(CS4.2) Strategic Forgetting or Selective Remembrance: Preserving the Built Heritage of the London Asylum for the Insane through oral Histories

In 1870, the former London Asylum for the Insane opened its doors to patients across southern Ontario, Canada. The original institution had many structures, including imposing Victorian patient buildings, as well as barns, a bakery, and mortuary. Today, a developer owns the asylum grounds and only four of the original buildings survive. In the last three years alone, they have suffered from almost a half-dozen catastrophic fires between them. Recent legislative changes to the Ontario Heritage Act makes the preservation of heritage buildings more challenging. These buildings are in jeopardy.
But as these asylum buildings are lost, the rich, pervasive, but also challenging history of the institution is rapidly fading. Thus, this project started with a question: How can oral histories be used to preserve the built heritage of the London Asylum for the Insane? This question resulted in a digital exhibit and oral interviews that reconstructed the built heritage of the London Asylum.

However, this project did not end there. Recording stories continued and research began into the historiographical basis for oral histories in built heritage preservation and the preservation of challenging sites more generally. While some oral historians have shown both the increasing popularity in and integration of oral histories into public history institutions, it does not seem that oral histories are being utilized in the preservation of historic properties.

Further, American and European academics have explored the challenging nature of redeveloping psychiatric hospital sites and, in turn, memorializing their history. How does one juxtapose a historically traumatic site with a new place that has to be safe and welcoming for a wide group? How does one fight against the real possibility that future generations will not only fail to appreciate the “preservation of heritage architecture and landscape” but also fail to remember “the asylum use for which they were both created.” (Joseph, Kearns, Moon, 152) Thus, with these ideas about the challenges of memorializing challenging landscapes – specifically psychiatric hospital sites – this research project, incorporating the built heritage with stories, acts as a potential model for future sites – even the London Asylum site itself. At the time of writing this proposal, there is little to suggest what the London Asylum site developer intends to do regarding the memorialization of the site – however, their website suggests a significant degree of both selective remembrance and strategic forgetting in their current advertising.

This project, which centers stories, experiences, and memories, can be a lesson on how the memorialization of challenging sites can be approached. Highlighting the stories of those who interacted closely with the traumatic site can humanize it and make it simultaneously an educational historic record and a place open to new experiences.