Around 13 million people have visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum at the site of the former World Trade Center in New York since it opened in 2014, and more than two million people visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland in 2016 alone.
“Dark” history or tourism, where people visit troubled and often contested sites of suffering and tragedy, is not new – Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, opened as a museum and memorial in 1947, just two years after the second world war ended. Similarly, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Phen, the capital of Cambodia, where thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot were tortured and executed, opened almost immediately after the regime ended in 1979.
With as many different ways to interpret such events as there are dark history sites, this relatively new cultural attraction sector provides a lot of scope. For instance, there is a huge gulf between events that happened centuries or even decades ago, where there is no one still alive who was affected, compared with recent tragedies that people remember and are still affected by.
The shockingly tragic fire in Grenfell Tower, west London, killed 71 people in 2017 and is now the possible site for a community-commissioned memorial to the disaster. But how can stakeholders ensure authentic stories and voices from the victims are heard? Lists of names can be powerful, but how do museums tackling such difficult subjects go about digging beneath the surface to unpick the complex stories that lie beneath?
“The 9/11 museum, for example, is a site at which stories of heroism are integrated into a narrative of US national identity,” says Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow professor of French at the University of Liverpool. Forsdick has researched and written on Holocaust, genocide and slavery sites, and has led a project about how these sites could be presented effectively and ethically to public audiences. “The listing of names gives complete equality regardless of who the people were, their nationality, ethnicity, religion, race or gender.”
Difficult histories
The US addressed the 9/11 terror attack proactively, with a museum devoted to interpreting the disaster, but historically it has been less comfortable with other aspects of its past.
There are many historic house museums along the Mississippi River that tell the story of plantation life, for example, but until the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana opened in 2014, none told the story from the perspective of the enslaved.
“Most plantation museums have historically disavowed slavery,” says Forsdick. He says that museums’ denial of responsibility around the cultivation of slavery has focused on the culture of plantocracy, where the ruling class insist their “slaves” are “servants”. Historically, this has meant that the nature of the slaves’ lives is eradicated and their quarters made inaccessible in plantation museum locations.
But this revisionist history is now being challenged. The Whitney Plantation Museum is unusual in that it is a private museum owned by a philanthropist. The interpretation is based on careful research by Ibrahima Seck, the museum’s Senegalese director of research, and visits are guided.
“You are given a tag with the identity of a real enslaved child,” says Forsdick. “There are life-size statues of children in the chapel where the tour starts, and several memorials around the site, so it’s a heritage tour that also becomes a place of remembrance. It’s a great example of good practice.”
In the UK and Ireland, social histories such as the latter’s abuse-ridden Catholic church-run Magdalene laundries for orphaned girls and “fallen” women, and political atrocities such as Bloody Sunday, are being told in an unsanitised way that reveal their complex and painful realities. Authentic voices are slowly but persistently coming to the fore as museums and interpretation teams work with victims, affected communities, families and descendants to provide the perspectives that have been erased or overlooked until now.
Riot and revolution
Windmill Street in Manchester is a landmark location in the history of British democracy. It is the site of the Peterloo massacre, when 60,000 people came to hear the orator and parliamentary reformer Henry Hunt speak on 16 August 1819. The authorities were nervous and sent 1,500 soldiers and special constables into the crowd, with their sabres, swords and truncheons drawn. As a result, an estimated 18 people died and hundreds were injured.
Curiously, though, this most-radical of British cities has taken 200 years to create a sizeable or even historically accurate memorial to mark the events. (Hunt’s pro-democracy speech indirectly led to reform, and directly to the politicising of thousands of workers from Manchester and beyond.)
Manchester City Council has finally commissioned a Peterloo memorial statue by the artist Jeremy Deller, and next year’s bicentenary will see a series of commemorative events led by Manchester Histories and the People’s History Museum, as well as the publication of a graphic novel. The People’s History Museum’s exhibition Disrupt? Peterloo & Protest, which opens on 23 March 2019 for a year, will be a central part of its commemmorative programme, as well as the new public mural commemorating Peterloo, by the artist Axel Void.
Indeed, the mural lays the ground nicely for a feature film on the subject, titled Peterloo and directed by Mike Leigh, that is being released nationwide on 2 November.
Deller, whose work includes The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a re-enactment of a notorious clash between police and miners during the 1984 miners’ strike, will reveal his Peterloo memorial designs in November, alongside its exact location.
