What is the relationship between memory and the world of work? Taken to its most extreme, memory and work have a very problematic relationship. Marxists, for example, find the idea of attachment to work as antithetical to the process of alienation and estrangement. Here, remembering economic life in a positive way presents a series of real contradictions. To be attached through economic activity is at least in part a denial of the centrifugal forces at play in modern employment, pressures that progressively detach workers from their labour, their fellow workers, and ultimately their species being. However, in study after study we get glimpses of a sense of embeddedness, meaning, and value.1 Arguably the strongest examples of this occur not when workers are in work, but after they lose it as part of shutdowns or layoffs (see Dudley 1994; High & Lewis 2007; Strangleman 2019).
In past research, Tim has used the idea of the ‘breaching experiment’ coined by Harold Garfinkel (see Strangleman 2019). This was the idea that underlying social structures were usually taken for granted in everyday life; it was only when social norms were breached that these hitherto disguised structures were revealed. The breach then exposed the meaning often attached in social interaction as well as a set of underlying rules. In the cases of work, redundancy, or wider deindustrialisation, these can equally act on a larger scale as a breaching experiment, forcing those caught up in the process of change to reflect on their working lives in the absence of work. Importantly, however, these memories of work almost always involve being rooted in particular times and spaces. Workers are not abstractly valuing a theoretical notion of work and attachment, but are rather remembering through people and place. They are socialising place and space through memory.
Economic geographers are critical of work sociology for failing to take space and place seriously. They suggest that the spatial, when invoked at all, is merely a device for containing action, a map reference where agency is exercised. Geographers, by contrast, claim they have a more sophisticated analysis where actors act on place and space, and equally the spatial makes up the actor (see for example Herod et al. 2007; Castree et al. 2003). There is a degree of co-production wherein the spatial is constantly live and contingent, not a passive receptacle. This chapter challenges these assumptions, suggesting that sociological accounts of work have often been alive to the potential of space. In particular, we suggest here that a complex and sophisticated understanding of place and memory emerges from writing about the loss of work through plant shutdown, or wider processes of deindustrialisation. Within this field, attachments to place are already being widely discussed whether it be through the economic dislocation of workers by political economists (Bluestone & Harrison 1982), the impact on cultural spaces described through cultural geography (Nayak 2006), or by employing literary terms to make sense of change (Linkon 2018). Through all of these accounts, the ideas of memory and space, articulated here through memoryscapes, helps us interrogate how workers remember their former labour, and how place-based memory often reveals an embedded attachment to work. This is often a relationship that was taken for granted when industry was open. In what follows we examine ideas of space and memory before focusing down on the workplace specifically as a site of memory. Finally, we draw on two short vignettes from our respective research showing differing forms of memory evoked by workplaces.
Before we take our discussion further, it is worth reflecting on a powerful counter narrative on memory and work, namely the suggestion that positive accounts of the past at work are ‘smokestack nostalgia’ (Cowie & Heathcott 2003). We take this to be the very real danger of romanticising an industrial past, one that edits out inequality around gender or race or glosses over pollution or industrial injury. As Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott say:
Equally, though, it is vital that the attachment felt by former workers to an industrial past is not simply dismissed as nostalgia. Whenever Tim has talked with retired or redundant workers they almost always leaven their positive accounts of the past with an acknowledgement of the negative aspects of labour (see Strangleman 2004, 2016, 2019). In other words, they engage in what Fred Davis (1979) labelled reflective or critical nostalgia, rather than simple nostalgia. ‘Simple’ nostalgia is a pejorative term which effectively diminishes claims to knowledge about the past. It usually implies an uncritical, romantic, rose-tinted view of events. Davis rejected the idea that this version of nostalgia is one that is ordinarily present. Instead he saw reflective and even critical forms of nostalgia as being more accurate interpretations of reminiscences. Here there is a questioning of the past alongside the present, even an evaluation of why particular memories are being triggered. These forms of nostalgia have the potential to be critical, analytical, oppositional and even radical (see Bonnett 2010; Boym 2001; Strangleman 1999, 2004).
