My PhD is a history of East London’s heritage industry, c.1973-2008. I’m trying to take a new approach to historicising heritage, and in doing so, to think about the formation of imperial memory in Britain.
Historians of Modern Britain have used heritage to show the way the past has been applied to support particular political projects. ‘Elite’ Professional museums are imagined as supporting a Conservative historical narrative, whereas ‘grassroots’ or ‘community’ heritage is seen as contesting the exclusion of the historically and politically marginalised. East London was home to the ‘first port’ of the British Empire, and so was a site of the interaction between local ‘community’ and elite national histories. It can help to rethink these binaries, and consider Empire’s enduring legacies within the British Isles. My thesis tries to understand how Empire’s relationship to the British interior was remembered and misremembered, on the left and right, in the decades after decolonisation.
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