Hutted Histories: Designing Memory - Understanding British war cemeteries on the old Western Front with Tim Godden

After the Great War the Imperial War Graves Commission was tasked with making permanent the cemeteries, burial sites and sporadic individual burials that had been left behind. It was a task described by Rudyard Kipling as ‘the biggest single bit of work since any of the pharaohs’. Now, over a hundred years on, an understanding of what informed and inspired the design of these sites is often lost, obscured by time and evolving ideas of remembrance.

This talk will explore the design processes and the decisions made that make the cemeteries look the way they do. It will look at the team of junior architects, all of whom were former soldiers, to show how their experiences shaped the individual designs. It will show how as well as designing beautiful spaces for the fallen, the architects of the IWGC used this opportunity to create a memorial to both the landscapes and experiences of the war on the Western Front.

About Tim:

Tim is an artist and historian whose work in both fields looks at and is inspired by aspects of the First and Second World Wars.

His academic work has explored the Imperial War Graves Commission design project of the 1920s and 30s, with a particular focus on the relationship between the wartime and memorial landscapes.

Find out more about Tim and his work: https://timgodden.co.uk/