ABSTRACT
The re-location of the Silvertown War Memorial in 2017, a hundred years after its dedication to the dead of an explosion at the Brunner Mond munitions factory in this East London docklands area, is the subject of this chapter. It raises a series of issues about hierarchies of national war memory, marginalisation of industrial histories, community heritage practices in the spaces of urban gentrification and the continued invisibility of legacies of colonial exploitation. Allied armaments used in the First World War were dependent upon nitrate from Chile for the explosive force of the contents of their shells, such as those manufactured in Silvertown. Yet the extraction and export of nitrate and the labour on which these processes depended remain invisible in heritage practices, either performed or permanent. Attention to the work of design in heritage and the application of design historical analysis in its interpretation are offered as ways of reflecting upon sites and structures of Silvertown’s industrial heritage, both marginalised and invisible.
