Heritage assemblages, maintenance and futures: stories of entanglement on Hampstead Heath, London

Edensor, Tim ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4715-6024 (2023) Heritage assemblages, maintenance and futures: stories of entanglement on Hampstead Heath, London. Journal of Historical Geography, 79. pp. 1-12. ISSN 0305-7488

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Abstract

This paper investigates a heritage assemblage in which the most prominent elements are an old brick arch and a massive beech tree, entwined together on Hampstead Heath. In drawing upon the figure of the assemblage, I explore how the practices of maintenance and management must take account of numerous human and nonhuman agencies that shape the ongoing emergence of the arch-tree assemblage. These multiple interactions continue to emerge and vanish according to divergent temporalities. I argue that in resisting reified, reductive accounts, more complex, layered narratives about heritage objects might be compiled to detail their historical entanglements with multiple forces and agencies. An awareness of these complexities also informs contemporary maintenance practices and provoke diverse conjectures about their futures.