Abstract
The existence of an authentic relationship with the past may intensify emotional and experiential attachments to a place and justify claims on its future. Yet established framings of authenticity tend to abstract and universalise, potentially leading to an overly comfortable sense of what does and does not count as authentic. This chapter attends instead to the crafting through struggle of a situated sense of authenticity, developed through dialogue with elements of a constructed past. Assemblage theories are used to attend to both relations of interiority and relations of exteriority in this process of emergence. Empirical support is provided by a detailed exploration of the struggle to save the undercroft skateboarding spot on London’s south bank. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on what heritage practitioners might gain from attending to authenticity as fluid, situated and emergent.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, the omission of the 1980s in a decade-by-decade rundown of the south bank’s history offered by South Bank London, the ‘destination brand promoting London’s South Bank’. Although Billy Bragg’s appearance at the ‘Big Busk’ on the Royal Festival Hall foyer in 2012 did imply links to the 1980s, Bragg used this to argue that commercial redevelopment of the undercroft was necessary to realising the Southbank Centre’s vision for the area.
- 2.
This emphasis on symbiosis and an organic relationship between people and place has similarities with Matless’s research on organicist attitudes towards rural landscapes, where the intimate connections between people and the earth are emphasised partly in order to distinguish a particular attitude towards the landscape and aversion to intervention by centralised forms of management.
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Webb, D. (2022). Authenticity and Struggle: Historicising Skateboarding as ‘Action Art’ on London’s South Bank. In: Hammami, F., Uzer, E. (eds) Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_5
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