Begin with the ruins.

Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851 did not mark London's first great performance of its own power and greatness. The original Crystal Palace celebrated expansion and industry, was a theater to tell a certain story about the British Empire. Today it is ruins, and yet it retains its function: its ruins (including a set of Sphinxes from the Egyptian Exhibit) link London to the great Empires of the past, suggest power and history. The place today, complete with museum and diminutive 'reproduction corner', becomes a kind of absurd, half-hearted and arcane thing, neither dog park nor British heritage site.

In London's theater of historical significance, absurdity is no stranger.

Witness it in the anachronistic figureheads of the Royal family, the arcane and awkward guards,

or the obscene height of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.

Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar become part of national culture and memory, the a battle a symbol of British power and Nelson a martyr and hero literally larger than life, all aided by the presence of a square and a monument that rises so far into the heavens, he might as well not be there.

Inspired by the column's inaccessible nature, one designer commissioned by the London Design Museum to suggest a way of giving back to the city designed an edifice that features a grassy platform so that visitors to Trafalgar might walk right up to the seventeen foot tall Nelson, attempt to rescue a man from within a myth.

No matter: monuments fill the city with characters of less-than-memorable names,

of fictional as well as true identities,

of educated and heroic men,

and of reproduction-wastepaper bins of great creatives?

Yes - so that the people might throw away or forget the many uneducated and unheroic people, the many acts of destruction, which also make up their history.

Monuments, memorials, reproductions, ruins, simulations, ceremonies, plaques and public squares dedicated and named for another great man or moment: when state commissioned or maintained, they are often pieces of propaganda, means of telling stories about what London and Britain are, where they come from, where they are going. Its—often strange—monumental stage props dotting the city stage, London becomes a theater for social control through the shaping and sometimes changing of cultural memory.