What do we feel when we walk through death?

Turning away from London Bridge this week, Will Gore considers how humdrum places gain meaning from past events

(PA)

We trample on other people’s memories all the time: by what we say, and what we don’t say; and by our thoughtless, even reckless actions. We do it literally too, when we walk in the spaces that have witnessed others’ personal disasters and triumphs.

Leaving a meeting in Southwark this week, I thought about heading over the river, planning to enjoy the endlessly bewitching swirl of the Thames under wintry sun and to pick up the Tube at Bank station. But then I was struck by the recollection of the hideous events that had taken place on London Bridge just a few days earlier, and all of a sudden, the idea of walking on the pavement where Usman Khan’s murderous assault had been brought to a definitive end seemed a little ghoulish.

What, I wondered, must it be like for his family – not only to know that their kin had a heart so full of hate, but that the spot on which he was shot by police will for ever more be ground under the soles of many thousands of Londoners a day?

What’s more, after a few months have passed, those who cross the bridge – each with their own preoccupations – will begin to forget that the stretch of pavement at the south side, which looks much like any other, bears any particular significance.

Likewise, how long will it be until people attend events at Fishmongers’ Hall and not recall that it was the place in which Khan’s utterly innocent victims, Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, were murdered in cold blood?

Eventually, and inexorably, past events move beyond our own knowledge, let alone our immediate memory.

Eventually, and inexorably, past events move beyond our own knowledge, let alone our immediate memory

Years ago, my brother and I were driving with my father to some family event in the Fens. “This,” said dad, glancing out of the window at a lonely junction, “is where your great, great uncle was killed by a highwayman.” Since we had not been aware of this familial incident before, it naturally came as a fairly startling revelation – made at turns both visceral and yet oddly distant by being announced at just the moment we rolled over the very ground on which an unknown forebear had met a violent end.

It was certainly a desolate site, but also utterly humdrum, devoid of any particularly distinguishing feature. How strange to think that it must have held such appalling poignancy for previous generations of our family.

In the wake of the most recent terrorist outrage in the capital, it’s inevitable perhaps to set these thoughts about place and memory in the context of tragedy and death. But it is worth considering that we must step on many more happy histories than horrible ones.

After all, there can surely be no bridge in London that has not been the site of myriad marriage proposals and countless breathless kisses.

And when I think of the Derbyshire dale where I got down on one knee, I can’t help but imagine how many hikers have stomped unwittingly on the very blades of grass that for those few seconds felt my heart pause, awaiting an answer to the most important question I had ever asked.

If we give them a chance, it is maybe these largely unknown – and indeed unknowable – bits of other people’s pasts that can bind us together, in sorrow and in joy. In a period when it sometimes seems that divisions in British society are unbridgeable, it’s worth a go, isn’t it? ​