What should Britain’s memorial to the Covid pandemic look like? | Eddie Blake
Erecting a monument alone wouldn’t be sufficient – after the first world war, whole villages were built in remembrance
Memorials aim to be an eloquent last word on an event. A key quality is that they resist change: they attempt to fix for us an abiding sense of what exactly has happened. They can be many things: columns, tombs, plaques, cenotaphs, village halls, even housing. But who are they for? The people who suffered, their families, the wider public or future generations?
At some point, inevitably, there will be an official, national memorial of the pandemic in the UK (as well as many more, surely, at local and international levels). What, then, should it look like? It will have to contend with how messy the past year has been – the death, the sorrow, the fear, but also the ensuing political and social division. Perhaps through all of that, memorialisation can play a therapeutic role.
Read the original article at The Guardian