Mixing Memory and Desire: Exploring Utopian Currents in Heritage

There is some precedent for utopian thinking around cultural heritage, and a number of writers have commented on the utopian ideal of museums to house and preserve intact cultural memory. However, this article focuses on another, distinct utopian strain relevant to cultural heritage, which can be traced through the influence of William Morris on the formation of conservation methods in the nineteenth century. While such figures have been linked to the critique of ‘monumental heritage’ in recent years, a central message in Morris’s writings was that the guiding principle for conservation should not be stasis but change. Equally, for him, knowledge of the past was important for recovering the hopes of former generations, a theme he explored in his utopian fiction. Morris’s utopianism presents a challenge to the logic of inheritance, whereby the past is figured as a legacy to be maintained and the future, in turn, is extracted confidently from the present. Instead, it involves a mixture of memory and desire, which signals a way into thinking about alternative experiences and expectations. Here, I discuss how the utopian currents in Morris’s work shed light on contemporary heritage debates and the different kinds of futures implicit in heritage-making.