Planting peace: The Greater London Council and the community gardens of central London

Abstract

Refereed journal paper. Gough's investigations into the iconography and rhetoric of peace, peace-keeping and pacifism has been developed through fieldwork and site visits in Canada, Turkey, Singapore and northern Europe. Drawing on international parallels, this paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London, which owe their origins to radical agendas set within the political climate of the Cold War of the 1980s, and were intended as contributions to world peace, multi-lateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation, Gough explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage. The paper links with wider research being conducted into militarized landscapes, raising questions over the potency of the iconography of peace and its relationship to the visual rhetoric of war. The research project was supported by an AHRC Grant, 2005, Place of Peace. A project website http://www.vortex.uwe.ac.uk/places_of_peace/ contains essays, typologies, and a gallery of images relating to peace gardens in north, central and south London, Bristol, and Greenham, near Newbury. The photographs offer the first appreciation of the peace gardens of central London. Initial findings were disseminated in the papers 'Garden of gratitude': the National Memorial Arboretum and strategic remembering' given as part of People and their Pasts. International Public History Conference, at Ruskin College, Oxford 16-17 September 2005; and 'Peace in Ruins: The value of mementoes, temporary shrines and floral tributes as markers of a public sphere' given at the conference: Public Sphere: Between Contestation and Reconciliation, held at the Yerevan, American University of Armenia, Yerevan, 25-27 October 2005.