AAA White Paper The political economy of informal events, 2030 | Page 121

With this degree of élan, enthusiasts for the Exhibition could shrug off
those who complained about it.
Still, whingeing ran high in the summer of 1850, when
the Illustrated London News unveiled an early design for the
Exhibition hall by Isambard Kingdon Brunel. Soon the Times
joined the chorus of disapproval, predicting that Hyde Park and
Kensington Gardens would become ‘a bivouac of all the vagabonds
of London’.
However, on 4 July the Commons rejected, by 166 to 46, a call
for a Select Committee enquiry into the Exhibition. Two days later,
Paxton’s alternative design, dubbed the Crystal Palace by Punch, was
judiciously leaked to the Illustrated London News. At once public opinion
swung behind the project. Later that year, as the Crystal Palace went
up, it became one of the sights of London, attracting thousands.
Before the century was out, the success of the Great Exhibition
led to a further dozen similar expos around the world.
2. The 1951 Festival of Britain: objections overruled
Churchill and the Beaverbrook Daily Express and Evening Standard hated
the idea of a Festival of Britain. The President of the Royal Academy
warned that crowds would turn the South Bank into a death-trap/
Evelyn Waugh and Noel Coward also reacted against the idea, in
predictable style. But by May 1951, when the Queen opened the
Festival, the critics fell silent:
‘For the first time for ten years, people saw freshly applied coloured
paint, saw new furniture that was not utility, saw buildings that
were both new and also very different to anything constructed on
these shores before, and had fun that was, in austerity jargon, “off
the ration”.’
(Adrian Forty, ‘Festival politics’, in Rayner Banham and Bevis
Hillier, editors, A Tonic to the Nation, Thames & Hudson, 1976)
The Festival was planned and implemented despite the Cold War,
the Berlin airlift, mobilisation for a war in Korea, three currency
crises, shortages of timber, steel and skilled labour, and rationing.
Opponents used this genuine adversity as ammunition against it;
but, from 1947 to 1951, the Festival’s director of architecture, Hugh
Casson, never wavered.
Adapted from Penny Lewis, Vicky Richardson and James Woudhuysen,
In defence of the Dome: the case for human agency in the new millennium, ASI
Research, 1999
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