and masochistic character. The memorial offers a chance for the display of our rationality, our civilization and our enlightened sensibilities. We subject their world to our values and look at past wrongs through the prism of modern standards. As a mode of self-congratulation it reflects a certain attitude towards the past that betrays a belief in the superiority of our own times in comparison with Tudor times. The ‘otherness’ of the past is expressed in LP Hartley’s well-known phrase, the ‘past is a foreign country’, but the memorial also reflects the tendencies and temptations of voyeuristic and hysterical culture. Our love of trials, bloody-thirstiness and conspiracies, on one hand, and our sentimentality and mawkishness on the other, show that we aren’t perhaps as far away from the tone and mood of Tudor times and that our public sphere is not as rational as we would like to believe but marked by emotion and sensationalism.

Memorials offer us an opportunity for a deeper emotional involvement, and a chance to show our humane feelings in a way that is over and above the usual tourist thrills of being photographed with a beefeater or posing on the chopping block. The memorial purports to enables us to ‘act responsibly’ on behalf of our distant ancestors, but perhaps it is simpler and more pleasurable to take responsibility for someone else’s ‘errors’ rather than confront complex contemporary concerns. The memorial hopes to provide a space for tourists to reflect on our capacity to cause harm and suffering, and to express a general and non-specific regret at man’s inhumanity to man. But ultimately, the remoteness of the memorialized events threatens the effectiveness and the integrity of the memorial, and undermines the memorial’s attempt to adopt a moral stance towards the deaths it commemorates. This memorial stretches the limits of remembrance and suggests that some pasts are out of reach in terms of our emotional or empathetic engagement, or of any genuine feeling of responsibility or sorrow.

The slick, sophisticated memorial fails to understand the relationship between site and commission. A more successful example of a memorial constructed many years after the events it seeks to memorialize can be seen in the monument erected in 1910 to the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Set on a bare hillside, the monument consists of a stone cross that turns what was an empty part of the landscape, unremarkable to any onlooker, into a site of meaning. The memorial works in this landscape. In contrast, the memorial at the Tower is surrounded by tourist iconography – the crows, beefeaters and torture devices – which go into making the Tower a successful and booming tourist trade centre. In this inhospitable and incompatible environment, the memorial is an eruption of seriousness and concern. The memorial poem addresses us with the hopeful words ‘Gentle visitor pause awhile’ but the appeal for us to slow down and reflect may be lost as it battles against so many other spectacles, not least the enormous queues to see the Crown Jewels. The Tower of London’s decision to erect the memorial reflects a growing resolve to take on large historical subjects and an impulse to fixate on grief and suffering. It remains to be seen whether, in this case, memorializing is able to assume the role ascribed to it.