Remembering

THE MODERN MEMORIAL

It used to be so straightforward: a king, queen or important man, on a pedestal. These days, public memorials are more complicated, more democratic and far more interesting. Charlie McCann reports

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2015

JOHN LENNON IS an airport, in Liverpool. So is George Best, in Belfast, and Ian Fleming, in Jamaica. Queen Elizabeth II is a terminal at Heathrow and an aircraft carrier. In Birmingham she’s a ring road, in Merseyside she’s a dock, and in London she’s a conference centre, an Olympic park, a pier, a gallery, a concert hall and a clock tower. Around the Commonwealth, she is a national park in Uganda, a mountain range in Australian Antarctica and a power station in Saskatchewan. All this, and she’s not even dead yet. This September, she will become Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, toppling Victoria, who is herself a sponge cake, a prison, half a museum, two states, three stations and dozens of parks, streets and squares.

Monarchs and presidents, soldiers and statesmen, the rich and the pious, celebrities and scholars, artists, athletes and engineers, deities and other fictions: we stitch the names of those we wish to honour into the fabric of our everyday lives. Their names are emblazoned on buildings, from the Walt Whitman mall in Long Island to the Rosa Parks bus depot in Detroit and the Henrik Ibsen garage in Oslo, and on maps (Bolivia, the Philippines, America). Laws get named after people (you can thank Ernesto for your Miranda rights), as do charities (Marie Curie, Susan G. Komen), awards (Samuel Johnson, Alan Turing), moon craters (Jules Verne, Michael Jackson) and Crossrail’s giant tunnelling machines (Victoria and Elizabeth still get landed with the world’s most boring jobs). Even people get named after people. My mother wanted to call me Charlotte after the Spanish queen; my father gunned for Chevy after Louis Chevrolet, the founder of the company—and the model of his first car. And then there are the names carved on to plaques, busts, statues and monuments; remembrances that serve only to remember.

IN MADRID, YOU'LL find a name you wouldn’t expect. In the well-heeled district of Salamanca, ten minutes’ walk from the Prado, is a small, concrete square. It’s bordered on one side by a Bank of Madrid and on the other by a five-star hotel whose ground floor, leased to a Hard Rock Café, is thronged with diners. Fixed about 20 feet up, either end of the bank, are two navy-blue signs; a third, hanging from a nearby pole, flaps in the wind.

The square was named through the efforts of the councillor who represents Salamanca on Madrid’s city council. Fernando Martínez Vidal is an affable, courteous man. When I meet him at the Hard Rock Café, he looks as if he’s cut short a lazy day of shopping. Dressed in olive-green chinos and a brown quilted jacket, with a large Armani bag by his side, he orders us some beers and fries—greeting the staff by name—and then, matter-of-factly, proceeds to tell me how the Iron Lady won his heart. “We admire Margaret Thatcher. And we admire Margaret Thatcher because we admire the British political system, the liberalism that she represented… She was very controversial, but she transformed the political life in the UK.” He pauses. “The most important thing is not what she did in the UK, but her influence in the world, how she contributed to pacifying the world and introducing freedom.”

“After she died”—Madrid commemorates only the dead—“we started to consider to put a place in Madrid, and in this area, because this area is conservative.” He adds, “It was impossible in the centre of Madrid because everything was already named. But we found this place”—he gestures to the square. “This place is not a public place; it’s a private place with public use.” Martínez Vidal had to secure permission from the Bank of Madrid, the owner of the unnamed square. This was the first step in a rather complex approval process that he had to explain to himself a couple of times before he could explain it to me. (Just to be on the safe side, he presented me with that Armani shopping bag; much to my disappointment, all it contained was a sheaf of paperwork.) Despite all the red tape, the gentleman was not for turning. Last September, in a ceremony starring Madrid’s mayor Ana Botella, the British ambassador Simon Manley and Thatcher’s son Mark, the square was dedicated to Maggie.

There have always been men like Martínez Vidal, eager to make their mental maps of the world real. The so-called great men of history have done so from time immemorial. Romulus gave his name to Rome; Constantine to Constantinople; Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist, to Rhodesia. Names, of course, don’t last for time immemorial. Revolution makes a virtue of re-naming: in Paris after 1789, 1,400 streets received new names because the old ones contained some reference to a king, queen or saint. When revolutionaries swing out of favour, old names swing back in: St Petersburg became Leningrad which became St Petersburg. In April, Ukraine’s parliament passed a bill banning communist symbols. In what has become known as “Leninfall”, activists have torn down more than 100 monuments to Lenin across the country. Thousands of street signs are to be replaced and several towns and cities may have to change their names.

To walk the streets of Paris or Madrid is to be given a local history lesson—by the winners, whether big or small. Martínez Vidal could pay tribute to Thatcher because his party, the conservative People’s Party, was in power; with its support, he could ignore the voluble protests of the opposition when his petition came to a vote in the city council. (These voices of dissent may still triumph. In May, Madrid elected a left-wing mayor, who promised to scrap Thatcher’s name.) Considering the support he had this time last year, why didn’t Martínez Vidal go for something more ambitious? Street names get into your address book, sure, but statues, monuments—they have gravitas. “The Margaret Thatcher Foundation offered us the possibility of a bust,” he says. “But because she is controversial, they may put a statue and the statue would suffer. It could be attacked, injured.” So they stuck with the square. Still, as Martínez Vidal told me earlier, “Hay que tener huevos para ponerle una Plaza Margaret Thatcher.” You have to have balls to dedicate a square to Margaret Thatcher.