Between 2014 and 2019, the UK experienced huge political changes. This period, which coincided with the centenary of the First World War, began with a narrative about austerity under a coalition government. There were also two major referendums, one on Scottish independence and another about leaving the European Union; the latter one brought seismic change to international alliances and the economy. A Conservative government was elected with a clear majority in 2015, but this then was diminished quickly following a second election in 2017. By 2019, unusually for recent British politics, there had been three different prime ministers; there had been just two from 1998 until 2010. Alongside these immense political changes, the UK government led an ambitious initiative to commemorate the First World War through a public arts programme. Since 2019, this programme has undergone a series of evaluations by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), via commissioned reviews by participating arts organisations, and by universities. The non-partisan think-tank British Future, which was not involved in the commemoration, also conducted independent research with the specific aim to identify learning from these commemorative activities. This article unites the findings in these different reports, considers both the context of 2014–19 and the changes that have happened since, and considers future challenges in the landscape of large-scale public commemoration projects for the Second World War commemorations from 2039.
Our current era is often characterised as being ‘post truth’; a time in which divisions in public opinion lead to increasing polarisation and a lack of trust in academic expertise.Footnote 1 The explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT or Dall-E, opens new possibilities for engaging with research but also undermines the labour of the researcher as these tools can distort the truth with biased, outdated or fictitious information and images. At the same time, as a recent report by the Royal Historical Society has noted, history as a discipline is under threat at many universities, potentially restricting the role historians will be able to play in future commemorative activities and their capacity to intervene in the sphere of public commemoration. The arts and creative practices can be a way to intervene and to create a space to consider the messy and entangled relationship between reality, truth and story.Footnote 2 The Covid-19 pandemic also drastically changed the arts and cultural landscape in the UK. While cultural institutions were closed, their online presence shifted from promoting the work of the organisation to being the organisation itself. They became visible as more than buildings that people visit and played a key role in community building, education, and some even found a way to ‘speak to the mood of the lockdown’.Footnote 3 As we moved out of the acute phase of the pandemic, arts and culture were also ways to overcome some of the negative impacts of the pandemic, such as projects that used theatre to overcome social isolation and reconnect people.Footnote 4 Now, there is a new UK government that has emphasised the importance of the arts.Footnote 5 However, the arts and culture sector was highly exposed during the pandemic and the recovery has been difficult with precarious employment and low pay commonplace.Footnote 6 Whether this governmental emphasis will continue and whether there is the desire and/or capacity to solve these problems is unclear. In this environment, it is uncertain whether historians, arts practitioners, and cultural and heritage institutions will have the resources and capacity to collaborate on a large scale in the future.
Looking ahead to the potential commemorations in 2039, it is not hard to see that commemorating the Second World War poses distinct challenges from the First. As historian David Reynolds has identified, whereas the First World War has a messy narrative, with its causes and outcomes unclear, the Second World War was a ‘struggle that had a dramatic and heroic start, a clear turning point in the middle, and an utterly decisive ending – a war waged for unimpeachable moral reasons’.Footnote 7 It is definitively understood as a ‘good war’ and any questions or uncomfortable feelings can be elided because there is a clear enemy, Germany and Japan, and these nations could be avoided in public discourse during much of the twentieth century or could be viewed with suspicion at a distance.Footnote 8 As Jenny Macleod noted in 2019, identifying the connections between the Brexit debate and the myths of the Second World War, an ‘us and them’ mentality is alive and well, where ‘Europe’ is a dangerous enemy that seeks to ensnare Britain.Footnote 9 Frequently in the UK, the war is used as a jingoistic narrative that paints 1940 as Britain’s finest hour where a clear enemy was defeated and any collaboration with European nations is a slide into defeat, a narrative which was mobilised during the Brexit debates and the pandemic.Footnote 10
This article examines the key findings that have been identified by evaluations and reviews of the commemorative events that occurred between 2014 and 2019 as part of the centenary. It also looks at any proposed solutions. By bringing together government reports, university findings and arts organisations reviews, the common threads can be identified. This article then reflects on how these findings might change when viewed in the light of more recent global challenges. Finally, as we look ahead to further centenary events in the 2030s, this article asks what we can apply from the First World War centenary events to future commemoration activities. Ultimately, I argue that as historians we need to consider carefully the narratives that might be the focus of these activities to prevent jingoistic or even fascist uses of the commemoration, as well as enabling obscured histories of this period to come to light.
