Visualizing liminal military landscape: a small scale study of Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Armed Forces Day is a military-centric event in the UK introduced into the public calendar during 2009 following recommendations made from The Report of Inquiry into National Recognition of Our Armed Forces. Despite the significance of these events requiring the situating and performance of military values, personnel, equipment and activities within otherwise civic spaces, academic research and critical commentary into the implementation and development of Armed Forces Day is limited. Influenced by autoethnographic work from critical human geography focussing on the materiality, spatiality and embodied experiences of military airshows, and seeking to extend some insights from the original text Military Geographies, the aim of this paper is to observe the situatedness and performance of Armed Forces Day to be what is defined herein as ‘liminal military landscape’. Through conducting a small-scale study of Armed Forces Day 2017 in Liverpool, employing observational techniques including notetaking and documentary photography, during this event urban space was found to undergo spatial ‘transitions’; have ‘portals’ opened through which temporality and materiality invoked past experience into the present; and create newly established liminal ‘thresholds’ waiting to be crossed between the seemingly contiguous spaces of civic and military.

KEYWORDS:

• Military geographies
• liminality
• autoethnography
• visual methods

Acknowledgements

My thanks to colleagues at Bangor University for their invitation to present and discuss an early version of this paper at their visiting speaker programme, and to Rachel Woodward (Newcastle University) and Paul Jones (University of Liverpool) for their generous and insightful comments on previous drafts of this article; all errors are, of course, my own. In addition, my thanks to Terence Heng (University of Liverpool) for his time, guidance and patience helping me curate the visual data used in this article, and to ForcesWatch for sharing funding details of AFD 2017 from a previously acquired FOI request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These spaces included Liverpool City centre, Princes Promenade, various locations along the waterfront, Pier Head Cruise Liner terminal carpark, and Princess Dock (see Royal Navy Press Office 2017).

2. See also the subsequent Ministry of Defence (2008) response to this report.

3. Or ‘states’ as preferred by Turner (1969).

4. Turner (1967, 92) clarifies ‘a state’ to be a ‘relatively fixed condition’ meaning many things, including changes in one’s maturity, mental health, or even profession and social status.

5. The approximate cost of organizing AFD 2017 in Liverpool was £226,000. The collective income from MoD funding and sponsorship from Cammell Laird, Peel, The Royal British Legion, BAE Systems and Vodafone totalled approximately £164,000. The total cost to Liverpool City Council was approximately £64,000 (Liverpool City Council 2018).

6. A Mastiff, see here: https://www.army.mod.uk/equipment/protected-patrol-vehicles/.

7. This has since been replaced by ‘UK Threat Levels’ to indicate the current threat posed to the UK from terrorism (see Home Office 2019).