‘tracking’ loose heritage: The 13.10 from cheltenham

Gloucester are playing Harlequins, or ‘Hairyqueens’ as they are less affectionately known amongst the cognoscenti. Along with Bath, Harlequins are the most vilified club in Gloucester supporters’ lexicon. The spectral Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway inherited the abandoned plans for the East Gloucester Railway in 1872, with the line into Cheltenham opening in 1881. Most relevant to the dissonance bound into Gloucester Rugby heritage is that fact that, according to White, the club charged to watch matches. Management of the heritage is the precise antithesis of what is occurring on our ghostly branch line, with groups clearly wilfully rejecting the urge to connect and create and manage collective memory. In a developing and critical sense of heritage as process, it is surely a short, but vital, step from Edensor’s “involuntary memories”, unconsciously recalled to an inchoate heritagisation. An anticipatory process that lurks and coalesces in the material left-behinds that operates in the realm of emotion and affect.