2014–2018 commemoration activities
The government funded a large part of the commemoration activities through the 14–18 Now programme. This programme centred on the anniversaries of the declaration of war in August 2014, the battle of the Somme (July 2016) and the armistice in November 2018. The DCMS described itself as the ‘governmental home’,Footnote 11 aiming to utilise the department’s experience of running large-scale arts projects with a reflective purpose like that during the build-up to the London Olympics in 2012.Footnote 12 In its post-commemoration analysis, the DCMS defined its role as a ‘moderator’ not a ‘director’; aiming to support projects and evaluate them afterwards but not dictate the direction of the arts.Footnote 13 As will be discussed, the DCMS may have wanted to play this role but as the choices they made framed the commemoration activities and there were other governmental departments influencing the events, it seems highly questionable.
According to the DCMS Legacy Evaluation, great consideration was given to the tone of the commemorative activities. The report noted that the government wanted to ensure that the launch event in August 2014, but also future events, would not ‘undermine reconciliation and accord’ and there would be no attempt to use this history ‘to serve a political narrative’.Footnote 14 The evaluation commented on YouGov polling commissioned by the think-tank British Future in 2013 that concluded that divisive messaging about the First World War was unwelcome by the public and there was desire to learn more about the war as a multi-ethnic, multinational conflict. As the evaluation was designed to ‘communicate the vision of the programme’ and how the DCMS and its partners ‘worked together to achieve its overall aims’, there is little opportunity to consider counter or negative critiques.Footnote 15 British Future also produced their own reports about the commemoration, informed by their vision of finding common ground and campaigning for an inclusive approach towards migration and integration. They launched in 2012 and conducted regular polling and research into issues around citizenship and immigration but did not have a role within the commemoration activities. Their polling provokes two questions. Firstly, how does the divisive rhetoric that was employed during the Brexit campaign fit into this desire not to undermine reconciliation and accord? There were very few events in the UK that included German representatives and, as Macleod noted, events in Europe attracted less interest.Footnote 16 Secondly, does the lack of a clear narrative lead to a ‘swirling cultural blizzard’ that can either confirm pre-existing beliefs or be manipulated?Footnote 17 The government may have claimed that they were not trying to serve a political narrative, but this is contentious. At the very least, by seeking to present a multicultural war, imperial histories that are uncomfortable can be hidden inside narratives about a multinational war without focusing on who participated and why.Footnote 18
14–18 Now funded 269 new artworks in more than 200 locations across the four nations of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Regional museums and galleries participated by utilising their existing collections, commissioning new works and encouraging public participation.Footnote 19 An estimated 35 million people engaged with art works and 580 community, arts and heritage partners were involved.Footnote 20 Some projects such as We’re here because we’re here, which featured actors dressed as soldiers in key locations across the UK, were estimated to have been ‘experienced’ by 63 per cent of the population.Footnote 21 The ceramic poppies of the installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London were visited by an estimated 5 million people; and when the poppies were sold, they quickly appeared for resale at massively increased prices.Footnote 22 There was a particular focus on young people’s engagement with the commemoration activities. Around 50 per cent of the projects included schools’ outreach elements and around 30 per cent of all project participants were under 25.Footnote 23 The Department for Education also funded battlefield tours, and 6,600 pupils and teachers took part from May 2014 until July 2019.Footnote 24 Battlefield tours for all ages increased both just prior to and during the years of commemorations and attracted criticism about the ethics of remembrance as an industry and concerns about the consumerism and commodification of the war.Footnote 25 Moreover, the schools’ tours were also supported by the Ministry of Defence and have been viewed as part of ongoing attempts to insert a military ethos into schools.Footnote 26 Again, we can see commemoration activities serving multiple purposes, some of which supported a specific agenda.
