16 December — The
2018 Lewis & Clark London humanities program is drawing to a close.
The students have been submitting final projects and taking their
exams this past week while preparing to move out of the residences in Mile
End that have been their home for the past three months. Our farewell
dinner on Saturday was the last time we were together as a group
before everyone departs. Some of us are headed straight home while
others, myself included, have further travel still ahead of us. In any
event, our London experience is coming to an end. I feel fortunate to
have become acquainted with the wonderful people whose support,
expertise, hard work and good cheer enriched our program in so many
ways. Among them are Eddie and Donna Stiven in Glenelg, Ceri Bevan and
his staff in the QMUL Global Opportunities Office, our London guide
Caroline Piper, and the staff of Lewis & Clark’s Overseas Programs.
Mostly I am grateful for the fifteen students whose enthusiasm,
sensitivity, curiosity, adventurousness, diligence, and humor have
taught me as much about London as I could have possibly taught them.
As
I prepare to leave, I find it difficult to sum up my experience of
living in London again after all these years. Indeed, it feels like it
was only yesterday when I welcomed fifteen newly-arrived students to my
flat in Whitechapel on a warm and sunny Sunday in September. And yet,
so much has happened in the intervening time to open my eyes to the
history and present reality of this great city that has been my home at
various times and which has excited my imagination like no other for
most of my life. To be honest, I feel like I am leaving too soon,
though I suppose that is always how I’ve felt whenever I leave London.
A
recurring theme for me during these past months has been loss,
remembrance, and resilience. Much of this surrounded the lead-up to
Remembrance Day on November 11th, which this year marked the 100th
anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. The usual
British rituals of poppy wreaths and lapel pins and the ubiquitous
phrase “Lest We Forget” were weighted with the additional significance
of the centenary of the end of “the War to End All Wars,” a phrase that
today seems bitterly ironic given the events of the century that
followed but which was not so at the time.
Looking back,
it seemed the First World War was always with us this semester. Almost
every town square and church we visited had a Great War memorial with
the names of the fallen dutifully recorded.
“Their Name Liveth For
Evermore.” Beyond this, my own travels in October took me to the
French-Belgian border region and the most notorious battlefields of the
war. I journeyed there mainly to see the memorials at such places as
Thiepval, Pozières, Beaumont-Hamel, and Arras. The most moving, though,
was the Canadian National Memorial at Vimy Ridge, a towering marble
sculpture rising from the site of one of the costliest battles of the war
for the Canadian forces. This astonishing monument—a hallowed
pilgrimage site for Canadians—is a sight I will not soon forget. Back
in London, the remembrance of the First World War culminated in our
group attending the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph on November
11th in which we braved the crowds to witness this most solemn of
British public rituals. Several of students in earlier blog posts have
commented on the impression left on them by this historic occasion.
As
I reflect on it, traumatic loss and the determination to build
something new and better from the ashes of the old and the mistakes of
the past is a story many times told throughout the long history of
London. The dreadful plagues and fires that ravaged the city in
centuries past, and that claimed the lives of so many of its residents,
were often followed by major improvements in urban planning and civil
society. Today, the City of London bears no sign of the inferno that
incinerated almost the entire area—except for a giant Doric column,
Christopher Wren’s 1677 Monument to the Great Fire. Likewise, sections
of the East End destroyed by the Blitz in the Second World War retain
little evidence of that ordeal except for occasional memorials tucked
away here and there. This year’s armistice centenary has been a salient
reminder that the end of living memory marks an important milestone in
patterns of historical remembrance… and forgetting.
This
last point was made clear to me a week ago when I took my students on
the final site visit of our history course,
London Through the Ages. We went to
my old neighborhood of Notting Hill, a place that seems appropriate to
return to in this concluding blog entry since I wrote about it in my
first entry shortly after arriving in London in September. Our
excursion included a visit to the Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage
Centre after which we walked to the unofficial memorial to the Grenfell
Fire.
