‘The task of every exhibition is to sell something, whether it is a new line of tea-pots or a plan for the regeneration of Western civilisation’, wrote Misha Black, reflecting on the agility needed to practise as an exhibition designer, when demanded to turn your hand to ‘selling’ across extraordinarily diverse contexts.¹ Black’s image of exhibitions offering the potential to sell everything from teapots to a vision of civilisation itself is apt for this chapter, which focuses on exhibitions’ use in Britain from 1933 to 1939 as propaganda for promoting diverse ideas and agendas by official bodies and activist groups. Essentially, exhibitions had been identified as a potent means of ‘manufacturing consent’, as media theorist Noam Chomsky later described it, to control the population through non-coercive, participatory means, rather than through the imposition of penalties or conspicuously punitive methods.²

Exhibitions were, increasingly, operating within the complex system of communications, as an adjunct to other media forms. In his 1938 book Propaganda Richard S. Lambert, editor of the BBC’s in-house magazine The Listener, argued for the value of propaganda in the dissemination of truth, observing that ‘propagandist organisations’ were using many types of activity as propaganda, from giving concerts and plays to arranging art exhibitions.³ Exhibition designer Misha Black, whose work and ideas are central to this book, believed an exhibition’s job ‘must be based on the principle of persuasion, consent and participation’.⁴ Such exhibitions could help the British population accept particular ideas, such as new government initiatives.⁵

Exhibitions were being recruited as an element in the burgeoning culture of promotion and public relations developing in Britain during the interwar years, as this chapter shows. In his account of this emerging culture, historian Scott Anthony cites Stephen Tallents and Frank Pick as central proponents. Both Tallents and Pick were firm believers in the power of exhibitions to convey ideas to the public, within a body of assorted media.⁶ In the previous chapter I discussed the striking impression the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona exhibition had made on Tallents. In this chapter I show how government-funded bodies such as Tallents’ Empire Marketing Board (EMB), the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) and its successor the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) and the General Post Office (GPO) used exhibitions as part of their promotions strategy. I analyse a number of examples, including exhibitions promoting ‘good design’ (Design in Modern Life), the Postal Service (Post Office Exhibition), British Empire practices and products (Timber through the Ages, Flying over the Empire and Peeps at the Colonial Empire); exhibitions amplifying government policy (Do Not Pass by the Special Areas and The Highway Code); and exhibitions as the focus for activist campaigns (Clear Smoke from the Air and New Homes for Old).

Exhibition design in Britain, as this chapter shows, was a vital cosmopolitan practice principally shaped by refugee and migrant artists and designers from diverse contexts, who arrived in Britain in large numbers during the early twentieth century. Black had arrived in Britain from the Russian Empire as a baby, while more recent arrivals were also to become formative influences on British exhibition cultures, as this chapter discusses, including László Moholy-Nagy, Hans Schleger, E. McKnight Kauffer and F. H. K. Henrion. It was the visual sensibility of this group that shaped information design and exhibition design more generally in Britain. Many of these artists and designers reappear across the multiple exhibitionary contexts of this book.

Exhibitions as projection and promotion

Turning over public spaces to use for sharing information was becoming established practice. Indeed, this kind of public promotional material was created to be shown in spaces of transition. Filmmaker John Grierson had set up film projectors at Victoria Station in the 1920s to attract passersby to watch his documentaries, as Stephen Tallents recalled.⁷ From the mid-1920s, London’s Charing Cross Station became a recurrent exhibition site, with the Underground station’s modest ticket hall becoming a well-used gallery as part of the liminal landscape of transport hubs and terminals. The extensive series of early Charing Cross exhibitions is recorded in the London Transport Museum archive, but the accompanying committee papers have not survived, so it is unclear who was responsible for organising and designing many of them, or what their overarching vision was. It is evident, however, that UERL started mounting exhibitions as a way to bring art to the public, to show off the progress of a design-conscious authority and to promote ‘good design’. Zoological specimens were shown on the westbound platform of Mansion House Station in 1925, followed by displays of a Frigidaire company ice demonstration at Piccadilly Circus Station in 1929 and a series of showcases at Leicester Square, including Central School of Arts and Crafts students’ work and glimpses of V&A collections with a label on a dress asking passersby: ‘What Did Our Grandmothers Wear?’⁸ Set in glass vitrines, with small informative text panels, they mirrored conventional museum installations of the day.

