A New Career in a New Town: Locating sites of pilgrimage
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-02-17

In 1191, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey ‘discovered’ the tomb of King Arthur beneath a lead cross carrying the inscription ‘Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus in insula Avalonia’. On January 10, 2016, many people flocked to Tunstall Road, Brixton to leave flowers and offerings in front of a mural depicting Aladdin Sane, a character developed by David Jones (aka Bowie), who had died that day. There are more things connecting these events than first meets the eye. Firstly, both Arthur and Bowie are figures of myth, not to say fictions. The latter was one of many dramatic characters created by David Jones. Moreover, both Bowie and Arthur have connections with multiple locations; Heddon Street in Westminster has been a place of Bowie pilgrimage since the 1980s, Beckenham, where David Jones grew up, has attracted his fans since the 1970s (Graves-Brown and Orange 2017). More generally, Bowie and Arthur are just two of the many figures on the boundaries between fact and fiction who are celebrated in sites and monuments where their status remains ambiguous; the Sherlock Holmes ‘museum’ in London's Baker Street or the Ianto Jones memorial in Cardiff Bay (Beattie 2014) being other UK examples. In this paper, we want to explore the social and cultural forces which lead certain locations to be sites of pilgrimage and reverence. In particular we will explore the reasons why certain places acquire fame through the appropriation of famous figures, real and fictional. Whilst not necessarily dismissing the claims made for these sites, we find that the creation of such shrines tells us a good deal about attitudes to death, commemoration, and celebrity. 

Paul Graves-Brown (UCL) and Hilary Orange (UCL)