COVID-19 in the Uneven Shadows of War and Pandemics

Britain is better at remembering wars than pandemics, and this chapter focuses on how commemoration of the First and Second World Wars has in various ways intersected with emerging memorialisation of the COVID-19 pandemic. This began with political appeals to the ‘Blitz spirit’ in early 2020, and various sites addressed in earlier chapters have connections with war memory. These include Remember Me in St Paul&s;s Cathedral, which after the Second World War became closely associated with British resistance to the Nazi bombing of London, the statues of Tom Moore, which tend to visually emphasise his status as a war veteran, and Sanctuary in Bedworth, known as ‘the town that never forgets’ because of its longstanding Armistice Day parades. It is concluded that, overall, the looming precedent of war remembrance has been generally unhelpful in terms of encouraging engagement with the COVID-19 pandemic on its own terms. But by noting how practices developed after World War One have progressively absorbed later wars, it is suggested that one way war memory may be useful is by providing a model of commemoration that focuses on a theme (i.e. military conflict) rather than a single event. Perhaps, it is proposed, this offers a model for publicly reflecting on pandemics as a recurring phenomenon.