With Frank Pick at the helm, the LPTB (as UERL had become from 1933) was intensely focused on promotion. Architect Gerhard Kallmann commented on the way that Frank Pick allowed Charing Cross Station to be used for ‘campaigns with which he was in sympathy’.⁹ As well as leasing station space to other bodies, the LPTB was keen to promote its own endeavours, with exhibitions illustrating the impressive programme of rapid expansion and modernisation with the spread of the ‘tube’ in the 1930s northwards towards Cockfosters on the edge of Hertfordshire and west towards Uxbridge.¹⁰ Frequent displays showed rolling stock and Underground posters, as well as flowers and vegetables grown by LPTB employees. The London Transport Photographic Exhibition of 1934 showcased the extensive transport stock, with photographs of the impressive trams, coaches and trolley buses, all ‘at London’s service’.¹¹ The Design in Transport exhibition of 1935 included photographs of transport and publicity design.

Displays at Charing Cross Station ticket hall began with conventional hangs, installed horizontally round the walls of the small space but, by the mid-1930s, these were becoming more experimental. Trade and tourism bodies like the Milk Marketing Board made displays at the station an element in their promotion programmes, installing live dairy cows and working milking machinery in the station, allowing passersby to drink fresh milk and promoting its health benefits. The British Electrical Development Association was one of many organisations that mounted displays; its Golden Age of Electricity in 1932 showed mock rooms using a range of technologies powered by electricity, raising the profile of their organisation and service. Commercial organisations took the space as another outlet for advertising campaigns: Shell-Mex and British Petroleum displayed products made from petrol in autumn 1932. The Hydrogenation Exhibition, hosted by the Anglo-American Oil Company in spring 1933, showed the ‘wonders’ of Essolube motor oil, from refinery to engine. Dunlop displayed the wide variety of their manufactured goods, from splayed badminton rackets to comfortable cinema chairs and latex car seats, in spring 1933 in a display reminiscent of a department store installation. The Metal Box Co. installed working machinery to showcase processes for canning English fruit and vegetables in 1935, with multiple pyramids of cans interspersed with photographs illustrating the bucolic English origins of each product, exhibitions acting as advertisements.

Promoting ‘good design’: Design in Modern Life

As well as promoting trade and commerce, throughout the 1930s Charing Cross Station was used for non-commercial exhibitions: elements in wider publicity campaigns and the corollary to radio and film broadcasts, posters and booklets. Organisations including the Housing Centre and the Council for Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) chose Charing Cross to promote their work to the passing public in exhibition form. The Design and Industries Association (DIA) chose Charing Cross for a conventionally installed exhibit of British goods ‘of moderate price’, Design in British Goods. This 1932 display illustrated the maxim ‘Fitness for Purpose & Simplicity Are the Key to Good Design’, with shelves of goods chosen for their ‘simple and efficient design’ including sections for tableware, shoes, kitchen gadgets, accessories, clocks and lamps.¹² The DIA returned to Charing Cross the following year with Design in Modern Life, this time moving beyond a sole focus on well-designed goods, to buildings and environments.

Showing their awareness of compounding technologies for promotional purposes by bringing objects and radio together, the DIA’s exhibition accompanied the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s National Programme series of radio talks Design in Modern Life (1933). The series included designer Gordon Russell on ‘The Living Room and Furniture’, poet Francis Meynell on ‘The Printed Word’, transport administrator and ‘good design’ champion Frank Pick on ‘The Street’, architect Wells Coates on ‘Dwellings’ and housing consultant Elizabeth Denby on ‘The Kitchen’. Exhibition visitors were prompted to buy a series ‘syllabus’ prepared by the BBC from Messrs WH Smith & Co. at a station kiosk. BBC was developing its expansive agenda to speak to the world, allying with other organisations to expand its reach and to amplify its messages, and exhibitions were a potent element in this alliance. BBC programming was also regularly focused towards supporting exhibitions on the built environment in the years up until the end of the Second World War.¹³