“There are several significant locations, but the epicentre of the 1819 events is Windmill Street, where the Manchester Central Convention Complex – formerly known as G-Mex – stands,” says Fitzgerald. “Peterloo is Manchester’s version of the Tiananmen Square protests.” And just like the Chinese government, Manchester’s authorities have been squeamish about commemorating this turning point in the history of democracy.
Fitzgerald expects the memorial to become a reminder about political change and may even introduce people to an event they know nothing about.
“The memory of Peterloo should be provocative,” he says. “If it doesn’t ask tough questions about our democratic processes and where we are now, if it’s not about defending and deepening and spreading that hard-won democracy, then what’s the point of creating a memorial at all?”
Workhouses revealed
The county of Norfolk had 22 Victorian workhouses, one of which, at Gressenhall, became the Norfolk Museum of Rural Life. This has now been redeveloped as Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse, with new galleries and displays, including Voices from the Workhouse, which was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Gressenhall remains a traditional working farm and has live farm animals on site.
“The rebranding and new galleries put the focus more on the workhouse history, but firmly within its context as part of Norfolk’s rural history,” says Megan Dennis, a curator at Norfolk Museums Service, which runs Gressenhall. “There was a gradual realisation that the stories in the galleries were not doing credit to the amazing research by our volunteers. We had material from local sources and Poor Law Board correspondence from the National Archives that told the stories of the building, the institution, the complexities of the workhouse system and the afterlives of the building.”
More nuanced stories of the lives of the inmates have been built up by making better use of this material and by working with descendants and families. “People think it was all black and white, and yes, it was a terrible existence for some but for others it provided a start in life or gave them a sense of community and a place to belong when the alternative was worse.”
“We also had to bear in mind that everybody’s comfort level is different. Gressenhall is a family-friendly site with many primary school-age children visiting, which has to be reflected in our interpretation,” says Dennis.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about how we could present the stories in a balanced way. Yes, some people experienced terrible existences, but for others it was a place of sanctuary. It could give them a start in life or, for the institutionalised, a sense of community and a place to belong when the alternative was being on the street. We have had to prevent the difficult stories overpowering the mundane ones.”
After serving in world war one, Norton developed epilepsy and lost his job, his mental health deteriorated and he asked to rejoin the workhouse, but benefits rules of the day meant he was only allowed back for one night. Norton ended up drowning himself in the nearby river.
Precious reminders
In a quiet corner of the workhouse’s galleries, Norton’s medal, the coroner’s report and a leather-bound pamphlet telling his emotional story are displayed. Other exhibits bring out parallel stories of how the workhouse could be a place of sanctuary for some people.
“It sometimes provides a snapshot of a life,” says Dennis. “For example, one man put his children in the workhouse when his wife died, but he didn’t leave them there forever. He came back for them – the workhouse gave him a period of respite while he grieved and got back on his feet. We aim to build empathy through our displays, but each story is backed up by meticulous archival research.”
As with Norton’s attempt to better his life and Hunt’s pro-democracy speech in Manchester, good intentions often give rise to bad feeling and conflict. The Museum of Free Derry in Northern Ireland was built 12 years ago on the site of what has become known as Bloody Sunday, where British soldiers fired into a peaceful civil rights march on 30 January 1972, killing 14 people.
“We wanted a building that was at the heart of the events and where the last two remaining bullet holes could still be seen,” says Julieann Campbell, the chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust and the museum’s education officer. Despite its historical importance, the building, a former housing block, was structurally unsound and had to be rebuilt. “But we were able to cut out the bullet holes in order to mount them – almost like an art installation – on the side of the new building.”
The trust worked alongside families from the entire area of Free Derry (a self-declared nationalist area of the city that existed between 1969 and 1972) and not just Bogside, where the museum is, to work out how to tell the difficult stories of the families affected and collect objects associated with the traumatic event. Many of the items are personal, such as clothing worn by those that died that day. Campbell’s family donated the white handkerchief that was waved by Edward Daly, the bishop of Derry, while he was tending to the dead.
“This is our number one artefact and is something of global significance because of the symbolism behind it,” Campbell says. “We have to tread carefully. It’s our community’s story and it’s been overlooked all these years. It is still so recent and raw, and it has been fraught. It’s an authentic visitor experience and visitors are often visibly upset. The artefacts remain on loan because no one wants to part with such precious reminders of their family members.”
