Abstract
In a city full of monuments to warrior heroes and overseas conquests, the British Empire Exhibition commanded attention. Visitors approached the exhibition, held in the north London suburb of Wembley, on “the pathway of empire,” a walkway hundreds of feet wide leading between enormous concrete structures whose size was intended to dwarf the individual. The exhibition combined a puffed-up imperial grandeur with elements of a Victorian schoolroom, a convention hall and meeting rooms, a trade show, a department store, a museum of science and industry, a county fair, and a carnival sideshow. Colonized peoples from West Africa, British Guiana, and other parts of the colonial empire were put on display as objects of ethnographic interest before public audiences. The architectural focal point of the exhibition grounds was the Empire Stadium, later rechristened Wembley Stadium, the largest sporting facility in the world in 1924, with a capacity of more than 120,000. The stadium was the site of opening and closing ceremonies presided over by the king and the royal family, religious observances led by Dean Inge of St. Paul’s Cathedral, pageants of empire, and popular events including military tattoos, a Calgary-style rodeo, an imperial Boy Scout jamboree, and the annual Football Association cup final. Huge concrete “palaces” housed exhibits of engineering, industry, and the arts, and dozens of smaller kiosks housed displays from merchants and manufacturers. A “never stop” railway ferried tired visitors around the park, dozens of restaurants served familiar and exotic foods to the hungry, and a large amusement park “rounded out” a day’s or week’s family visit.
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Notes
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Lawrence Weaver, Exhibitions and the Arts of Display (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 97.
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© 2013 Daniel Stephen
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Stephen, D. (2013). Introduction. In: The Empire of Progress. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137325129_1
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