‘Private’ Spaces of Memory?: Hyde Park and the Holocaust Centre

Public acts of memorialisation rely upon ‘participation’ for their ‘functional essence’.1 Creating sites of memory therefore assumes-indeed, requiresthe pre-existence of a will to remember. This underscores the correlation between an absence in sites of cultural memory in Britain during the fi rst half of the postwar period and the fl uctuating levels of interest in the Holocaust among both Jewish and non-Jewish society.