Remembering and Forgetting Britain’s COVID-19 Pandemic presents the first critical assessment of British memorial sites created in response to impacts of the COVID-19 virus.
Remembering and Forgetting Britain’s COVID-19 Pandemic presents the first critical assessment of British memorial sites created in response to impacts of the COVID-19 virus.
Covering memorials established during the half decade since the start of the first lockdown, this book considers the complexities of their origins, their varying forms and narratives, and how they have been received. The stories of these sites are addressed in relation to a wider context of uncertainty regarding how the COVID-19 pandemic should be remembered – whether the focus should be on bereavement, or wider societal suffering, or heroism and resilience – and indeed whether it deserves public attention at all. The pandemic’s impacts in Britain were, and continue to be, vast in scope, and yet engagement with memory of this event remains in a state of hesitancy and flux. This book argues that through understanding the physical sites of remembrance that have been created since 2020 we can better engage with the diversity of pandemic experiences and the range of its meanings.
This book will be of particular interest to memory studies scholars, but also general readers interested in the societal aftermath of this complex and contested event in recent British history.
Abbreviations
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Mnemolethe
2. Hearts: Grief, Grassroots Agency, and (Im)permanence
3. Human Forms: Heroism, Exhaustion, and Mutual Support
4. Trees: Planted Memory and Forgetting
5. Sacred Spaces
6. The British State
7. COVID-19 in the Uneven Shadows of War and Pandemics
8. Ethnicity, Gender, and Invisibility
9. Conclusion: Revisiting Northernhay Gardens
Bibliography
Index
David Tollerton is Associate Professor in Memory Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. His research focuses on debates in public Holocaust remembrance and emerging memorialisation of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the author of Holocaust Memory and Britains Religious-Secular Landscape (2020).