One of the aims for the museum is to complete an oral history project, which will contribute to the National Civil Rights Archive, held in a nearby building. “It’s a living history that has filtered down through generations,” says Campbell. “In a wider sense it’s a working-class history and tells the stories of factory women and how they were represented, for example. But it’s a finite resource as people are getting older, making it even more crucial to collect their stories.”
Dark tourism seems to be on the rise, but most museums are treading carefully and doing their utmost to present stories with sensitivity, compassion and understanding.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
Life goes on in places where horrendous events have happened, but this does not mean they have been forgotten. In a small landscaped rectangle in the Paris suburb of Drancy, the Shoah Memorial (one that commemorates Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust) faces a rusting railway carriage.
It’s an affecting and reverential arrangement that forms an unusual memorial to the nearly 100,000 French Jews who were transported to their deaths during the second world war. Drancy was an unfinished housing estate from the 1930s that was requisitioned during the war. The housing blocks became a transit camp for most of the French Jews, including hundreds of children, before they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps.
After the war ended, the estate reverted to a social housing scheme and remains one today. But a contemporary museum has been built on one street corner, with artefacts and an archive and library for Holocaust studies. Its large plate-glass windows overlook the gathering point where people were marshalled. The railway carriage that was used to transport them to Auschwitz is a powerful static exhibit in the square.
“It is neither sanitised nor rendered static, but a kind of inhabited heritage with people going about their daily lives,” says Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow professor of French at the University of Liverpool, who has researched and written on Holocaust, genocide and slavery sites.
“Dark” history or tourism, where people visit troubled and often contested sites of suffering and tragedy, is not new – Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, opened as a museum and memorial in 1947, just two years after the second world war ended. Similarly, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Phen, the capital of Cambodia, where thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot were tortured and executed, opened almost immediately after the regime ended in 1979.
Displays of shoes and shorn hair, skulls of the murdered, and the twisted, charred fragments of the World Trade Center are gruesome yet powerful representations of traumatic events in a country’s history. These sites have the dual purpose of being memorials to victims and having an educational purpose.
“Dark tourism is a term that was coined by academics in the mid-1990s to shine a spotlight on areas of difficult heritage,” says Philip Stone, the executive director at the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire. “But it’s not helpful for museums, as it is not always translatable. But what the branding has done, however, is expose the area for more interrogation, one that museums could learn from. It’s a way for victims’ voices to be heard.”
With as many different ways to interpret such events as there are dark history sites, this relatively new cultural attraction sector provides a lot of scope. For instance, there is a huge gulf between events that happened centuries or even decades ago, where there is no one still alive who was affected, compared with recent tragedies that people remember and are still affected by.
The shockingly tragic fire in Grenfell Tower, west London, killed 71 people in 2017 and is now the possible site for a community-commissioned memorial to the disaster. But how can stakeholders ensure authentic stories and voices from the victims are heard? Lists of names can be powerful, but how do museums tackling such difficult subjects go about digging beneath the surface to unpick the complex stories that lie beneath?
“The 9/11 museum, for example, is a site at which stories of heroism are integrated into a narrative of US national identity,” says Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow professor of French at the University of Liverpool. Forsdick has researched and written on Holocaust, genocide and slavery sites, and has led a project about how these sites could be presented effectively and ethically to public audiences. “The listing of names gives complete equality regardless of who the people were, their nationality, ethnicity, religion, race or gender.”
Difficult histories
The US addressed the 9/11 terror attack proactively, with a museum devoted to interpreting the disaster, but historically it has been less comfortable with other aspects of its past.
There are many historic house museums along the Mississippi River that tell the story of plantation life, for example, but until the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana opened in 2014, none told the story from the perspective of the enslaved.
“Most plantation museums have historically disavowed slavery,” says Forsdick. He says that museums’ denial of responsibility around the cultivation of slavery has focused on the culture of plantocracy, where the ruling class insist their “slaves” are “servants”. Historically, this has meant that the nature of the slaves’ lives is eradicated and their quarters made inaccessible in plantation museum locations.
But this revisionist history is now being challenged. The Whitney Plantation Museum is unusual in that it is a private museum owned by a philanthropist. The interpretation is based on careful research by Ibrahima Seck, the museum’s Senegalese director of research, and visits are guided.
“You are given a tag with the identity of a real enslaved child,” says Forsdick. “There are life-size statues of children in the chapel where the tour starts, and several memorials around the site, so it’s a heritage tour that also becomes a place of remembrance. It’s a great example of good practice.”
