The ‘contemporary past’ is a relatively new concept but it is a field of heritage that is already becoming well established. It has a particular social relevance because – like the idea of landscape it relates directly to people’s everyday lives, to their surroundings and to their perception of the contemporary world. Like landscape, too, it encourages us to think in slightly different ways about heritage – for example about the balance between keeping and celebrating – and of working, notably through wide-ranging inter-disciplinarity.
Contemporary heritage does not fit into a simple chronological bracket, and might even be best defined backwards, for example as 2010 -1950. It takes us from the present day to a time when the past seems no longer modern, whenever that might be given the way that the profusion of vivid visual, aural and now digital records stretches the traditional yardstick of the fading of living memory.
Heritage in the 20th century
English Heritage has considerable experience in 20th century heritage. These include the post war-listing programme in the 1990s and comprehensive reviews of 20th century military heritage, as well as our historic landscape and townscape characteristation programmes which focus heavily on recent decades.
More recently we have developed ways for using characterisation-type approaches to study large modern military complexes and iconic places such as Bletchley Park, and new ways to perceive historic landscapes such as auditory archaeology.
Evolving ideas
Our ideas on the contemporary heritage are still evolving.
In 2004 Characterisation Team and its partners published a discussion paper called Change and Creation, followed in 2007 by a book Images of Change, an issue of Conservation Bulletin called ‘Modern times’, and organsied seminars, notably ‘Heritage CHAT in 2008.
A Research Strategy for the Archaeology of the Contemporary Past is currently in preparation.
