by Luke Bennett
Figure 11.1. Open to All, Appealing to All: Hack Green Bunker (2009, Luke Bennett).
The majority of the participants were first-time visitors to the site (84 per cent). The participants initially claimed that the main reason for visiting the Cold War site was based on recreational motives. As one person stated, it was primarily ‘a day out’ (PT157, male, 48 years, visiting with son), and another noted, ‘I don’t know really. A day out, education for the kids, I think that’s all really’ (PT148, male, visiting with wife and sons).
While most participants described the meanings of the visit as being primarily social, ‘a nice day out’, this does not necessarily mean that the resulting experience was merely a passive act of leisure. Although participants were not directly questioned on their understandings of the word ‘heritage’, there were several indications that they had actively engaged with the site from a heritage perspective as part of their visit. The apparent ambivalence regarding the site’s Cold War history appeared more related to disconnectedness with the Cold War past per se. These feelings of detachment and disengagement were expressed by 42 per cent of the participants, and even those who were born, grew up or lived in the Cold War era often did not recall having any personal or first-hand memories. Moreover, for these participants the Cold War seemed to be something that just ‘happened’ to them, as the events were too intangible to grasp, influence or understand – both in the past and in the present. Through their (often) first-time encounter with a tangible environment of the militarized aspects, many regarded the visit as a unique opportunity to enter a previously ‘concealed world’. Their unfamiliarity with, and the mystification surrounding, the site also evoked feelings of humbleness regarding the actual site, its significance during the Cold War and also the people who worked there; for instance:
I was surprised at how big it was. I was surprised at how many people worked here…. The fact that all this was here without anybody knowing it was here. (PT167, female, mid-forties)
I was just overcome by the sheer size of it, the capacity of information, everything that had to be thought of, in fact, because people had to survive here … (PT147, male, 29 years)
Well, it was – showed people having to live in these conditions, you know, just to sort of monitor what was going on with maybe no chance of ever coming out of it. (PT151, male, 66 years)
Just the physical aspect – I can’t even imagine, what, say 600 people in it, imagine it’d be pretty cramped. (PT 156, male, 22 years, visiting with girlfriend)
These tangible confrontations, stirring processes of remembering and meaning making, also contributed to and confirmed the overall belief that the management and the interpretation of the site were ‘safe’ in the custody of the site managers. For some, the act of visiting a Cold War site was in itself a way of contributing to the process of conservation by means of paying admission fees, membership contributions and a legitimate proof that Cold War remains ‘matter’; for instance:
I think it should be on a map, because it’s a really unique location. (PT157, male, 48 years)
You know, it’s something that I feel a lot of people would like to see and know about. (PT162, male, 55 years)
Furthermore, these notions also align with the idea of heritage as something that is best taken on and managed by site managers in order to construct a meaningful ‘Cold War experience’ for the visitor. In practice, this meant that visitors initially regarded themselves as passive receptors (Smith 2009), guided in their interpretation of the Cold War site by the ‘assistance’ of managers, information panels, leaflets and objects, both prior to and during their visits. However, this perception underestimates the already-existing memories, experiences and expectations, whether unconsciously or consciously present, that appeared to actually influence visitors during their visit.
The appeal to conserve Cold War remains, expressed by the desire to visit specific Cold War sites, implies a sense of participation by visitors, as they perform personal, military or British history by negotiating and embedding meanings and values in the context of a site visit. What’s more, the visit was not only motivated by personal fulfilment but also as an opportunity to create a framework through which to recuperate and share past experiences with others. As participants noted, ‘I came here when I was a wee boy’ (PT147, male, 29 years, visiting with girlfriend), and ‘I lived here from 1969 and I remember when they were just government buildings and it was hidden away’ (PT163, 63 years, one visitor). Especially for multi-generation groups, the visit offered an opportunity for constructive understandings; as one participant noted, the visit was intended ‘for my family to all see what my background was’ (PT168, male, 39, visiting with parents, wife and sons).