In the UK and Ireland, social histories such as the latter’s abuse-ridden Catholic church-run Magdalene laundries for orphaned girls and “fallen” women, and political atrocities such as Bloody Sunday, are being told in an unsanitised way that reveal their complex and painful realities. Authentic voices are slowly but persistently coming to the fore as museums and interpretation teams work with victims, affected communities, families and descendants to provide the perspectives that have been erased or overlooked until now.
Riot and revolution
Windmill Street in Manchester is a landmark location in the history of British democracy. It is the site of the Peterloo massacre, when 60,000 people came to hear the orator and parliamentary reformer Henry Hunt speak on 16 August 1819. The authorities were nervous and sent 1,500 soldiers and special constables into the crowd, with their sabres, swords and truncheons drawn. As a result, an estimated 18 people died and hundreds were injured.
Curiously, though, this most-radical of British cities has taken 200 years to create a sizeable or even historically accurate memorial to mark the events. (Hunt’s pro-democracy speech indirectly led to reform, and directly to the politicising of thousands of workers from Manchester and beyond.)
Manchester City Council has finally commissioned a Peterloo memorial statue by the artist Jeremy Deller, and next year’s bicentenary will see a series of commemorative events led by Manchester Histories and the People’s History Museum, as well as the publication of a graphic novel. The People’s History Museum’s exhibition Disrupt? Peterloo & Protest, which opens on 23 March 2019 for a year, will be a central part of its commemmorative programme, as well as the new public mural commemorating Peterloo, by the artist Axel Void.
Indeed, the mural lays the ground nicely for a feature film on the subject, titled Peterloo and directed by Mike Leigh, that is being released nationwide on 2 November.
“There’s a strong history of suppressing the memory of Peterloo,” says Paul Fitzgerald, a co-founder and chair of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign, which has lobbied for a memorial for 10 years.
“Even as recently as the 1970s it was still controversial to talk about it. The only commemoration was a small plaque on the side of the old Free Trade Hall, which explained nothing about the violence perpetrated on the protestors or the number of dead, and a laughably inadequate 1950s mural inside that made it look like a fight at a picnic.”
Deller, whose work includes The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a re-enactment of a notorious clash between police and miners during the 1984 miners’ strike, will reveal his Peterloo memorial designs in November, alongside its exact location.
“There are several significant locations, but the epicentre of the 1819 events is Windmill Street, where the Manchester Central Convention Complex – formerly known as G-Mex – stands,” says Fitzgerald. “Peterloo is Manchester’s version of the Tiananmen Square protests.” And just like the Chinese government, Manchester’s authorities have been squeamish about commemorating this turning point in the history of democracy.
Fitzgerald expects the memorial to become a reminder about political change and may even introduce people to an event they know nothing about.
“The memory of Peterloo should be provocative,” he says. “If it doesn’t ask tough questions about our democratic processes and where we are now, if it’s not about defending and deepening and spreading that hard-won democracy, then what’s the point of creating a memorial at all?”
Workhouses revealed
The county of Norfolk had 22 Victorian workhouses, one of which, at Gressenhall, became the Norfolk Museum of Rural Life. This has now been redeveloped as Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse, with new galleries and displays, including Voices from the Workhouse, which was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Gressenhall remains a traditional working farm and has live farm animals on site.
“The rebranding and new galleries put the focus more on the workhouse history, but firmly within its context as part of Norfolk’s rural history,” says Megan Dennis, a curator at Norfolk Museums Service, which runs Gressenhall. “There was a gradual realisation that the stories in the galleries were not doing credit to the amazing research by our volunteers. We had material from local sources and Poor Law Board correspondence from the National Archives that told the stories of the building, the institution, the complexities of the workhouse system and the afterlives of the building.”
More nuanced stories of the lives of the inmates have been built up by making better use of this material and by working with descendants and families. “People think it was all black and white, and yes, it was a terrible existence for some but for others it provided a start in life or gave them a sense of community and a place to belong when the alternative was worse.”
“We also had to bear in mind that everybody’s comfort level is different. Gressenhall is a family-friendly site with many primary school-age children visiting, which has to be reflected in our interpretation,” says Dennis.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about how we could present the stories in a balanced way. Yes, some people experienced terrible existences, but for others it was a place of sanctuary. It could give them a start in life or, for the institutionalised, a sense of community and a place to belong when the alternative was being on the street. We have had to prevent the difficult stories overpowering the mundane ones.”