This nostalgia forms from affective attachments to place. Workers use this radical spatial remembering to compete for visibility by rupturing narratives of spatial and temporal progress. In Theatres of Memory, historian Raphael Samuel notes the temporal fracture present in sites of redevelopment, as he says; ‘the past is seen not as a prelude to the present but as an alternative to it, “another country” ’ (2012: 221). In spaces where memories are shaped into a performance of history, there is a sense of a bygone past that is foreign to the now. Literatures that examine the relationship between space and memory will often echo this sentiment by articulating the different representations of a community’s past, putting individuals at odds with official discourses (Linkon & Russo 2002; Dudley 1994; Misztal 2003). This most commonly occurs in spaces of ‘official’ remembering such as museums, ruins, or even entire cities and towns (Samuel 2012; Smith 2006; Edensor 2005a, 2005b). Within these spaces power and memory intersect. Indirectly, public spaces can also be enrolled into these controlled dialogues of remembering through what Samuel (2012: 39) called ‘the historicisation of the built environment.’ When these public spaces are ‘rebranded’ the evidence of destruction must be hidden, a process Tim Edensor (2005a) refers to as ‘exorcising.’ Non-elite memories are invariably marginalised, skipped over, or excluded altogether. The complexity of lived reality is flattened, simplified, and rendered linear.
When taken to former spaces of work, this relationship becomes even more complicated as nostalgia, and the affective attachment from which it forms, becomes a disruptive force. Edensor (2005a, 2005b) examines this in industrial ruins, spaces that are either forgotten or demolished to make way for regeneration. Agents of restoration attempt to strip particular areas of memory, washing over ‘haunted’ spaces. These practices aim to produce a single narrative of history, removing the possibility for contestation. Those with direct links to these sites of memory act as spectres, fluid entities who have the potential to disrupt the fixed narrative of modern capitalism. The dominant strategies of official and unofficial heritage spaces impose a certain identity on sites, but these get muddled by the spectral presence. Capitalism requires these spaces to perform a certain identity which becomes disturbed when those with competing discourses are present (Edensor 2005a). These ghosts, however, haunt all spaces of memory as they embody the contestation of power which characterise memoryscapes, acting as a transgressive form of remembering; they occupy a grey space between past and present as they draw in competing discourses of memory to these sites.
This theme is an elaboration of the ideas of American sociologist Avery Gordon and her book 2008 book Ghostly Matters. Gordon makes a powerful argument for the idea of haunting within the sociological imagination, and, in particular, the way ideas and memories linger long after the context which originally framed them disappeared. Long suppressed or forgotten memories and ideas bubble up in the present, reminding individuals, groups, or societies about an aspect of the past. Alongside Edensor’s writing, Gordon’s social haunting is suggestive of the revelatory moment, a surprise uncovering, and the keeping alive of memory of a suppressed past. Workers are drawn out of this past and into the present, fracturing the temporal shift of the redevelopment of space.
The affective attachment of workers to their spaces of employment makes this radical nostalgia place based. Ghosts reintroduce alternative memories and representations of loss, pain, and pride: the affective responses to change that are difficult to linearise or standardise. Affective responses are less successful in ‘authorized heritage discourses’ which cleanses history of emotion, reducing the past to observable and teachable facts (Smith 2006). Ghosts, by contrast, invoke empathy, making contact with the viewer and giving a more human face to change. Spaces of memory disrupt the clean break between past and present. They can challenge the linearity of capitalism and development, bringing forth the grey space in between now and then, highlighting the experience of change. So, spaces of memory reflect structural processes of capitalism, power imbalance, and control over discourse. They are microcosmic battle grounds for privilege and dissent where these dynamics become visible. This becomes most apparent when individuals remember workspaces and problematise the idea that industrial closure was inevitable and a part of the natural order of capitalist progress.
