And when new mayor Manuela Carmena swept to power with the backing of the anti-austerity movement Podemos nine months later, British MPs were said to be up in arms at reports she was planning to wipe Thatcher’s name from the city’s street map.
While Carmena’s office issued a denial, and Plaza Margaret Thatcher still stands in Madrid, the mayor has now set her sights on street names associated with former dictator General Francisco Franco. Policies such as ordering Balthazar in the annual Three Kings parade be played by a black man rather than a white man blacked up, or opening the elite Club de Campo Villa de Madrid to the public, have proved controversial in some quarters, but it is the idea of changing Franco-era street names that has arguably gone deeper and reopened old divisions.
While many streets and squares directly bearing the name of Franco were renamed a decade ago under socialist prime minister José Luis Zapatero’s Historical Memory law, Carmena believes the Popular party of Botella never went far enough in the two and a half decades it ruled Madrid until her surprise victory last June. [...]
It’s not only in Madrid where name changing is a big issue. In Poland, around 1,500 streets, squares and bridges could have their names revised in an effort by the ruling Law and Justice party to “de-communise” the country. [...]
Darran Anderson, author of Imaginary Cities, says that much of our sense of identity and belief is wrapped up in signs and symbols. “Once you decide to name a street after a person or an event, rather than topography, you’ve started something intrinsically political and subjective,” he says. “When we fail to look at what existed previously and why, we rob ourselves of context and roots.”
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