Opposition to Battersea

silter

11/6/2007

There is a growing body of feeling that the proposal to create a garden memorial in Battersea Park is an inadequate response to the depth of feeling concerning the Boxing Day tsunami. We can do better than this.

The DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) have failed to offer the Tsunami Support group (TS) a genuine choice. There is a suspicion that the TS has been manoeuvred into accepting the Battersea proposal for secondary reasons that have much more to do with diverting resources to a shabby and run-down part of south London rather than a response to the greatest natural disaster of the last 3 centuries.

The DCMS must be asked who was contacted concerning a public space for a memorial in London, and what was the response. If, as we strongly suspect, the whole business was conducted internally within different departments of the DCMS then it is not good enough, and we must step back and try again.

The meeting itself is being held at Battersea, as if everything was resolved, and the first task is to stop the bandwagon. The Battersea Park people have been very accommodating and the park itself is by no means without merit, and has one or two fine pieces of public sculpture. But it fails for the important reason that it is difficult to reach unless one seeks it out, and will remain so for a long time to come. We want something that visitors from overseas who perhaps have been affected by the tsunami will come across in the normal course of their travels around London, and will feel that the memorial also speaks for them.

As far as the memorial itself is concerned, doing nothing is better than doing something woeful, and although I have opinions about the form it should take I am quite content to vote for putting the whole thing on ice and try again later. A great many people will feel no need for a monument and may be cold towards the idea, for a variety of perfectly good reasons. I guess we have all created our own private memorials. Nevertheless my own feeling is that the event needs to be marked and those lives acknowledged in a significant public way. Recently I came across the number of people who die in the world each day - its about 155000. More than that died within 30 minutes of the earthquake that set off the Boxing Day tsunami, and nearly twice that number had died within 3 hours. That is the scale of it, and anything we create as a memorial needs to convey something of that enormity.

The TS has an absolute responsibility to get in touch with the wider tsunami community within the UK. I know it is difficult, and the DCMS has been less than helpful in providing contact details, but until the responses for any proposals reach several hundred then the TS does not have a mandate to spend resources on their behalf.