Attachment to space is a temporal, spatial, and cultural negotiation of place and memory. Spaces of work physically and culturally imprint communities and communities imprint on the spaces in which they work. Memory is often used as a tool in workplaces to gain autonomy in labour and reclaim a form of communal control and solidarity. Workplaces act as ‘circuits of memory’ as routines and identities based from communities of memory make claim to the space (Edensor 2005a). These communities are what Barbara Misztal (2003) calls ‘mnemonic’ as they are formed from individuals adhering to a collective memory. As Misztal (2003) describes, remembering is a social process that forms a social identity. As new members at work engage in the same cultural knowledges, they ascribe to the same social identity that is transgressive by nature. Therefore, they are joining a wider communal identity which can be ‘identified primarily with habit; its authority is derived from the felt need to reiterate the wisdom bequest by the past’ (Hutton 1993: 17). Through these rituals, the workplace is renegotiated which alters the cultural space. Workplace cultures are reliant on memory as, through collective remembering, solidarity is formed. The destruction of these workspaces does not erode these communities entirely as Steven High and David Lewis (2007: 12) remind us, ‘communities are lived in social networks, created in places, and imagined at a distance.’ Therefore, they have the potential to exist beyond the walls of the workplace and imprint upon the physical site of labour.
When workplaces close, the community loses access to its physical focal point. However, this does not mean that they become entirely disassociated from it. Sherry Linkon and John Russo (2002) in Steel Town examine the role of communal and collective rememberings that are oppositional when trying to reconstruct the identity of a former industrial town. Here, the individual has a distinct form of remembering the workspace that contradicts the memories constructed by the official planners. Remembering workspaces here is too invested with dialogues of power as they try to understand who owns the collective identity of the community. These imbalances over power, however, can also work to restore the community of memory and refocus their collective solidarity into a singular memory that acts as a membrane to members. Valerie Walkerdine (2010) discusses this phenomenon in South Wales whereby memories of industrial culture allow members to draw strength in their remembering and use it to collate a singular sense of a communal self. This acts as a force to resist official discourses that would seek to reconstruct their identity in a way that they do not recognise. Within both cases, there is a struggle over memory and over how individuals and communities of workers attempt to renegotiate the forced terrain of detachment. They have been spatially disassociated from their sites of labour that allowed their solidarity and community to reproduce, and therefore, without ownership or direct relationship with the physical marker of their community, they must try to restore this focal point elsewhere.
What we have tried to pick out from the discussions so far is that recurrently the literature on sites of memory return to the notion that there is a power struggle in these places. When we began to consider what form remembering took at work and particularly within work, it appeared central to how work solidarities were formed through the renegotiation of cultural space. Of course, when the workplace closed, these cultural spaces became even more ephemeral as they lost their material attachment. Detachment and attachment are central components to what it is to remember a site of work because the community has been removed from its physical grounding. But, beyond that there seems to be two aspects of this that need to be examined a bit more. What happens to the workspace itself, the physical space of memory, and the workers who form the cultural space of memory.
In Corporate Wasteland, High and Lewis pose an important question: ‘Industrial ruins are memory places, for they make us pause, reflect, and remember. But remember what, and to what end?’ (2007: 9). We offer two vignettes from our respective research to illustrate some of the complexity of the relationship between memory and the place of work, and in the process hope to answer, at least in part, High and Lewis’ question. Firstly, Tim will talk about a small aspect of one of his interviews from his Guinness research which highlights the bonds that exist between former workers, their memories and space. Secondly, Emma discusses an interview with former Chatham Dockyard worker, Stuart Pollitt, who further details the role of nostalgia and perspective in this triadic relationship. What both accounts taken together show is that memoryscapes are political. They incite dissent, and, particularly within the relationship between workspaces and workers, the complexity and fragmentation of rendering memories as a physical space is highlighted.