Alongside the DCMS, universities and the wider research community participated through initiatives funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In 2014, the AHRC awarded funding for the creation of five engagement centres with the aim that these centres would connect university-based researchers with community partners.Footnote 27 The universities chosen to run the centres were the University of Birmingham, the University of Kent, Queens University Belfast, the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Nottingham. Further universities were able to participate as co-investigator institutions, leading to the involvement of a further twenty-nine institutions.Footnote 28 The AHRC offered up to £2.5 million to support the engagement centres for the first three years, with further funding for the co-investigator institutions. Each centre focused on a particular theme, to broaden the scope of the overall engagement. Many of the community partners that worked with the university engagement centres were recipients of Heritage Lottery Funding (HLF) and the centres could support applicants and connect different funded projects. About 1,900 projects were funded with the total funding reaching £15 million.Footnote 29
Key findings
Across all the reports and evaluations, time is identified as a key factor in determining the outcomes of the projects and the commemorations as a whole. Most participating organisations that played a leading role seem to have only had months to prepare. 14–18 Now had ten months to get ready for the launch in August 2014.Footnote 30 This seems to be true for the non-governmental organisations too. The university engagement centres were informed of their participation by the AHRC in December 2013 and began working in January 2014. Much of the first six months was spent setting up the centres rather than preparing for the first commemoration activities and developing new lines for research.Footnote 31 It is noted by the DCMS, however, that the Imperial War Museum had identified the need for a programme of commemorative activities much earlier and began developing this in 2010.Footnote 32
Time was also a factor in building and sustaining the kinds of relationships that were needed for successful collaborations and again this is true for both the government-led activities and the universities. British Future’s analysis of 14–18 Now recognised that more time was needed for both historical research and the development of schools and community engagement.Footnote 33 Schools cited the time restrictions of their packed curriculum as a reason for not engaging with the programme.Footnote 34 For universities, it was identified that there was not enough time allocated for relationship building and maintaining.Footnote 35 Time was also experienced unequally between the participants, with complex university procedures for pay and reimbursement causing delays and damaging relationships.Footnote 36
For a project of this scale and scope, it is not surprising that there were difficulties coordinating and communicating between the different institutions and organisations. The DCMS acknowledged that better coordination with the Department for Education would have been helpful,Footnote 37 while British Future took the more negative view that the link between 14–18 Now and the value added by the battlefield tours led by the Department for Education was not evidenced.Footnote 38 Additionally, British Future identified that marketing and communication channels used by the government departments mostly reached groups and individuals already interested in arts and culture, particularly when using social media. Television coverage seems to have reached a more diverse group, but it was harder to use this method as coverage was linked to ‘newsworthiness’.Footnote 39 Moreover, much of the flagship programming done by the BBC was fronted by journalists and other celebrities rather than historians, with historians acting as advisers behind the scenes on docudramas and often struggling to make changes to pre-existing narratives.Footnote 40 With an even more fragmented social media landscape and the BBC’s ongoing funding troubles, how will we reach future audiences with new or challenging narratives about the Second World War?
The universities that formed the Engagement Centres struggled to manage working with community groups that were thematically linked rather than geographically close.Footnote 41 It was also difficult to communicate the different expectations of the community groups and the universities. The universities took money for overheads from the grants, leading to a smaller share going to the community group, resulting in a sense of unfairness.Footnote 42 Academic language could also be opaque, so promoting further divisions between university researchers and the groups with which they were trying to work. Universities faced an additional hurdle due to the perception that they were unwelcoming and even hostile spaces.Footnote 43 Practices such as having complex procedures and being slow to pay partners are likely to have fed into this perception. It was also noted that individual academic staff members’ attitudes towards their partners opened them to accusations of ‘arrogance’ and feelings that the university benefited more from the community partners than the community partners did themselves.Footnote 44 There was a conflict between the desire for co-production and how ‘impact’ is measured as part of the Research Excellence Framework and what is valued by the universities as institutions.Footnote 45 How government departments were perceived by the groups they worked with is unclear but perhaps, as noted in the evaluations of the universities, many community groups and artists are used to applying for grants that they then use by themselves; the partnership approach encouraged by the Engagement Centres was a different method and relied more on relationships.
The expectation that groups would apply for funding also led to imbalances in the work that was funded, even where groups applied directly to the government or to the HLF and did not need to navigate university procedures. Maggie Andrews identified the cultural capital required to be able to fill in the sixteen-page application form for the HLF. This included the technical skills and resources to return it online, as well as the sense of ‘entitlement’ that the applicant was justified in applying and that the heritage they wanted to research or share was the right kind for this moment.Footnote 46 Individuals and groups who were already marginalised were unlikely ever to feel that they had the resources or the right to tell their histories.
Finally, both the government reviews and the universities have struggled with the legacies of the commemorative activities. How can the impact of such a long project with so many different people involved be measured meaningfully? Moreover, none of the partners involved had a clear strategy for preserving the outputs of the activities. Much of the artwork that was made is not publicly accessible and even films are not available due to copyright issues around their use of archival footage or distribution rights.Footnote 47 The Engagement Centres noted the fragility of digital outputs and there was not a strategy of what to preserve or how to ensure sustainability or long-term access.Footnote 48 Many websites have since gone offline and their preserved footprints are only a fragment of what was there.Footnote 49 Not one of the centres had a mandate to preserve created artefacts and when the funding ended, so did the centres, with the report noting: ‘The irony remains, that had the centenary been less “digital”, its outputs may have been sustained for the longer term.’Footnote 50 Even with this acknowledgement, concerns about public accessibility of physical artefacts remain unaddressed.