For many participants the sites were regarded as more than physical objects; hence, they were cultural processes through which to construct or represent sets of identities and memories. Moreover, the interview transcripts also revealed that the visit added to the participants’ sense of ‘place’ or ‘belonging’ (Smith 2009), and even helped visitors to (re-)position themselves in wider cultural, social and physical contexts. From a geographical stance, participants connected the physical reality of the Cold War site not only to their own local context – for instance, by stating that ‘I live only a mile away’ (PT163, male, 63 years, sole visitor), and ‘It was close to where we live (PT154, male, 54 years, visiting with sons) – but also in a global setting; as one participant noted, ‘looking around here today, you realize that we were really heavily involved … the threat was as real for us as it was for America (PT145, male, 19 years, visiting with friends).
By using geographical mapping, a spatial analysis of the fieldwork findings suggests that a local Cold War site may be one of the ‘last’ blank spots in people’s sense of place and belonging. This aligns with current debates (e.g. Kjeldstadli 2008) that the idea of heritage is linked to the geographical closeness of visitors, and that cultural connectedness declines when geographical distances increase. Although being culturally connected is not solely defined by geographical proximity, the map not only illustrates that the majority of participants lived relatively close to the Cold War sites, but also that all other participants came from ‘Western’ countries such as America, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, France and Spain. Though no definitive conclusions can be drawn, these findings suggest that visits to these Cold War sites are connected with the visitors’ Western values, ideologies and perhaps even personal memories.
In addition to the idea of geographical proximity, the participants were asked what ‘being’ at the Cold War site meant to them and how the physical setting guided, assisted or affected them during the visit. In response, guided panels were especially mentioned as being an important means by which to acquire information about the physical representations and to give meaning to the Cold War ‘reality’ and ‘messages’ that were elicited during the visit. Furthermore, ‘being’ at the Cold War site also evoked responses related to a strong awareness of the site as an unknown, secret and concealed place. This ‘sense of unfamiliarity’ was especially evoked through the affective register of sounds (23 per cent), the exterior appearance (16 per cent) and particular smells (15 per cent).
the thing that you hear coming over the speakers, it can sort of bring – take you back in time, if you like, to you know, to what it might have been like. (PT162, male, 55 years, visiting with wife and children)
even if you’re blindfolded, you know you’re in one [bunker] because there is a certain temperature that your body recognizes and there are certain smells that are quite evocative. (PT161, male, 56 years, visiting with friends)
the smell of old things, and things that we didn’t know about makes it interesting. (PT146, female, 56 years, visiting with son and grandson)
The smell – yeah the smell … Smelled musty, sort of. (PT154, male, 54 years, visiting with son)
Alongside the physical discomforts, participants also experienced social anxieties as they, in ad
dition to senses of nostalgia towards the past, also felt confronted by their ‘outsider’ position and ‘powerlessness’ against the dominant political system. However, instead of being emotionally blasé about their disposition, on many occasions, participants responded fiercely about the exclusion of ordinary people from these places in case of a nuclear attack. The visit, in that sense, often enhanced their general awareness about the inferior position of ‘common people’ and, more importantly, the unlikelihood of this group surviving an actual nuclear attack.
If you’re not important, you didn’t deserve it, pretty much … and we paid all the taxes. (PT156, male, 22 years)
what we’ve seen today is that the wimpy survivors would be government officials, while the rest of society was obliterated. (PT169, male, 67 years)
Simultaneously, participants also expressed sympathy for those who were permitted access into the bunkers in case of a nuclear attack, for example:
But so even if it actually happened, I wouldn’t like to be the hiding prime minister here. It would have been a woeful, slow death. (PT160, male, 54 years)
It must have been mundane but when the [bomb] – you know, yeah, it must have been unbearable pressure. (PT143, male, 49 years)
you would survive down here, which is something, [but] what you’d come up to is another thing. (PT154, male, 54 years)
In addition to feelings of physical and social distress, participants expressed a strong, yet somehow contrasting, ‘sense of astonishment’ about the enormity and complexity, and perhaps above all, the actual existence of the sites. Expressed through mixed feelings of amazement, surprize, shock and admiration, the visit facilitated a physical reality through which participants, on a personal, social and spatial level, arranged, shaped and negotiated who they ‘are’ and what their ‘place’ is in this world. Visitors’ encounters with these places thus often took them somewhat by surprise. As they sought to make sense of their visit, they were forced to explore their own relationship (or lack of it) with their individual and collective Cold War past. This ultimately led some to ponder issues of power and secrecy, partly in accordance with and partly despite the shaping influence of the owner’s curation of the site. Meanwhile, I was surprised to find that power and knowledge constraints played an important role in my data gathering, during my fieldwork. As a young Dutch woman, I was regarded by some of those visitors whom I approached as unqualified, in terms of gender, nationality, age or education, to ask questions about heavily debated concepts such as heritage. This required me, as a tourism researcher, to dive deep(er) into the background and personal stances related to the broad context of Cold War history, heritage discourses and British culture than I had anticipated when originally designing my study. I will now summarize aspects of this deeper consideration of contexts, discourses and stances, which has informed my interpretation of the findings.