In the summer of 2015 Tim interviewed former brewery worker Terry Aldridge. Terry had worked at the Guinness brewery at Park Royal in west London for two decades from 1975. In the interview Terry had reflected warmly of his time at Guinness and those he had worked with there. Tim’s abiding memory of this interview with Terry was of them both laughing as he recalled the pranks that he had been a victim or perpetrator of, these usually involved getting wet. Throughout his career Terry had been a keen and talented amateur photographer, taking pictures of the brewery from the time he began working there. Towards the end of their time together he showed Tim the images he had taken of the site while it was in the process of demolition. As he showed Tim the images he had taken of destruction, he told him about the impact of what he saw:
Terry made several pilgrimages to his former place of work but, by the final visit, there was little to record:
Tim was fascinated to understand why Terry, who had not worked at the plant for over a decade, would make the long trip from his south coast home to record the fate of a former place of work. After a long sigh he told him:
A little later that summer Tim interviewed Henry Dawson in his north west London home, ten years after he had initially talked to him while the brewery was open. Tim asked him if he had returned to the site during its demolition. He said simply:
Tim asked Henry if he had seen any of Terry’s photographs of the demolition:
As he explained to Tim, ‘I’d rather remember it how it was working … and people smiling while they were at work.’
There are some fascinating things going on in the material from Terry and Henry. In their different ways both shows a great love of their former site of work, seeing great value in it, and each was sad, and even angry, to witness the buildings destroyed. But while Terry felt compelled to take photographs of the ruination process, to record the events because of this attachment, Henry cannot bear to look at these same images, precisely because of a desire to remember attachment in a different form. Through images memories can be stored and regenerated but also perhaps eroded; they allow a complex range of emotions to surface and circulate.
It is clear that both Terry and Henry valued their work and the people they had worked with: looking back fondly, even nostalgically on the working lives at Park Royal. But their reflection on the past is not uncritical. Neither worker had given an unalloyed positive rendering of the past. Equally in looking at the present and the past, the place of labour is used to provide a critique of work now and its organisation. Complexity, then, is the marker of remembering through space. As Terry and Henry show, their presence and memories muddle any attempts to find coherence in the responses to memoryscapes whether they be physical or cultural. When revisiting these spaces as the two men show, their attachments render the spaces political.
Similarly, Emma found this contestation and politics of attachment to take form in her discussions with former Chatham Dockyard worker, Stuart Pollitt, who had started at the Dockyard as a yard boy doing general maintenance duties in 1964. At 15, Stuart had been called into the Number 8 Machine shop and told by one of the senior engineers of his selection for the apprenticeship programme. The next ten years of Stuart’s work life would happen within that machine shop until the day he left the yard. During Stuart’s interview, the machine shop repeatedly emerged as a central theme in how he remembered his work, particularly, referring to the first time he visited the yard after its 1984 closure. Since then, the machine shop had been stripped of its cladding and kept as a skeleton frame which had been listed as a heritage site. The area surrounding it had been drastically transformed from a working industrial Dockyard to a retail outlet. The other machine shop that stood opposite Number 8 has been repurposed as a shopping centre, restaurants, and a cinema. The skeleton therefore seems odd against this landscape. Stuart revisited this preserved frame and stood amongst it:
Listening to Stuart shows that there is something important about remembering through workspaces, his own personal memoryscape. Stuart conjured up a mental image of the past rooted in that space, which gives him the perspective to see how invisible that past is to those passersby. He occupies a space much like Edensor’s (2005a) ghosts, as an entity that complicates the narrative of the retail district that surrounds the skeleton by drawing upon his attachment to place. He draws the past into dialogue with the present and disrupts the notion of a clean break between the area’s industrial past and its retail future. Stuart occupies the grey space between past and present and moves between these spaces to offer a reflection on what has changed.