Promoting the postal service: Post Office Exhibition

Amongst the public bodies in Britain that chose exhibitions as a central means of promotion, the GPO stood out for its striking use of the medium, with exhibitions sitting alongside film in enabling the company to explain its functions in providing mail, radio and telephonic communications.¹⁴ The company often mounted their exhibitions in newly built cinema halls, as a self-conscious embodiment of modernity, and regularly incorporated films into their displays. The GPO mounted an extensive programme of thematic exhibitions, with the Charing Cross exhibition one of twelve held in 1936. The May 1936 Post Office Exhibition explained the GPO’s range of technologies – from telegraphs to telephones and engineering – through a series of arresting and dramatic photomontages, with a floor-to-ceiling montage of the London skyline covering the walls with huge photographic figures of postmen and customers superimposed on top and a mural on the ceiling showing clouds with messages (Figure 2.1). The front of the Charing Cross space was animated by a series of dramatic silhouettes, showing GPO transport types.

Post Office explained the mechanics of the service, with a sample postal car and maps, a telephone and other modern machinery demonstrated by a GPO worker at a desk.¹⁵ The design of the Charing Cross installation shows the strong influence of Modernist forms at a time when designers employed by the GPO to work on exhibitions, films and other forms included László Moholy-Nagy, E. McKnight Kauffer, Tom Eckersley, Hans Schleger, F. H. K. Henrion and Austin Cooper.¹⁶ Cable and Wireless, the telecommunications company that served the whole of the British Empire, held an exhibition of World Communications at Charing Cross in August 1936, again with a background of abstracted photomontages and demonstrating telecommunications equipment.

2.1 Post Office Exhibition, Charing Cross Underground Station, May 1936, with striking floor to ceiling murals and demonstration of new communications equipment. Topical Press. U20393 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Promoting British Empire projects: Timber through the Ages

The rolling programme of trade exhibitions at Charing Cross Station included the Timber Development Association (TDA)’s Timber through the Ages held from February to March 1936, with artist Paul Nash as appointed designer.¹⁷ The TDA, a trade body for timber businesses set up in 1934, was rooted in a tradition of promoting British Empire timber. Nash’s appointment was likely the idea of TDA Director of Public Affairs and design writer John Gloag, who appointed Walter Gropius as judge of a timber house design competition the same year.¹⁸ Nash was an inspired choice of artist for the TDA’s Charing Cross Station display, given the romantic and lyrical associations with wood in his work; and, despite its commercial focus, Timber through the Ages provided Nash with an opportunity to share his artistic vision.¹⁹

Nash designed a large mural using eight wood veneers ‘chosen for their colour, harmony and variations of grain’ across the back wall of the station’s space (Figure 2.2). Mural panels ranged from ‘pale blue-grey, yellow and ochre, to russet brown and chestnut red’. The woods were unstained, the effect depending on their natural beauty, as Commercial Art enthused.²⁰ Splayed sidewalls allowed views to the wooden mural from outside. In addition, Nash chose a series of photographs arranged on rectilinear-shaped veneers showing wood anatomy and features, film stills illustrating the ‘Life of a Tree’ and ancient and modern uses of timber, constructional and decorative uses, usual and unusual uses (Figure 2.3). Images ranged from a fifteenth-century house to a spinet, a bridge to an aeroplane wing, and included photographs he had taken such as ‘Gate Posts in the Making’, chosen for ‘its essential, native woodenness’.²¹ Despite such displays’ intention to persuade and influence passersby, the lack of records of how they were received by the public makes it curiously hard to gauge what sort of impression they made.

Peeps at the Colonial Empire

The close linkages between Britain and its Empire had been shown across a century in dazzling displays. National and imperial exhibitions had been held all over Britain from 1900, transposing the imperial theme onto an epic scale, highlighting the invisible bonds holding the Empire together and selling products of Empire to the world.²² Major exhibitions had proved efficient vehicles for reinforcing the narratives of colonising nations, in effect acting as global communications technologies for projecting and legitimising national power.

