Charred churches or iron harvests?

Abstract

The bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe between August 1940 and May 1941 is a pervasive theme in popular memories and cultural representations of the Second World War, but it has been memorialized in a peculiarly restrained and disjointed manner. This article examines this phenomenon of memory fragmentation with reference to a specific site, St James’s Church Piccadilly. In contrast to these and other inscribed scraps of official memory I propose a re-examination of London’s ‘Iron Harvest’: the continual recovery of unexploded German bombs. By reconsidering James Young’s concept of the ‘counter-monument’ and the performativity of commemorative processes, I argue that these discoveries can be regarded as acts of commemoration. As the Second World War slips out of living memory we need more diverse and imaginative forms of remembrance to represent both the fragmented traces of modern wars and the absences they create.