THE ARCHITECTURE OF FORGETTING: THE WHITE HORSE CLOSE

Abstract

This fieldwork report investigates how spatial memory is performed, erased, or reconstructed through the architectural restoration of White Horse Close, a historic courtyard in Edinburgh. Beneath its carefully composed surfaces lies a more complex narrative: shaped by poverty, slum clearance, aesthetic control, and selective remembrance. Drawing on walking, sketching, photography, filmmaking, and historical analysis, this study explores how restoration becomes not just a technical process, but a curatorial act that frames memory through architectural choices and archival silences. Primary and secondary archival materials, historic maps, engravings, photographs, and conservation records were critically analysed for their representational politics, revealing selective narratives shaped by institutional framing. The analysis draws on five key frameworks: spatial memory as dynamic and relational (Massey, 1994; 2005), critical heritage discourse (Smith, 2006), architecture as a tool for authoring the past (Berghout, 2025), the selective power of archives (Mbembe, 2002; Carter, 2006), and the influence of Romanticism, the picturesque, and the tourist gaze (Urry, 2002; Pittock, 2011). The findings reveal that restoration in White Horse Close not only preserves material fabric but also performs a curated memory, privileging aesthetic coherence over the site’s complex social history. Irregular vernacular details have been replaced by symmetrical, romanticised façades, reflecting conservation and tourism agendas. Yet informal greenery, light, and material weathering continue to shape lived experience, o[ering subtle counterpoints to the controlled heritage narrative. By synthesising archival evidence and site-based observation, the report argues that restoration operates as both preservation and forgetting, cal