2.2 General view of Timber through the Ages in March 1936, at Charing Cross Underground Station, with a wood mural across the back wall, designed by Paul Nash. Topical Press. U19757 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The unfolding of a tradition of spectacles of the British Empire in and from Britain, celebrations of the vast, multiracial empire, continued until the 1930s. These linkages were shown in more modest exhibitions, equally complicit in communicating messages of British difference and superiority despite their small scale and streamlined appearances. The short-lived Empire Marketing Board (1926–33), led by Stephen Tallents, consistently used exhibitions to display Empire at home and to project Britain abroad, part of a long-standing culture of commoditising non-Western cultures and geographies in Britain. Imperial Airways developed a stand at the aeronautical exhibition at London’s Olympia in 1929 to promote activities and highlight imperial connections. Five years later it mounted its own exhibition, Flying over the Empire, at Charing Cross, comprising a large folding screen with a map mounted on it, models of Imperial aircraft, photographs and dioramas of imperial scenes. This was renamed The Empire’s Airway and remounted at London’s Science Museum in December 1935, subsequently touring to Canada, South Africa and Australia where, by the end of its run, it was estimated to have been seen by a million people.²³

2.3 Photographs selected by Paul Nash shown to illuminate the theme of Timber through the Ages, Charing Cross Underground Station. Topical Press. U19760 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Imperial Airways appointed László Moholy-Nagy to design The Empire’s Airway exhibition at Charing Cross Station in June 1936, showing the many routes flown and encouraging the transcendent benefits of flying with slogans such as ‘The AEROPLANE IN THE SKY CARRIES US ABOVE MEDIOCRE THINGS’, featuring cut-out photographs of planes, models of planes in section and of landscapes (Figure 2.4 and 2.5).²⁴ A series of peep-holes allowed glimpses through from the entrance, as well as mimicking the circular windows in planes to allow views through to illuminated displays with photographs, dioramas and statistics. The exhibition’s installations were photographed in meticulous detail by news agency Topical Press.²⁵

A succession of exhibitions at Charing Cross Station aimed to reinforce Britain’s colonial and Dominion relationships. The government-mounted Peeps at the Colonial Empire of October 1936 brought together exhibits from a vastly dispersed colonial area: the British West Indies, Malaya, Ceylon, British West Africa, British East Africa, Malta and Cyprus, showing a dramatic diorama of silhouetted scenes of life from the various colonies above a series of sections showing crafts and produce such as coffee and tobacco, all accompanied by information pamphlets (Figure 2.6).²⁶ Empire Tea at Charing Cross of 1937 showcased Great Britain’s tea industry, making a connection between the ‘120 thousand million cups’ of tea a year drunk in the British Empire and the employment it gave to ‘more than 2 million British subjects in India & Ceylon’. Photographs of tea pickers were displayed besides a diorama showing an ‘Empire Tea Garden’ and statistics about ‘when the English family takes tea’.²⁷

2.4 Publicity for The Empire’s Airway at Charing Cross Underground Station, June 1936, designed by Theyre Lee-Elliott. 1983/4/4490 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Policy in three dimensions: Do Not Pass by the Special Areas exhibition

Charing Cross Station ticket hall was used by a plethora of organisations for promotion and projection. From the mid-1930s, the ticket hall also became a site for enabling the public to visualise government policy in three dimensions. Modernist exhibition techniques – including photomontage and the new typography – were in evidence at Do Not Pass by the Special Areas, mounted at Charing Cross in February 1936. The exhibition was planned and designed by F. C. Pritchard, Wood & Partners, the advertising agency of the Isokon Furniture Company. ²⁸ The small exhibition was mounted at the request of the Commissioner for the Special Areas, a government appointee tasked with improving conditions in places stricken by the Depression, and was intended to amplify government policy. It entreated Londoners to jolt themselves out of insularity, to ‘Look Beyond London – Learn How Others Live’.²⁹

2.5 The Empire’s Airway exhibition at Charing Cross Underground Station, designed by László Moholy-Nagy. Topical Press. 1998/42726 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

2.6 Peeps at the Colonial Empire exhibition, Charing Cross Underground Station, October 1936, showing products from the colonies. Topical Press. U21703 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The exhibition’s accompanying poster was designed by commercial artist E. McKnight Kauffer, its red and black script set on dynamic diagonals, centring on the cut-out photograph of an official-looking man appealing to the public’s sense of social responsibility by proclaiming ‘every citizen should see this’ (Figure 2.7). American-born Kauffer, who had lived in England since 1914, played a key role in the emerging profession of graphic design in England. He was, by the 1930s, working for numerous clients including doing regular work for the Underground, where he was championed by Frank Pick.³⁰

‘Special Areas’ was an official designation given by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1934, through the Distressed Areas Act, to three districts hit particularly hard by the Depression. The Act had allocated £2 million for demolition of derelict factories and to aid self-help schemes. While the scheme was criticised as too minor an intervention, given the over two million unemployed in these areas, including by MP George Lansbury who described it as ‘an attempt to bale out the ocean with a spoon’, the Charing Cross exhibition was part of a wider programme to promote the government scheme.³¹ It showed what the government was doing to improve conditions and instructed the public on what they could do to help.

