Lenin's Grave

There are times when spatial memory is actively hidden, when the authorised narrative of the history of a place excludes whole episodes. This can occur at a huge scale, for example the urban cleansing of entire parts of cities in the name of regeneration, but it can also occur at the scale of individual buildings and objects. A pertinent example of the latter would be that of Lenin in London. There is a blue plaque, one of those banal examples of sanctioned memory, dedicated to him at the site of a now non-existent house where he once lived in Percy Circus, which is all very well, but he’s also buried in London…


There was once a statue of Lenin, erected by Tekton architect Berthold Lubetkin in 1941. Cast in concrete, the impossibly sharp likeness was set within a typically modernist white wall, staring fiercely. The bust sat somewhere outside of Lubetkin’s Lenin Court, which is home to a glorious staircase and a rather half-hearted mural in that quasi-Picasso style so common after the war. As time went on however, the statue became subject to consistent acts of NF vandalism (although it has been written that it was ‘the public’ as a whole who insisted upon destroying it, as if post war Islingtonians just couldn’t walk past a communist without smashing its face in). Undeterred, Lubetkin kept a supply of busts in order to maintain the monument, but eventually the council got tired of protecting and replacing so it was decided that it had to go. Strangely, Lubetkin took matters into his own hands and in fact buried the sculpture before it could be destroyed, turning up one morning with a mate and a digger. The council also renamed the entire building just in case it got its face smashed in too...


Visiting again the other day and passing over the site where it was lost, I tried to identify exactly where it could be. I recalled the very few photos that exist, trying to picture where it might have stood, begging some Tony Robinson type to arrive and film a TV archaeology special, locating it with a scanner before digging it out with a toothbrush. I suspect that it would look very different now, just some sludgy grey colour, squinting out from behind its rotten goatee, perhaps as unrecognisable as some disintegrated caryatid from the acropolis.

Of course it’s best that it stays underground; the very real-ness of the decay it must have gone through by now could only possibly be read as that old cautionary message of the frailty of man and its ambition. This is typical of the ruininlust that is making its return to consciousness now, a lazy warning against even daring to think the new. This highlights the problem of decay as a trope – on the one hand it has a necessary function within the politicised aesthetics of hauntology, but it is constantly slipping on the edge of kitsch and the reactionary picturesque. The question is; how to negotiate this boundary?

PS – we're very excited at the prospect of Burial vs K-Punk in The Wire…