A Cenotaph for the Community: How Londoners Have Remembered the First World War

The last episode of the RCRM Speakers Series – Season 1 will feature Katrina Pasierbek, a PhD Candidate in History at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON. Katrina has taught myth, memory, and public history courses at Laurier and King's University College at Western University. An educator both inside and outside the classroom, Katrina also leads overseas battlefield tours of First and Second World War sites across England, Belgium, and France. Before enrolling at Wilfried Laurier, Katrina was a Public Programmer at our museum and today she will be talking about a familiar feature to London’s residents: The Cenotaph at Victoria Park.
In the years following the First World War the citizens of London, Ontario raised local memorials to honour the generation who served in the war. Built in 1934, the most prominent local structure is the Cenotaph located at Dufferin Avenue and Wellington Street, but few Londoners are aware of its complicated and intriguing history. Throughout its eighty-six-year history, the Cenotaph has been edited to reflect Canada's military engagements in twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the space surrounding the Cenotaph has become a gathering place for remembrance ceremonies, parades, public protests, and vandalism.