A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events
Author | : Jonathan Gardner |
Publisher | : UCL Press |
Total Pages | : 304 |
Release | : 2022-05-16 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781787358447 |
ISBN-13 | : 1787358445 |
Rating | : 4/5 (445 Downloads) |
Download or read book A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events written by Jonathan Gardner and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events explores the traces of London’s most significant modern ‘mega events’. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe and their organisers self-consciously seek to leave a ‘legacy’ that will endure for decades or more. With London as his case study, Jonathan Gardner argues that these spectacles must be seen as long-lived and persistent, rather than simply a transient or short-term phenomena. Using a novel methodology drawn from the subfield of contemporary archaeology – the archaeology of the recent past and present-day – a broad range of comparative studies are used to explore the long-term history of each event. These include the contents and building materials of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace and their extraordinary ‘afterlife’ at Sydenham, South London; how the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition employed displays of ancient history to construct a new post-war British identity; and how London 2012, as the latest of London’s mega events, dealt with competing visions of the past as archaeology, waste and ‘heritage’ in creating a vision of the future.