This project is sponsored by the AHRC Heritage Consortium and develops research approaches into ‘heritage’ as both a locus of meaning (the heritage object) and a practice of meaning (a doing) which has affecting as well as personal, political, cultural, and ethical consequences within our everyday lives. It takes the experience of London bus travel as a focus, working with bus enthusiasts as participants as they encounter the London Transport Museum and Heritage Route 15 and through talking about their own personal heritage practices.
In the project, heritage is treated as a concept related to experience rather than, or as well as, an innate quality of material things surviving from the past. The meaning of heritage is considered as contingent on the context-specific action in the moment of encounter AND its renewal through representation. These meanings are ‘affective’, they are felt, sensed, and lived through and with.
The study seeks to investigate the motivational forces for doing heritage, as cultural practice related to a sense of ‘time-consciousness’. For example: the accumulation and re-presentation of objects and experiences from the personal or collective past; or activities which seek to preserve the present as a means of future-building. It also seeks to reassert the role of the material, the heritage object (body, bus, museum), within the ‘critical heritage discourse’.
London bus travel is considered a specific cultural phenomenon which has values and uses beyond the utilitarian (transporting passengers from A to B). The phenomenon is sensuous, affecting, and materially expressed. By engaging with bus enthusiasts, the aim is to explore some of the meanings and values attributed to everyday bus travel during the interaction with and accumulation of heritage objects and experiences. My role as passenger, enthusiast, visitor, observer, participant, and analyst, is central to the enquiry.
