12 November — This past week was reading week here at Queen Mary. Reading week is
governed by the same idea as reading days back at Lewis & Clark:
some time without class to catch up on work or studying. From what I’ve
heard from my fellow Queen Mary students, it is tradition for associate
students to take the week to travel Europe, to explore London, and to
generally ignore their coursework.
I have a little too much work due in the coming days to completely ignore my work, but I’ve done my best to combine the best of both worlds and have spent the past week exploring what London has to offer in terms of libraries, museums, and simply the physical London itself. A lot of my exploration has been helpful for assignments, and I’ve gotten a surprising amount of research done, so I don’t feel too guilty about the hours I’ve spent in the library (approximately 0.25) or the things I’ve checked off my to-do list (3 of 8).
I’ve seen parts of London I can’t imagine I would have otherwise seen. There’s something to be said for having the time to walk and explore without the immediate pressure of class or society meetings or coursework. London is a lived-in sort of place. London has lived and burned and lived again since the first century CE; coming from America, it is often hard to comprehend the sort of history I am seeing, everyday, with my bare eyes.
And yet parts of London feel plastic. They feel too new. The Stratford Westfield mall is a mammoth: a winding maze of stores and tourists and restaurants and, inexplicably, another one of the chain stores we passed just a few minutes ago. In the semi-darkness of a London night, the McDonald’s in Leicester Square boasts a pristine white and yellow exterior until nearly 3 in the morning.
I was told to expect old when I came to London, nearly 1,600 years of old that we never get at home in the “New World.” But I am reminded time and time again now that I am here that a lot of this “old,” especially the exciting bits, come from the largest empire the world has seen, one with a thorny and complex history of enslavement and colonization.
One of the many places I have visited this reading week was the Museum of London Docklands. The museum is a top-down experience; you begin on the top floor with a gallery on the origins of slavery in the British Empire and the continuing impact on the modern United Kingdom, before working your way down through time. The Docklands museum is a fantastic museum, in particular the first gallery on slavery. It is a thoughtful and informative exploration of how and why Britain became involved in the trade of people. While walking through the exhibit, however, I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that it took 45 minutes of travel via TfL, plus some wandering around Canary Wharf, and the four flights of stairs it took to get to the top floor of the museum to finally read a placard that explicitly said “slavery is bad.”
Slavery is in many ways the foundation of modern Britain. Slavery funded wide-scale and iconic architectural changes in London, slavery changed the racial makeup of England significantly, slavery brought the funds for continued expansion of the British Empire into the New World and beyond. But slavery is also very bad, and I do not think I should have to look so far afield to find something that acknowledges the massive contribution of the slave trade to what was at the time the world power while also recognizing that it was unequivocally immoral and wrong.
Upon reflection, the plastic of London makes me uncomfortable because it feels like it is missing things. Blink, and the racist and xenophobic slave-owner is being immortalized as a successful businessman. The Museum of London lets you walk through model streets of the past—without the grime and the smell and the communicable diseases, of course. All over London, the past is retouched and retold.
Maybe it is a part of becoming something resembling an adult that has made me more aware of both my own personal history, but also the history of where I am from and the implications of that history. Maybe it is the academic study of history that has inspired me to think critically about how human society has gotten where it is today, has inspired me to explore both the positives and negatives of being a product of America in the 21st century. Regardless: I am conflicted. For a place with so much history, it is amazing how little London seems to be aware of its own past.
I have a little too much work due in the coming days to completely ignore my work, but I’ve done my best to combine the best of both worlds and have spent the past week exploring what London has to offer in terms of libraries, museums, and simply the physical London itself. A lot of my exploration has been helpful for assignments, and I’ve gotten a surprising amount of research done, so I don’t feel too guilty about the hours I’ve spent in the library (approximately 0.25) or the things I’ve checked off my to-do list (3 of 8).
I’ve seen parts of London I can’t imagine I would have otherwise seen. There’s something to be said for having the time to walk and explore without the immediate pressure of class or society meetings or coursework. London is a lived-in sort of place. London has lived and burned and lived again since the first century CE; coming from America, it is often hard to comprehend the sort of history I am seeing, everyday, with my bare eyes.
And yet parts of London feel plastic. They feel too new. The Stratford Westfield mall is a mammoth: a winding maze of stores and tourists and restaurants and, inexplicably, another one of the chain stores we passed just a few minutes ago. In the semi-darkness of a London night, the McDonald’s in Leicester Square boasts a pristine white and yellow exterior until nearly 3 in the morning.
I was told to expect old when I came to London, nearly 1,600 years of old that we never get at home in the “New World.” But I am reminded time and time again now that I am here that a lot of this “old,” especially the exciting bits, come from the largest empire the world has seen, one with a thorny and complex history of enslavement and colonization.
One of the many places I have visited this reading week was the Museum of London Docklands. The museum is a top-down experience; you begin on the top floor with a gallery on the origins of slavery in the British Empire and the continuing impact on the modern United Kingdom, before working your way down through time. The Docklands museum is a fantastic museum, in particular the first gallery on slavery. It is a thoughtful and informative exploration of how and why Britain became involved in the trade of people. While walking through the exhibit, however, I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that it took 45 minutes of travel via TfL, plus some wandering around Canary Wharf, and the four flights of stairs it took to get to the top floor of the museum to finally read a placard that explicitly said “slavery is bad.”
Slavery is in many ways the foundation of modern Britain. Slavery funded wide-scale and iconic architectural changes in London, slavery changed the racial makeup of England significantly, slavery brought the funds for continued expansion of the British Empire into the New World and beyond. But slavery is also very bad, and I do not think I should have to look so far afield to find something that acknowledges the massive contribution of the slave trade to what was at the time the world power while also recognizing that it was unequivocally immoral and wrong.
Upon reflection, the plastic of London makes me uncomfortable because it feels like it is missing things. Blink, and the racist and xenophobic slave-owner is being immortalized as a successful businessman. The Museum of London lets you walk through model streets of the past—without the grime and the smell and the communicable diseases, of course. All over London, the past is retouched and retold.
Maybe it is a part of becoming something resembling an adult that has made me more aware of both my own personal history, but also the history of where I am from and the implications of that history. Maybe it is the academic study of history that has inspired me to think critically about how human society has gotten where it is today, has inspired me to explore both the positives and negatives of being a product of America in the 21st century. Regardless: I am conflicted. For a place with so much history, it is amazing how little London seems to be aware of its own past.
—Emma Celebrezze