HERITAGE (AND) TOURISM DISCOURSES: A THEORETICAL EXPLORATION
My work is based on the notion that all ‘heritage’ is intangible. By saying this, I am not dismissing the tangible (i.e. physical) or pre-discursive (i.e. the embodied, instinctively known), but simply de-privileging and denaturalizing the ‘material’ as the self-evident form and essence of heritage. Following Laurajane Smith (2009), heritage is not a historical monument nor an artefact or place, but rather the activities that occur at and around these places and objects. These places are given value by the act of naming them heritage, and by the processes of heritage negotiations and re-creations that define them as important. Therefore, the bunkers that I included in my fieldwork activities were first and foremost nothing more than concrete chambers scattered across Britain; they were not inherently valuable, nor did they carry essential meanings. So my guiding research question was ‘what made (and still makes) them valuable and meaningful?’ In other words, ‘what makes them heritage?’.
Heritage, then, is a product of a set of values and meanings that ultimately make ‘heritage’ a cultural or social practice (Smith 2009). These practices, through routines, management protocols, techniques and procedures, influence and encourage the continuance of particular dominant forms of heritage evaluation and management: Smith’s (2009) ‘authorized heritage discourse’, which in turn comes to insinuate itself as ‘the normal way of acting’; in short, one possible way becomes the only acceptable way. Thus, owners of – and visitors to – Cold War attractions tend to give meaning to the physical and social realities of their sites utilizing dominant heritage discourses, with discourse here denoting ‘a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts and categories that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices’ (Hajer 1996, 44). Additionally, as Schön and Rein (1994) argue, by doing so, discourses and their attendant practices reduce the complexity of reality by ‘naming and framing it’. And in this process certain features are emphasized, while others become submerged. Looking at any instance of heritage, it is possible to identify authorized and opposing discourses at work, based on different ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’ heritage according to the position of the social actors. Thus, the practices of naming and framing are ubiquitously intertwined with the power dynamics of a society in the here and now, and interwoven with both collective and individual processes of heritage agencies, site owners and visitors, the latter being (too often) considered to be merely passive receivers of ‘officially’ framed dominant constructions of heritage.
But the interpretive traffic is not – as I have already shown from my fieldwork data – simply a ‘top-down’, passive compliance with received, dominant discourses. Instead, heritage is a process, a creative endeavour which offers individuals the opportunity to become ‘active selves’ (Bruner 2011, 899), moving inside and outside discourses and even creating breakthroughs in these often self-referential and hegemonic processes, which articulate and legitimize ideologies of British nationalism and national identity. Heritage, I would argue, is about (relatively open) processes of negotiation and cultural change and the use of symbols, myths, monuments, commemorations and performances that rework the meanings of the Cold War and its events in the past. Therefore, the presentation of Cold War ‘attraction’ sites by their owners, via their arrangement of artefacts and the provision of interpretive signs and the like, is not necessarily fully determinative of what visitors will take from the site and their experience of visiting it. Certainly, they may contribute towards framing the visitor’s meaning-making process, but possibly not in the manner intended. Thus, individual visitors’ meaning making could be a reaction against the way in which the place – and what it is claimed to stand for – is presented to them (Osborne 2001, 4).