2.7 Do Not Pass by the Special Areas, Charing Cross Station, February 1936, poster designed by E. McKnight Kauffer. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The exhibition visualised and dramatised the impoverished living conditions of the working classes beyond London, with context presented in the exhibition in documentary form, through photomontages showing the areas’ rural beauty: lakes, hills and cathedrals, industrial landscapes and the people who worked and lived in them. Photographs of mills and power stations were brought together with cut-outs of sooty miners, children and babies (Figure 2.8). Maps showed the three government-designated ‘Special Areas’: Cumberland, Durham and South Wales (Figure 2.9). The West Cumberland and Alston section showed locations for coal, iron and steel, quarrying and weaving. Woollen, woven, metal and glass product displays entreated viewers to ‘Buy the products of the special areas’, while travel information showed people how to visit them and a photocollage demonstrated government training provided for retraining men ‘for whom there is little or no prospect of further regular employment in their own trades’, as well as twelve recuperative courses to ‘restore their physique’.³² Such exhibitions, even in the small underground space, were ambitious elements of government communications; their installations complex and multi-faceted, combining media and script, and driven by narrative, becoming manifestations of government policy in three dimensions.

2.8 Do Not Pass by the Special Areas, Charing Cross Station, planned and designed by F. C. Pritchard, Wood & Partners. 1983/4/4333 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

2.9 Do Not Pass by the Special Areas, Charing Cross Station, planned and designed by F. C. Pritchard, Wood & Partners. 1998/42360. Chancery Co. Ltd. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Displaying road safety: The Highway Code: An Exhibition

Charing Cross Station continued to be seen as a good venue for sharing official policy and information, although frustratingly little evidence of the public response remains. In November 1937, Charing Cross hosted The Highway Code: An Exhibition, intended to keep the public safe on roads. Developed by the Ministry of Transport, Highway Code was part of the campaign to increase public awareness of dangerous roads, following the appointment of modernising Transport Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha.³³ Highway Code was designed by Hans Schleger, who worked under the pseudonym ‘Zéró’. Schleger had been born Hans Schlesinger in Poland, training at the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule and Reimann School in Berlin, working as a designer in the US from 1924 to 1929 before joining the Berlin office of prestigious British advertising agency W. S. Crawford and moving to London with Crawford’s in 1932.³⁴ With the support of Crawford’s Director Ashley Havinden and graphic designer E. McKnight Kauffer, Schleger had secured an exhibition in the art gallery of Lund Humphries Bedford Square in 1934. He designed posters for the LPTB regularly from 1935.

Commissioned by the LPTB to create a poster to publicise The Highway Code exhibition, Schleger depicted ears and eyes marching (Figure 2.10). Modern Publicity explained that ‘by simple visual analysis’ the poster created ‘an abstract notion of behaviour’, lauding Schleger’s work as ‘a brilliant example of very difficult material admirably co-ordinated’. The article continued, ‘the imposition of eyes and ears for heads underlines the necessity of super-awareness on the part of pedestrians in traffic’. It admired how such an ‘unusual visual idea imports an interest and curiosity-appeal into a subject which would otherwise make dull poster material’.³⁵ Made a year after the London Surrealist exhibition, Schleger’s poster showed the influence of Surrealism and of contemporaneous designs by Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Herbert Bayer and the work of Roland Penrose, whom Schleger had recently exhibited with in Cambridge.³⁶

Signage at the Charing Cross exhibition used a Playbill font, which echoed the poster. An introductory panel declared it the work of the Ministry of Transport, ‘with the Authority of Parliament’, appearing like the front cover of a book complete with publisher, ‘His Majesty’s Stationery Office’, location and date. Schleger’s exhibition installation showed the influence of his German training and alliances: abstract or cut-out photographs caught in organic shapes depicted a spat between cyclists and an inconsiderate car driver; miniature model cars showed how to navigate roads safely; neat illustrative diagrams showed the dangerous times on the road and casualty numbers; drawings and cartoons, metal cut-outs overlaid photographs and illuminated signage, images glimpsed through port-holes were all accompanied by aphorisms such as ‘Good Tyres, Good Brakes’ and ‘Drive Within the Limits of Your Lights’ (Figure 2.11).³⁷ Beyond short reports in the trade press, there is frustratingly limited evidence as to what the public made of the installation.

