The contemporary archaeology of urban mega-events.

This book explores the traces of London’s most significant modern “mega events”: the Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1951 Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition, and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe, and their organizers self-consciously seek to leave a “legacy” that will endure for decades or more. The book argues that these spectacles must thus be seen as long-lived and persistent, rather than simply transient or short-term phenomena. It explores the long-term history of each event through contemporary archaeology, examining the contents and building materials of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace and their extraordinary afterlife at Sydenham, South London; how the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition employed displays of ancient history to construct a new postwar British identity; and how London 2012 dealt with competing visions of the past as archaeology, waste, and heritage in creating a vision of the future.