Over the past few months, I’ve been taking part in the VE Day/Cenotaph project with English Heritage as a Young Producer. The project brought together talks, workshops, field trips, and oral history trainings to explore remembrance culture, memorials, and how different histories of the Second World War continue to resonate today.
Using the Cenotaph as a focal point representing collective remembrance, the project explored different perspectives connected to the Second World War. Through a series of lectures and discussions, we heard insights from historians, curators, campaigners, and organisations working across remembrance and public history. Jeremy Ashbee from English Heritage introduced the history and ongoing care of the Cenotaph and other memorials in London, while Stephen Bourne discussed the experiences of Black British communities and LGBTQ+ service personnel during and after the war. Kate Husband spoke about the emotional significance of the LGBTQ+ memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum and her work with Fighting With Pride, while Steve Ballinger from British Future explored how remembrance projects can help connect younger and more diverse audiences with wartime history.
For me, the field trips around Whitehall and London memorials opened up new doors. Engaging with these monuments closely in person made me physically aware of how remembrance exists within everyday public space, while paying special attention to small physical details – traces of wartime damage, helmets with bullet holes, uniforms, and objects used to represent absent people. I was especially struck by the Women of World War II Monument, where empty uniforms stand in for the people who once wore them. These static daily objects make the memorial feel unexpectedly human and immediate. Now 81 years after the end of the Second World War, these physical traces and objects also felt like reminders of how memory slowly moves from lived experience into history and archive, with the gradual absence of the wartime generations.
Visiting the Tower Hill Memorial
Throughout the project, we were also exploring ways in which we might want to further document and explore people’s reflections and opinions on remembrance and the role of the Cenotaph. The oral history training led by Sarah Lowry from the Oral History Society inspired us. We discussed how to approach interviews sensitively and how oral history preserves not only facts, but also emotion, memory, and personal experience. At a moment when many veterans and first-hand witnesses are sadly disappearing from living memory, it is crucial to preserve these stories before they move fully into archival history.
Not having grown up in the UK, the project also gave me a chance to witness how wartime memory differs across cultural contexts. While VE Day remains highly visible within British public memory, it also feels important to approach the history of the Second World War from broader and more interconnected perspectives beyond Europe alone. Even when discussing VE Day, the war itself cannot really be separated from the wider global histories and human experiences that shaped it.
From the perspective of our shared humanity, projects like this create space for younger generations to engage with these histories in more personal, meaningful, and globally aware ways. It also reminded me that remembrance is not only about history itself, but about how people continue to carry and interpret these memories across time and across cultures.
This article is a written response to the Reframing Remembrance project.