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Hewitt, Danielle (2025) A bombsite flora: London’s wartime plants as historical facts. Architecture and Culture. pp. 1-32. ISSN 2050-7836
This article examines E.J. Salisbury and F.E. Wrighton’s botanical studies of the flora which thrived in London following the bombings of World War II, and which have established in the city since. This flora is revealed as a complicated new nature which thrived specifically due to the topographic conditions produced by bombing. This visual essay combines photographs of contemporary occurrences of bombsite plant species with a historical and theoretical text producing a "plantarium", a hybrid interpretation of the Flora and herbarium as forms of botanical knowledge. In positioning these plants as a living archive, they are understood as "historical facts". Thinking through Rebecca Solnit’s use of the term "saeculum" and through a reflection on the temporality of the photograph, with reference to Ariella Azoulay, the article suggests that contemporary occurrences of the bombsite flora can propose alternative historical temporalities for thinking the relationships of our violent past to the present.
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 4.0.
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