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As the centenaries of the events of the Great War are commemorated in Britain, a wave of new memorials and commemorative practices have been developed. These are additions to an already well-established ‘landscape of memory,’ with memorials built in the war’s immediate aftermath across villages, towns and cities in Britain. This article examines these new sites of memory and mourning to reveal how social, moral and political identities within contemporary Britain are constructed through places that enable individuals and communities to ‘bear witness’ to the confl ict. 1. Memorializing the Great War The Great War possesses a prominent place within British culture and society. To even mention the war, or to refer to ‘1914–1918,’ ‘the trenches,’ ‘the Somme,’ ‘Gallipoli’ or ‘Passchendaele,’ is to immediately evoke a powerful act of remembrance that connotes death, tragedy, suff ering and pity (Wilson 2013, 3–5). Over the last decade, historians have demonstrated the way in which this memory of the war is an “invented tradition” (Bond 6; Todman 5; Corrigan 5). This scholarship has highlighted how the contemporary response to the war is born out of its representation on fi lm, television, art and literature over the course of the twentieth century. This has created an image of the confl ict that focuses on the stoic British “Tommy” on the Western Front, enduring the privations and horrors of industrial confl ict (Badsey 113). Scholars have lamented this bias as preventing an understanding of the confl ict as a complex, international event. However, whilst the meaning and memory of the war have been exposed to greater scrutiny what is not disputed is the status of the confl ict in British society. Over a century after its outbreak, with the last veterans having passed away ensuring the war is beyond ‘living memory,’ the war still has a presence within national narratives. In part, this is derived from the way the iconography of the confl ict has become part of wider remembrance schemes of wars fought during

Witnessing the Great War in Britain: Centenaries and the Making of Modern Identities