Just as discourses in heritage reflect and constitute a range of social and cultural practices, which are influenced by nation, class, culture and ethnicity, this is also the case for practices in tourism. Tourism is not just a product or destination; it also consists of fluid and embodied practices constantly performed both spatially and temporally through ‘feelings of doing’ (Crouch 2002, 211). Thus, our bodies encounter a physical sense of performance and space through visits to Cold War sites. Nevertheless, the concept of heritage within tourism discourses is often conflated in the reductive notion of ‘heritage tourism’ and portrayed as a tourism enterprise, a catalyst for economic growth or a means for the rejuvenation and commodification of sites or even entire regions. Similar to the authorized discourses on heritage, tourism discourses often reduce places to merely a product for consumption, which ultimately, in practice, turns them into ‘theme parks’. Decades ago, critical scholars, such as Wright (1985), Hollinshead (1997) and Burton (2003), predicted that Britain itself would soon become a gigantic theme park where ‘Disneyfied’ stories and images would simplify the historical messages of the past. The rise of mass tourism from the mid-20th century, combined with forces of economic rationalization and globalization, has indeed equated the concept of ‘consumption’ and practices of heritage interpretations (Dicks 2003, 33). Heritage sites and objects a
re no longer expected to only respond to the expectations and desires of their visitors; they are also intended to create and produce these expectations and desires (Fox 2010). The authorized discourses that spark this consumption, and which progressively seem to overlap the fields of heritage and tourism, are more than simply a reflection of reality; they are, at the same time, the creators of that reality in which individuals can be obligated to partake in the experiences, the practices of managers, conservationists, experts and so on. By regarding visitors as passive consumers, often even labelling them as ‘tourists’, they are not only seen as oblivious or foreign to the heritage site they visit or engage with, but also as individuals who are simply passing through in their free time.
Initially stirred by the conversations with visitors at Cold War sites, I came to increasingly question this assumption that visitors are passive consumers of a pre-framed and packaged meaning for Cold War ‘attraction’ sites, and that such sites are visited solely in a passive sense. Following Samuel (1994), heritage sites do much more than offering ‘framed’ consumable experiences to their visitors; they offer a setting in which visitors can engage in practices that are culturally close to them and allow for, at least temporal, ways of re-imagining the self, the ‘other’ and the ‘collective’. Hence, heritage tourism is more, as Boswell (2011, 6) notes, a sort of ‘imaginarium’, ‘an entity that allows one to re-imagine aspects of one’s past or present’, and through which they can express or perform aspects of individuality that are not offered under ‘normal’ circumstances, or even do not exist (Boswell 2011, 6).
BRITAIN’S COLD WAR: DOMINANT HERITAGE (AND) TOURISM DISCOURSES
So what is the authorized heritage discourse in relation to Cold War ‘attraction’ sites, and how dominant (and/or monolithic) is it? The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, and by the early 1990s attention was turning to the dismantling of the UK’s Cold War defence policy, and its physical assets. But as Cold War sites were closed down (and some sold off) attention started to turn to the Cold War’s built environment as a matter of heritage and conservation. Projects such as the Defence of Britain Project (1995–2002) sought to valorize the 20th century’s previously ignored defensive remains. Meanwhile, heritage agencies such as English Heritage6 developed criteria (Cocroft & Thomas 2004) by which individual sites and structures could be identified for statutory protection, with the ‘most’ important ones to be granted statutory protection as part of English Heritage’s Monument Protection Programme (MPP). It was found that those initial criteria needed to be refined, given the sheer number of Cold War sites. Under the tutelage of Wayne Cocroft, Senior Investigator at English Heritage, sites were included when they reflected the ‘changing nature’ of the Cold War, ‘characterise[d] the British experience of the Cold War’ or ‘had been central to British defence or NATO policy’ (Cocroft 2001, 42). However, these criteria were still too broad compared to the amount and range of military sites that could be designated and the managing capacities of any heritage protection system of organisation. Consequently, additional selection and assessment criteria were put in place that would contribute to a more detailed process of rationalization, selection and prioritization. This resulted in a complex evaluative taxonomy of Cold War sites: a list consisting of nine categories; subdivided into 31 groups, followed by monument classes and type variants. Within each group, five selection principles, namely Survival/condition, Period, Rarity, Diversity and Cultural/Amenity value, were used to determine which structures and/or sites would be recommended for preservation. As a result, only 32 Cold War sites were designated for statutory protection immediately, although a further batch remained under consideration for protection.
