PhD Student Tim Fox-Godden won the Gail Braybon Prize for Best Postgraduate Paper at the 8th Conference of the International Society for First World War Studies; the conference was entitled ‘Landscapes of War’ and was held in September 2015 in Trento, Italy.
The paper, ‘Sites of Memory Beyond Mourning?’ looks at narratives of memory contained within the architecture of the British war cemeteries along the former Western Front of the First World War. The traditional interpretation of these sites has been one centred on the commemoration of the dead and whilst this is important it is not the only layer of memory. The paper, based on Tim’s PhD research, explores one of these other layers of memory; specifically, the relationship between the cemetery architecture and the landscape of the Great War. Using a case study of a cluster of cemeteries on the Franco-Belgian border the paper identifies a design typology in the relationship between the architecture and the wartime landscape. In doing so it highlights the layer of memory that retains the geometries and features of the battlefields that would otherwise be lost.