2.10 The Highway Code exhibition, at Charing Cross Underground Station, November 1937, poster designed by Zéró (Hans Schleger). 1983/4/4923 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

2.11 The Highway Code exhibition, display designed by Zéró (Hans Schleger). Dell & Wainwright. 6747-DW © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Exhibitions as activism: the Schools Exhibition and Food for Fitness

At the same time as promoting organisations and goods, and giving concrete shape and form to abstracted government policy, exhibitions were being taken up by activists to promote acute social and political agendas. In the case of the examples I have chosen in this chapter, these agendas coalesced around improving health, children’s education, air quality and housing standards; their audiences varied from central and local government to the general public. All were focused towards prompting social, cultural or political change. The extent to which they met their target is extremely difficult to gauge.

The Leftist News Chronicle newspaper had a strong social agenda to improve living and working conditions and mounted regular exhibitions to further this agenda. News Chronicle’s Schools Exhibition, held from December 1937 to January 1938 at Charing Cross Station, gave audiences an exhibition taster before pointing them on to the more major exhibition on the same subject being held simultaneously at Dorland Hall on Regent Street.³⁸ Collages by E. McKnight Kauffer flanked the Charing Cross exhibition’s entrance, showing a cut-out photograph of a child leaning on a book, with the slogan ‘For Us and For the Future’ (Figure 2.12). A whimsical cartoon accompanied a mocked-up section of a school hall with bars, school bench, gym horse, hoops and pummel-bag. McKnight Kauffer designed the exhibition’s poster, one version showing an abstracted Doric column accompanied by the cut-out photograph of a child’s head, another version showing a trowel, in which the trowel’s head was the drawing of a school plan (Figure 2.13).³⁹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its opposition to the Leftist politics of the exhibition’s sponsor News Chronicle, fascist magazine Action wrote a scathing report of the exhibition, focusing on its use of ‘photographic layouts’, which aimed to typify the spirit of education in Russia and Spain but ignored Germany and Italy and hardly, they thought, showed Britain.⁴⁰

2.12 News Chronicle Schools exhibition at Charing Cross Station, 1938, with collages designed by E. McKnight Kauffer. U25966 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Exhibitions addressing public welfare came in a variety of forms. Food for Fitness was one such exhibition. Held at Charing Cross in February 1938 and probably mounted by the government’s Public Health Department, its agenda was clearly to teach the benefits of well-planned meals in terms of budget and nutrition, as well as the negative impacts of poorly planned ones (Figure 2.14). An ideal diet for ‘a working man’ and a child were displayed, with sample menus showing healthy choices and blown-up photographs showed appealing looking healthy food, alongside a vast photograph of an obese man shown to caution against the ‘wrong’ kind of eating (Figure 2.15).

2.13 News Chronicle Schools exhibition at Dorland Hall, London, 1937, poster designed by E. McKnight Kauffer. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Gift of Mrs. E. McKnight Kauffer, 1963–39–96. Photo: Matt Flynn. © Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

2.14 Food for Fitness exhibition at Charing Cross Station in January 1938, teaching the benefits of healthy eating through sample menus. Topical Press. U26173 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Exhibitions for air quality activism: Clear Smoke from the Air

A striking Charing Cross installation tackled atmospheric pollution, a subject seemingly antithetical to visual brilliance. The respiratory and pulmonary threat of the dense coal smoke that billowed from the chimneys of factories, workshops and homes had been strikingly evident for a century.⁴¹ The Clear Smoke from the Air exhibition was organised by the National Smoke Abatement Society and mounted in December 1938 in co-operation with the Gas Light and Coke Company, to campaign against London’s ‘smoke, soot, as causes of disease, as deterrents to business and as chief obstacles to the growth of beautiful cities’.⁴² Herbert Morrison MP opened Clear Smoke and the press photographed him chatting with a sooty chimney sweep.⁴³ Morrison had a strong belief in exhibitions’ efficacy in communicating government messages, as his regular appearances through the many phases of this book will show.