How the workhouse operated as a social structure and safety net is backed by research into individual lives. “We were able to work with the grandsons of Herbert Norton, a boy who came into the workhouse with his mother and sister,” explains Dennis.
“We had his first world war service medal, which had been found under the floorboards at the workhouse, but we didn’t know about his subsequent life. By working with his grandsons, who were amazingly supportive and interested in the process, we discovered what happened after Norton left the workhouse.”
After serving in world war one, Norton developed epilepsy and lost his job, his mental health deteriorated and he asked to rejoin the workhouse, but benefits rules of the day meant he was only allowed back for one night. Norton ended up drowning himself in the nearby river.
Precious reminders
In a quiet corner of the workhouse’s galleries, Norton’s medal, the coroner’s report and a leather-bound pamphlet telling his emotional story are displayed. Other exhibits bring out parallel stories of how the workhouse could be a place of sanctuary for some people.
“It sometimes provides a snapshot of a life,” says Dennis. “For example, one man put his children in the workhouse when his wife died, but he didn’t leave them there forever. He came back for them – the workhouse gave him a period of respite while he grieved and got back on his feet. We aim to build empathy through our displays, but each story is backed up by meticulous archival research.”
As with Norton’s attempt to better his life and Hunt’s pro-democracy speech in Manchester, good intentions often give rise to bad feeling and conflict. The Museum of Free Derry in Northern Ireland was built 12 years ago on the site of what has become known as Bloody Sunday, where British soldiers fired into a peaceful civil rights march on 30 January 1972, killing 14 people.
“We wanted a building that was at the heart of the events and where the last two remaining bullet holes could still be seen,” says Julieann Campbell, the chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust and the museum’s education officer. Despite its historical importance, the building, a former housing block, was structurally unsound and had to be rebuilt. “But we were able to cut out the bullet holes in order to mount them – almost like an art installation – on the side of the new building.”
The trust worked alongside families from the entire area of Free Derry (a self-declared nationalist area of the city that existed between 1969 and 1972) and not just Bogside, where the museum is, to work out how to tell the difficult stories of the families affected and collect objects associated with the traumatic event. Many of the items are personal, such as clothing worn by those that died that day. Campbell’s family donated the white handkerchief that was waved by Edward Daly, the bishop of Derry, while he was tending to the dead.
“This is our number one artefact and is something of global significance because of the symbolism behind it,” Campbell says. “We have to tread carefully. It’s our community’s story and it’s been overlooked all these years. It is still so recent and raw, and it has been fraught. It’s an authentic visitor experience and visitors are often visibly upset. The artefacts remain on loan because no one wants to part with such precious reminders of their family members.”
One of the aims for the museum is to complete an oral history project, which will contribute to the National Civil Rights Archive, held in a nearby building. “It’s a living history that has filtered down through generations,” says Campbell. “In a wider sense it’s a working-class history and tells the stories of factory women and how they were represented, for example. But it’s a finite resource as people are getting older, making it even more crucial to collect their stories.”
Dark tourism seems to be on the rise, but most museums are treading carefully and doing their utmost to present stories with sensitivity, compassion and understanding.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
Drancy remembers
Life goes on in places where horrendous events have happened, but this does not mean they have been forgotten. In a small landscaped rectangle in the Paris suburb of Drancy, the Shoah Memorial (one that commemorates Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust) faces a rusting railway carriage.
It’s an affecting and reverential arrangement that forms an unusual memorial to the nearly 100,000 French Jews who were transported to their deaths during the second world war. Drancy was an unfinished housing estate from the 1930s that was requisitioned during the war. The housing blocks became a transit camp for most of the French Jews, including hundreds of children, before they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps.
After the war ended, the estate reverted to a social housing scheme and remains one today. But a contemporary museum has been built on one street corner, with artefacts and an archive and library for Holocaust studies. Its large plate-glass windows overlook the gathering point where people were marshalled. The railway carriage that was used to transport them to Auschwitz is a powerful static exhibit in the square.
“It is neither sanitised nor rendered static, but a kind of inhabited heritage with people going about their daily lives,” says Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow professor of French at the University of Liverpool, who has researched and written on Holocaust, genocide and slavery sites.
“It is an uncomfortable but powerful experience to walk the streets and stand in the very place where people were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.”
