Philip Hoare: When you play virtual war games, spare a thought for the real veterans

It's been a strange week in London, and not just because the soaring temperatures made the city streets look like Blackpool on a summer bank holiday rather than the grimy metropolis in spring. On Tuesday, for instance, I attended two launches. The first was held on HMS Belfast – "London's warship" as its publicity rather queasily proclaims. On the deck of the dazzle-painted ship, moored by Tower Bridge and normally overrun by exploring kids, was a crowd of ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, many bedecked with substantial rows of war medals dangling from their jackets and possessing handlebar moustaches of which the comedian Jimmy Edwards would have been proud.

The occasion was the publication of James Holland's new book, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-1943, a terrifying but little-remembered episode in wartime history when the tiny island held out against German bombardment for two and a half years. "It makes the Battle of Britain look like child's play," reported one RAF pilot. Holland – the rights to whose book have already been snapped up by Miramax – interviewed veterans of the siege, and many of them were there to celebrate their survival.

By coincidence, just the day before, I'd visited a widow living alone in a Southampton suburb. Her husband had also served in Malta, and his medals – including one from the Soviet government for his work on the Atlantic convoys – stood framed on her side table. The sitting-room curtains drawn against the light, this now housebound lady lived in the afterglow of memory, neither requiring pity nor seeking it.

And, looking at her elderly contemporaries standing out in the sunlight of the Belfast's deck, I realised how easy it is to dismiss our past. They're the sort of senior citizens you see in the aisles of Sainsbury's, dithering over the frozen fish as you push impatiently past in search of sun-dried tomatoes. Yet these same people endured death and destruction and lived through an extraordinary period of British history, at a time when they were mere teenagers.

We watch the computer games of modern warfare from the comfort of our sofas; but my own mother, a young woman in Southampton during the Blitz, remembers suburban streets with gun emplacements on their corners and returning home from work in the evening, literally dodging the bombs as she went, not knowing if the family home would still be standing when she got there, or even if its inhabitants would still be alive.

Our own generational memory seems so mediated in comparison. That night I joined the throng up-river at County Hall, gathered round Damien Hirst's post-modern intimations of mortality suspended in formaldehyde. The Saatchi collection, set in the institutional wood-panelled halls of municipal London, makes a deliberate contrast between the past and the imagined future of the young British artists. Next to marble plaques inscribed with the names of forgotten councillors and civic dignitaries stands Gavin Turk's wax effigy of himself as Sid Vicious mimicking Elvis Presley – all the rebellion of the post-war world summed up in one image.

Yet already these pieces look like history, too. Last seen in the extravaganza of the "Sensation" exhibition, they are lodged in the cultural memory as a commentary on the fin-de-siècle of the 20th century. On that opening night in 1997, the star guest was due to be Diana, Princess of Wales, only for history to intervene. But what a vivid image of mortality and celebrity that would have been: the spurned People's Princess standing next to Hirst's emasculated shark.

I came away from County Hall and into the warm night air, heady with Mr Saatchi's champagne – and the diesel fumes from Richard Wilson's roomful of sump oil – and wondered what kind of launch party our generation might assemble in 50 years' time, when we too are old and grey.

Sarf London chic

The Saatchi collection is envisaged as part of a new expanding London triangle, stretching from County Hall to Tate Modern and down to the Elephant and Castle. It's the same process that has gentrified Clerkenwell and Hoxton. As a 1997 report stated, "Remaking the inner cities is easy. Push the button marked arts, and the money pours in." The quote comes from a thesis by a University College geography student, Andrew Harris, who recently interviewed me about my adoptive neighbourhood, Hoxton. I've lived there for 20 years now, and watched it change from National Front stamping-ground to a "night-time economy", resembling Manhattan's SoHo.

And just as New York's latest happening area lies in Brooklyn and labours under the ironic acronym, Dumbo ("Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass"), so London, too, is looking over the river. The writer Michael Collins, currently working on a book about the area, told me that thousands of pounds have been ploughed into marketing "London South Central" (making a rather uneasy comparison with the gang-ridden Los Angeles district of the same name), describing it as "edgy urban". With Borough already the transpontine Hoxton, how long before even the cultural desert of the traffic-girded Elephant and Castle roundabout is swarming with foodies and art-lovers?

Poisoned pen

Trawling through the archives of the British Library throws up some bizarre stories – take the mid-Victorian editions of Human Nature magazine, for example. This compendium of alternative and new age beliefs – ranging from Shakerism to spirit photography and dress reform (principally to prevent Victorian women going up in flames along with their combustible skirts, as they were doing at a rate of 300 fatalities a year) – is a fascinating glimpse into another era, and their yellowing pages shout out at you with evidence that nothing much has really changed.

One report dwelt on the issue of euthanasia, while in June 1867 Human Nature's latest campaign centred round "The Vaccination Humbug", and the possible harmful effects of compulsory mass immunisation. It reported that "a large number of petitions have been from time to time presented to Parliament against Compulsory Vaccination, and many from parents who alleged that they had lost children by death through the operation, and wished to give evidence respecting their cases; but these petitions have not been made public."

The fear was of the hubris of the modern medical profession, state intervention, and medicine as violation: "To overthrow this huge piece of physiological absurdity and medical tyranny, an Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League has been formed: Office 1 South Place, Finsbury, London E.C.," declared Richard Gibbs, who ran the Free Hospital at the same address. "I believe we have hundreds of cases here, from being poisoned with vaccination, I deem incurable. One member of a family dating syphilitic symptoms from the time of vaccination, when all the other members of the family have been clear. We strongly advise parents to go to prison, rather than submit to have their helpless offspring inoculated with scrofula, syphilis, and mania." Indeed, members of sects such as the Peculiar People did go to jail for such beliefs. In a week in which yet another report has dismissed claims of a link between the MMR jab and autism, Human Nature's pages make salutary reading.

Janet Street-Porter is away