Unmarked lives, unsettled spaces: creative public history and everyday heritage praxis at the ‘Epsom cluster’ asylum cemetery

This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach to interrogate a creative public history project commemorating Horton Cemetery in Epsom, Surrey – Europe’s largest asylum burial ground containing around 9,000 unmarked graves. The ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ project, supported by a Historic England ‘Everyday Heritage’ grant, facilitated numerous arts-based, historical workshops and a large scale, crowd-sourced memorial installation. Written qualitative feedback from nearly 300 participants is analysed through the imbricated and iterative theoretical frameworks of heterotopia (spatial othering), rhetorical space (discursive construction), place identity (affective attachment), and everyday heritage praxis (lived, community-based enactment). This case study demonstrates how creative and co-productive local heritage activities can surface marginalised histories, (re)animate rhetorical spaces, and contribute to place identity formation and future-oriented heritage imaginaries.