2.15 Food for Fitness exhibition, teaching meal planning through visual guides to healthy food, enlarged photographs and photocollages. Topical Press. U26174 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The National Smoke Abatement Society had held regular exhibitions to lobby for improved air quality through the 1920s and 1930s.⁴⁴ Aside from their success as lobbying exercises, displays had been criticised for failing to convey their visual messages effectively. A major Society exhibition at London’s Science Museum in October 1936 was panned by Shelf Appeal as ‘so magnificent a theme, so dramatic a subject’ but ‘so poorly handled’. Its treatment of photographs was ‘crowded and under-sized’ – ‘half-a-dozen powerful enlargements would have smashed home the message in an unforgettable manner’ – and ‘charts, diagrams and maps were small, inexpertly handled, and unconvincing … there was a lot of meat at the Exhibition, but it was served up in an indigestible manner’. ‘If the Society … had entrusted the exhibition to a display specialist – much more satisfactory results would have been obtained’. This point was echoed in the press comment, ‘Never has an exhibition cried out so loudly for the directive hand of a skilled and imaginative exhibition planner’.⁴⁵

Heeding this criticism, the Smoke Abatement Society appointed imaginative exhibition planners Misha Black and F. H. K. Henrion to design a pair of exhibitions. Russia-born Black had arrived in Britain as a child in 1912, starting his career as exhibition designer in 1927, so by the mid-1930s he had had several years’ experience.⁴⁶ The Society presented Black as ‘the leading exhibition designer in the country’.⁴⁷ German-born Henrion, who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in 1936, after working as a textile designer in Paris and as an exhibition designer in Tel Aviv, was praised by Art and Industry magazine as ‘a versatile’ and ‘sensitive’ artist who worked on press advertisements, folders, brochures, display units and photomurals.⁴⁸ Black and Henrion worked with Beck & Pollitzer Ltd as builders.⁴⁹

Clear Smoke employed visual rhetoric and dialectic contrasts to make its point. An image of dense housing was accompanied by the label ‘CENTRAL LONDON gets only half the winter sunshine’, the cut-out head of a ruddy-cheeked baby and children jumping, contrasting with an image of the 187-foot Nelson’s Column half buried in soot and the label ‘A month’s fall of soot in the County of London swept into Trafalgar Square would look like this’ (Figure 2.16). A diorama was used to show the transformation of a smoky, gloomy city, plagued by ‘The Soot Menace’, into a clean, orderly townscape. This was accompanied by the repeated incantation: ‘We CAN Work This Miracle’. The displays were at once serious and playful, visually appealing and innovative. A cartoon character, ‘Sammy Soot’, announced himself above the exhibition’s entrance, declaring ‘I make Work hard for you’, lurking mock-menacingly at intervals throughout the exhibition. The inset model of a house, with a plain brass plate on the fence at the front reading ‘Mr and Mrs Everyman, Makers of Smoke’, underlined the message that individual homeowners had a role to play in improving the situation by changing the fuels they used to cook and heat their homes.

A cut-out photograph showing a woman struggling with a heavy sack labelled ‘The Burden of Smoke’ illustrated the way pollution added a hidden encumbrance to life. This was contrasted with a display about housewives’ experiences of the additional washing and cleaning caused by soot entitled ‘Take a Womans [sic] Word For It’, with four photographs accompanied by textual vox pops, articulating the experiences of real women living in a smokeless London housing estate, the newly built Kensal House in London. The display playfully superimposed them on a house silhouette, with labels hanging like the outline of clothes on a washing line. ‘Health from the Sun’ contrasted with ‘Disease and Death from Smoke’, with X-rays of lungs, drawings of lines of vegetables and other devices used to illustrate the point, while a ceiling panel illustrated soot in the air and clever, angled displays showed from several sides (Figure 2.17).

