C O N T E X T 1 3 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 4 11 Remembering them The participants are gone, but reminders of the physical impact of the first world war remain. Some of these would be noticed only by historians – like the renamed streets whose original German-inspired names had become an embarrassment in the new jingoism and xenophobia of 1914. Others, such as the structures and buildings on Orkney, rust and crumble as incongruous features of the landscape, but remain too important a part of British history not to conserve and remember. Some remains are chilling reminders of a vast industry devoted to raining death on the enemy. The buildings of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, where 80,000 people, many of them women, made armaments, are now adaptable to peaceful uses. Elsewhere, some of the earliest buildings associated with powered flight survive. Many of them are modest structures, but they are of immense significance as the first steps in a world-changing new technology. Other remains are more easily forgotten, such as the hundreds of shipwrecks of the East Coast War Channels, in which thousands of seafarers died in the desperate struggle to maintain naval movement and essential trade. Some reminders of the first world war are less grim. With attention currently focused on how to get large numbers of houses built, and on the possible lessons of the garden city model, we look at the many houses constructed for British war-workers and war veterans which still remain and are highly valued. The Scottish Veterans’ Garden City Association was one organisation devoted to rebuilding shattered lives and thinking about how to plan for more peaceful times. More obvious features of cities, town and villages are the buildings and structures built specifically as memorials to the victims of the first world war. This issue of Context looks at some of them, while also considering more difficult questions of how to deal with the enormous variety of relics of one of the world’s great disasters.
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