Lessons to learn
All the reports and evaluations make recommendations for people and time; the right people need to be in place in order to facilitate communications, whether between government departments, between universities, between arts and community organisations and institutions, or to the public; and the right people need to have enough time to prepare the ground for fruitful collaborations. Given that centenaries are fixed points in time, it seems reasonable to expect that organisations and institutions should be able to develop plans in good time to prepare. Identifying the roles and hiring the right people to facilitate relationships and manage these on an ongoing basis is more challenging, but hopefully the learning from 2014 to 2018 can be applied to future activities.
The commemoration also seems to have been very dependent on digital technology, both to communicate about activities but also to generate projects. Social media is a challenging means through which to communicate as it is difficult to contact people who are not already interested in a topic. In 2025, social media has become more fragmented with different platforms attracting different groups. People who are viewed as ‘hard to reach’ by organisations or governmental institutions will remain outside the scope. As British Future noted: ‘Nobody considers themselves “hard to reach” – unless distant institutions are reluctant to turn up.’Footnote 51 The evaluations from 2014 to 2018 also identified the importance of finding and meeting people where they are, that is, not on a university campus. Despite the continued growth of digital technologies, it is likely that the physical world will be of importance when it comes to relationship building and making new connections.
British Future also asked very pertinent questions about the role of the arts in commemorative activities such as 14–18 Now that were supposed to bring people together. Should bringing people together be the role of the arts? Does increasing the accessibility of arts (in terms of themes as well as locations) contain the risk of producing ‘bad art that patronises its audience’?Footnote 52 As was identified with Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, choosing symbols such as the poppy that are already burdened with overlapping and contradictory meanings can result in artworks that are never going to be able to bear the weight of radical or critical remembrance. This installation was also framed in the media in a way that was essentialising and oversimplifying, and ‘blunted its potential for critique’.Footnote 53 Similarly, while the impact-agenda at universities is supposed to allow for negative impacts, there is still a tendency and a desire to tell positive stories. How would embracing the challenge to potentially upset audiences fit within this framework?
The British Future report identified upcoming, large-scale events that could be used to implement some of the learning from 14–18 Now. Many of these, including the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the 2022 ‘Festival of Britain’, were affected by Covid. The arts and culture landscape is also radically different from 2014, with an ongoing employment and funding crisis. Now, 2018 feels almost like a lifetime away and, although there are still academic researchers considering the implications of 2014 to 2018, with a new government it seems less likely that the learning from the past will be implemented, or new approaches developed. As 2018 becomes history and we move closer to 2039 and the centenary of the Second World War, understanding how to deal with these questions and challenges is vital.
There is also the challenge of managing collaborations. British Future identified the difficulties that artists encountered for 14–18 Now as they were mostly not historians with research expertise. Instead, they were frequently relying on materials that were easily accessible to a lay audience to develop their work. Archival practices are inherently subjective, with a whole range of human decisions shaping what is preserved and how it is described, which hides individuals and groups from the narrative. With Artificial Intelligence, this situation has the potential to worsen. In future commemorative activities, will artists use generative AI tools to research the past and end up relying on outdated, biased or fabricated information? Will this limit the stories that are told about the past? This raises another question about whether these projects should be artist-led or academic-led. But, if genuine collaboration and co-creation is the goal, how can this be facilitated in a context of unequal partnerships and opaque processes that privilege the academic staff member and university expertise over artists or community partners?
In addition to the passing of time, there is also the existential crisis that many universities are facing. Many universities have relied on temporary staff hired on short-term contracts. Of the staff involved in the Engagement Centres, how many are still in post? For those who have left, what has happened to their knowledge and experience? Many universities are also closing or have closed their History departments. According to a study conducted by the Royal Historical Society between 2020 and 2024, 60 per cent of History departments reported reductions in staffing with 45 per cent reporting the cutting of course options. Post-92 institutions have been particularly affected, with 88 per cent reporting staff reductions.Footnote 54 Even looking beyond History departments at the work done by scholars in Modern Languages does not offer any comfort as many of these areas have also been hit with redundancies at both pre- and post-92s. Out of the five Engagement Centres, the University of Hertfordshire was the only post-92. In the current landscape of course cutting and redundancies, and in the light of future cuts, how likely is it that a post-92 university would be in a strong position to compete for this kind of role in future commemorative activities?
2039 and the Second World War
The Second World War poses different challenges from those of commemorating the First World War. In the current political atmosphere, the rise of the right seems to dominate international media, and we have seen fascists and anti-fascists clashing on the streets of many American cities, something which seems likely to continue under a second Trump presidency. Democracy seems unstable in many countries, despite a record year of elections in 2024. The question of truth is also under attack, particularly as the last eyewitnesses of the Holocaust pass away. In this uncertain environment, commemorating the Second World War is going to be difficult.
