Senior Research Seminar 21st November with Professor Tom Yarrow (Durham University)

Senior Research Seminar 21st November with Professor Tom Yarrow (Durham University)

 

Life Restored: heritage steam nostalgia and the past at the end of time

 

Through an ethnographic account of steam railway enthusiasm, this paper explores how the restoration of steam railway infrastructure is bound up with the restoration and recovery of other things. Specifically, it traces how this work responds to senses of loss both in relation to their own lives, and in light of the broader social, economic and political changes they have witnessed since the period when they grew up.  Building on work on restoration and on nostalgia, I highlight a series of ambivalences that have often been overlooked. Parallel literatures on nostalgia and restoration have tended to bifurcate between those that conceptualise these as reactionary and problematic, and those that characterise them as socially useful and even emancipatory. I argue that restoration makes present and visible the very sense of absence to which it also responds and highlight the ambivalent possibilities that attend this work.

 

Thomas Yarrow is a professor of anthropology at Durham University. Through ethnographic projects in both the UK and Ghana, his work has explored various themes including heritage, memory, development, temporality and expertise. His books include Architects (2019), The Object of Conservation (2023, with Sian Jones) and Ancient Identities in Modern Britain (2025, with Richard Hingley and Kate Sharp).