On June 14th, 2017, Grenfell Tower, an apartment
block that had originally been designed as low-income public housing,
caught fire shortly after midnight and flames consumed the upper stories
of the building within minutes. In total, 72 people died in the
incident, the worst residential fire in Britain since the end of the
Second World War. This catastrophe was all the more tragic for having
been entirely preventable. For years, tenants had complained to the
property management about the numerous fire hazards in the building but
were ignored. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the rage of the
local community could barely be contained. The fact the victims were
largely low-income and immigrant members of what has become a rapidly
gentrifying area of the richest borough in London was not lost on local
residents.
The Grenfell fire galvanized the local
community. Many religious congregations, such as Al-Manaar, played a
vital leadership role in providing aid and comfort to the survivors and
bereaved families. Grenfell United was established to provide long-term
support to the survivors of the fire and to lobby for a thorough
investigation and accountability for this disaster. As I shared with my
students, the Grenfell tragedy had a very personal effect on me since
Notting Hill had once been my home as a graduate student and, in fact,
the flat I lived in is less than half a kilometer from the tower.
During our visit the students and I met with the executive director of
Al-Manaar and the chair of Grenfell United. Both of these individuals
emerged as leaders in the hours and days after the fire and have worked
tirelessly for the community since then. Our visit ended at the
memorial itself, a heart-wrenching shrine that has grown along the
wooden wall surrounding the tower, which is now a large-scale
construction site.
As I took in the memorial I was
immediately struck by the awareness that I was looking at something I
had seen only weeks earlier in forests and fields of Vimy Ridge, or
least something uncannily similar. It was a monument of remembrance for
a tragic loss of life. Perhaps all the more poignant since in each
case—Vimy and Grenfell—the loss being memorialized was entirely
preventable and owed mostly to human cause: one was a willful act of
aggression with no regard for the human cost, the other the result of
criminal negligence.
In each memorial, the personalized
recognition of the fallen appears at eye level. At Vimy, the over
eleven thousand names of the missing march uniformly past each other
etched in marble in alphabetical order, row after row and panel after
panel. At Grenfell, handwritten messages to loved ones in multiple
languages are mixed spontaneously together and accompanied by photos,
drawings, candles, and flowers.
Yet as one steps back,
both monuments draw the visitor’s gaze upward toward the heavens. At
Vimy, twin pillars of gleaming white soar above the French countryside,
visible for miles around, as angels and allegorical figures of human virtues carved
exquisitely into marble adorn its heights. At Grenfell, a large green
heart and the words “Grenfell Forever in Our Hearts” appear boldly
across the top of the tarp stretched over the scaffolding that now
enshrouds the charred remains of the tower. At a height of twenty-four
stories the message is proclaimed boldly in all directions high above
the rowhouses, churches, and shops of Notting Hill and North Kensington.
These
two memorials are in many ways the same. They are a balm to assuage
the grief of the bereaved, they struggle to give meaning to a senseless
tragedy and to waste that owes so much to human failure, they offer
tentative hope that a more just and humane reality might emerge from
such heartbreaking loss, and they command from on high that the dead not
be forgotten.
Before we departed from the memorial, I
mentioned to the students that the events and aftermath of Grenfell are
too recent for us to think of them historically. Yet after our
experience this semester we cannot help but place them in the long
narrative of London’s history of loss, remembrance, resilience, and the
hope that something good, or at least better, might emerge from the
tragedy of the past. This is history in our time and it remains to be
seen the place that Grenfell will come to occupy in the great story of
London.
Lest We Forget.
—David Campion
Left: Canadian National Vimy Memorial, Pas-de-Calais, France.
Right: Grenfell Memorial, Notting Hill, London. Photos by David Campion
Names of the Missing, Canadian National Vimy Memorial. Photo by David Campion
Grenfell Memorial Wall. Photo by David Campion
Pylon Statuary, Canadian National Vimy Memorial. Photo by David Campion
Grenfell Tower. Photo by David Campion