How the commemoration is planned and designed will also have a large effect on the activities that follow. The 14–18 Now project chose key battles on the Western Front around which to focus the commemoration. This automatically meant that some stories would be included and others would not, limiting the scope of the programme and the potential audience. Had a different approach been taken, the programme would have looked very different. Which key events would be likely candidates from the Second World War and what problems would this kind of approach cause? In 2015, Sarah Lloyd and Julie Moore, both historians involved with the Engagement Centre at the University of Hertfordshire, identified that creating sedimented histories could be a way to allow for complexity without forcing one narrative to compete against another.Footnote 55 Is it possible for this to work for the Second World War, allowing uncomfortable histories to sit alongside the comforting narratives while also not enabling positive appraisals of fascism by fascists to take hold? There are histories we live by, such as the role Winston Churchill’s speeches play, and histories we live with, such as the legacy of oppression which may have been caused by politicians such as Churchill. Depending on the person, these histories intertwine in different ways.Footnote 56 For the commemoration of the Second World War, where in the British context so much is framed as history to live by, recognising and understanding how this is also history to live with is difficult to achieve. There is some serious intellectual and emotional labour to be done here. Given the current financial crises facing universities and the existential battles many historians are facing, 2039 seems a long way off. It is impossible to know how History as a discipline will emerge from the current storms. In 2014, as Macleod noted, a great deal of First World War historical research was being conducted outside History departments, a situation which is likely to be true for the Second World War.Footnote 57 While this is a boon for interdisciplinary working, it can be difficult for researchers to find each other and to build the trust required to engage in the kind of intellectual and emotional work that is needed.
It is difficult to predict the political situation of the UK in 2039, and difficult too to predict what aspects of commemoration will be attracting attention. However, it can be safely assumed that there will be a lot of public interest in commemorating the Second World War. However, for anyone working in the field of History with a research connection to this era, a number of challenges present themselves:
1. Unlike the narratives of the First World War, where public opinion seemed uninterested in villainising old ‘enemies’, how will commemorative activities avoid demonising German and Japanese people today?
2. What can we do to prevent the narrative of the war being captured by the far right and commemorative activities being repurposed for fascist aims?
3. As AI becomes more prevalent, how can we resist the reliance on dominant but false or overly simplistic narratives about the war in order to tell more comprehensive stories about the past?
4. How can commemorative activities be planned to ensure that the widest possible range of stories will be told, and the broadest range of people included (avoiding relying on the ‘usual suspects’ for participation and falling into the trap of labelling some people ‘hard to reach’)?
5. How do we navigate the spaces between truth, something that feels true and facts in a highly polarised world?
6. In a world in which both the humanities within universities and the arts sector are being decimated by funding cuts, how can we find ways to collaborate and participate in commemorative activities?
7. How can the differing aims of universities, government institutions, community organisations and artists align to generate effective and sustainable collaborations?
Many of these questions can be addressed by careful planning but this requires time. Time needs to be invested now so that the broadest possible amount of research can be conducted before the centenary to provide a wide knowledge base for community organisations and governmental bodies to draw on. The accessibility and visibility of archives is also important to allow for new stories to come to light, with the caveat that we need to read against the grain and look for the gaps to avoid overgeneralising and missing stories outside the mainstream. We also need to invest time in building relationships for future collaborations to ensure that there are opportunities for a wide range of people to be involved. However, whether we can undo, undermine or alter jingoistic narratives about the war, and whether we can even make a space to offer these interventions, is unclear. This challenge is going to require some deeply radical proposals.
We have the time; however, time costs money and this is unevenly available across the university sector. Proper workforce planning and judicious use of research council funding could ensure a range of stable jobs and career pathways to develop new research, form and sustain collaborations and partnerships, and influence government policy. As History departments have closed or shrunk and many working on the Second World War are likely to be based outside of academia or even academia, we need new inter- and transdisciplinary ways of working in which a broad range of expertise is embraced. We also need to work with others inside academia and beyond to include the importance of historians for the development of commemorative activities in our calls to save History within Higher Education. This requires the kind of ambition, collaboration and long-range vision that is uncommon in both academia and wider society, as well as working under increasingly tight financial constraints. However, this work is necessary and needs to begin now.
Competing interests
None.
Author biography
Dr Corinne Painter is an Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research focuses on German women’s experiences of the interwar period, with a particular emphasis on political activism.
Open access
