The role of town memorials:

Memorialisation is a fascinating topic. Several theories exist around how and why we memorialise in the ways that we do, and how processes of remembering and forgetting occur in competition but also relate to and condition one another. Furthermore, different opinions have developed around how these processes come to inform the ways that we understand our identities and sense of place. This talk will explore how different theories surrounding memorialisation can enable us to understand what people think the roles of memorials are in Barnsley. The focus of the talk will be on Barnsley’s coal mining and war history, and the ways that memorials can either successfully or unsuccessfully convey messages about the past and therefore inform people’s understandings of the past and their place in the present.

John Land is a final year PhD student in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield. His thesis explores the roles that memorials have for people in post-industrial communities and how landscapes of memory can be both sites of competing ideas and sites at which identity and a sense of place are moulded. His specific interest is in Barnsley’s memorial landscapes, and the ways in which coal mining heritage is memorialised in very different ways to the town’s First and Second World War heritage. The different ways these pasts are memorialised can tell us more about how and why some pasts maintain relevance across time and how certain pasts come to inform identity.

This event can be booked through the Gardens Trust eventbrite page.

Ticket sales close 4 hours before the first talk

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link, please contact the Gardens Trust), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 2 weeks.