Stuart was being nostalgic. He is looking back on the past and reopening the doors of what once was at the site to draw parallels with the future. Rather than being romantic and wistful, he is reflective, even critical about the changes to place and space. He does not have a blind desire to return to a better past; by standing in that frame and occupying the space between the then and the now, he has the privilege of perspective. He can cast a critical gaze on both the past and the present to see what has changed for the better and for the worse. He hazes the officially imposed normative discourse surrounding these sites of regeneration that the change is beneficial for the area as he reintroduces the critical voices of those who have lost out in these sites. He stands as a voice for the former workers who become ostracised from the spaces that were once central to their communities by the ongoing redevelopment projects. Stuart disrupts the linear narrative of change and progressiveness by being a ghostly figure of nostalgia.
Like Terry and Henry, Stuart is talking through a form of attachment; one that is evoked by a complex form of spatial remembering. He remembers his attachment to his community at work and the chap he remembered sweeping the floors – those that gave him the ‘gift’ of solidarity, communality, and all the other positive aspects of the workplace. Within the frame, he is reflecting on the memories shared in the workplace; he draws this community out of its past and reimagines its existence in that moment. Memory and spaces overlap in communities as groups imprint their collective conscious onto a physical site (High & Lewis 2007; Linkon & Russo 2002; Misztal 2003). Stuart acts as a vessel of this communal memory, finding the strength to reject their ‘by-gone’ status through being in the space of memory. However, being in the machine shop also forces him to consider the subsequent detachment felt to the passers-by. Those who remind him of his invisibility and cause his concern for the existence of his workplace in the present. Through these forms of attachment/detachment, he finds his critical viewpoint. His nostalgia therefore is a form of attachment as it is through his relationship with material and imagined spaces, that he draws the past into the present. In this respect, attachment to space is political as it is the catalyst for drawing out feelings of nostalgia, dissent, and complicated voices.
Overall, this chapter has thought through what happens when individuals and communities remember through spaces of work. Employing the concept of memoryscapes within the sociology of work allows us a new lens to examine a phenomenon that is already present within existing accounts. But this new articulation helps draw together the geographical, social, cultural, and political narratives that often imbue workers’ relationships to place. How workers remember, imagine, and describe space becomes an essential part of the narrative of the place. Their agency is repositioned in the memoryscape and we understand more about their attachment to place and the places’ attachment to them.
Workspaces therefore offer a unique form of spatial remembering. They are spaces where critical reflection is made easier and transgressive discourses flourish. Workers and workplace communities embed these sites with their memories; they are laced with spatial and temporal fixings that allow former workers to feel ownership over the space. Former factories, ruins, and workshops are imbued with meaning for those who have attachment to these communities of memory. The communal identities become fixed into the space which allows remembering outside of the official discourse. Particularly we have shown this to be brought into focus when workers engage with nostalgic remembering.
What Terry, Henry, and Stuart uncover through their presence and absence at their former workspaces is that memoryscapes are sites of politicised remembering. Within these spaces, attachment emerges as a form of nostalgia characterised by complexity and dissent. Through Stuart and his skeleton frame, we see this juxtaposition occur through the relationship between the past and the present. Henry and Terry show how this can occur within the attachment of the workers themselves as they negotiate their affective responses to their former workplace. Both examples show how conflict emerges both internally and externally for the workers.
Plant shutdowns and wider processes of deindustrialisation have acted as a breaching experiment: enabling, or rather forcing, former workers to reflect on their attachment to their now redundant trade. Memories are elicited through discussion, photography, and material object, and these reflections are often critical in nature rather than ‘simple nostalgia,’ or ‘smokestack nostalgia.’ While individual testament can be a powerful counter to sweeping industrial change, collectively the voices and memories of deindustrialised workers offer up a wider critique of capitalism and the decisions made about individuals, communities, and industry. Workers’ memories therefore are powerful. Through engagement with their relationship to space, we learn more about how places are given meaning and the processes in which these are made and remade.
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