On the arbitrary nature of memorials

The BBC web site has an article on a memorial to the people who were killed in the 7/7 bombings of 2005. It doesn't look like a very imaginative sculpture - just some poles stuck in the ground. It doesn't even seem to represent "52 unique individuals" as claimed, since all the poles are the same.

The way that we choose to memorialise certain things and not others seems very arbitrary to me. So for example a similar number of people are killed in traffic accidents every day, or die whilst waiting to receive hostpital treatment, but these people don't usually have statues - artistically interesting, or otherwise - erected in their memory.



So what seems to matter as far as memorials are concerned is not just the number of people killed, nor whether they were "innocent" or "non-political", but whether the event in which they died was itself of a highly political nature.

Needless to say, if I were unfortunate enough to be killed in an event resembling 7/7 I would't wish to be represented as a featureless grey monolith.

Four years on from 7/7 there still remain some inadequetely explained components to the story, and the lack of a public enquiry into exactly what happened that day has meant that various possible alternative explanations, questions about what the security services knew about the bombers and miscellaneous conspirarcy theories have arrisen. In hindsight I think that not holding a public enquiry was a mistake, and that probably the best policy when something like this happens would be to open source the evidence as soon as it becomes available, so that the wilder theories can be clearly ruled out.