Heritage, civilisation and oblivion in inter-war Britain: The case of the city churches

This essay investigates public debates over the prospective loss of Christopher Wren’s City of London churches as a window onto changing public attitudes to ‘heritage’ and historic preservation during the inter-war years. It argues that the Great War made a profound impact on the ways in which the British public engaged with notions of heritage and historic preservation. In particular, this essay claims that inter-war debates over church demolition expose the considerable extent to which the war popularised conceptualisations of ‘heritage’ which had, since the 1870s, been entertained exclusively by a small cultural elite.