2.16 Clear Smoke from the Air exhibition, December 1938, organised by the National Smoke Abatement Society at Charing Cross to tackle atmospheric pollution. Topical Press. F. H. K. Henrion Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives. © Estate of F. H. K. Henrion. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Display praised the Charing Cross exhibition for its ‘moving effects, illuminated transparencies, striking photo work and sound design apparent in the informative displays’. It went on to note the particularly strong messaging achieved by this exhibition, saying that Charing Cross Underground Station ‘promises to become the venue of London’s forceful temporary exhibitions’, exhibitions that did not only show objects or produce but stood to communicate a point.⁵⁰ The Society described Charing Cross as ‘one of the best-known and valuable exhibition sites in London’, noting with satisfaction that the exhibition had prompted an increased demand in information about smokeless fuel.⁵¹ Exhibitions such as these were elements in strategies to raise public consciousness about the invisible threat of poor air quality across a variety of media including posters and film. In 1938 the Society ran a poster competition, judged by E. McKnight Kauffer, setting designers the task of illustrating one of three slogans such as ‘Away with smoke, let in the light’.⁵² And in 1939 the Society ran a film competition for films on smoke abatement, with highly respected documentary-maker Paul Rotha as judge.⁵³ Through their choices of judges and designers, the Society’s campaigns were inextricably linked with wider Modernist activism promoting social reform and new housing. It is no coincidence that another form of exhibitionary activism, that focused on housing, drew contributions from some of the same designers.

2.17 Clear Smoke from the Air exhibition. Topical Press. F. H. K. Henrion Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives. © Estate of F. H. K. Henrion. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Exhibitions for housing activism: New Homes for Old

A series of exhibitions titled New Homes for Old was mounted in London between 1931 and 1938 to draw attention to overcrowding and poor housing conditions and to show that high quality cheaper housing could be built. From Ideal Home to Building Exhibitions, the exhibition had long been considered an effective medium for representing solutions to housing problems: educating the public on improved forms, selling materials to the building industry and communicating diverse planning visions.⁵⁴ By the 1930s, public interest in building was strong, something RIBA President Sir Giles Gilbert Scott attributed to the negative impacts of ‘vast building schemes which have done so much to ruin England’.⁵⁵

The 1930 Housing Act championed by Arthur Greenwood, Labour Minister of Health, had promised to bring sunshine to the slums, giving local authorities power to clear ‘plague’ sites. Two million children, it was estimated, lived in unfit housing; the question was how to find solutions rapidly.⁵⁶ With low inflation, this was a boom time for private housing, with 345,000 houses built annually between 1933 and 1937. But much of it was poor quality, based on piecemeal planning, and public housing programmes were faltering.⁵⁷ While commercial building exhibitions had engaged a large public by showing novel housing forms and materials, an exhibition series with a more adversarial and polemical focus was developed by the Housing Centre, a pressure group of women drawn from London’s voluntary housing societies, their other activities including creating housing information, publicity and research.⁵⁸

New Homes for Old once again demonstrated the exhibition as suited to housing activism, allowing for a mix of photographs, charts and three-dimensional elements, knitted together by a hard-hitting narrative. Housing Centre exhibitions were intended to precipitate rapid improvement by showing the ills meted out by successive governments that had invested in building accommodation without sufficient understanding of people’s actual needs. The first New Homes, co-ordinated by housing professional Elizabeth Denby and held at Westminster Central Hall in December 1931, displayed a graphic and easily absorbed representation of the horrors of London’s slums, pointing to what needed to be done.⁵⁹ Model flats and illustrations of exemplary German working-class housing were shown alongside a shock section on slums.

The pictures, intended to horrify viewers into action, included pinned-out specimens of rats, beetles and other vermin, employing a vivid use of a dualist problem/solution trope to point from the existing problem towards a preferable solution, a display device favoured by many contemporary lobbying organisations, including the DIA.⁶⁰ The exhibition was designed to tour round the country and, as architect Judith Ledeboer explained, it was successful in ‘taking a large share in the rousing of public opinion to abolish the slums’.⁶¹ The second New Homes for Old exhibition, held at Olympia in September 1932, again brought together a mix of media including models, photographs and statistical charts. It drew on data from the recently completed 1931 census to underpin messaging about the human cost of slums.

Sensing that such powerful material was hitting home with the public, the 1934 New Homes exhibition brought together visually impactful material, from documentary photographs to models and pictograms, in combination with a punchy textual narrative. Held in September 1934 and mounted at Olympia Building Trades Exhibition, the exhibition was designed across seven bays, along with a simulacrum slum alley given the title Susannah Row, Drysdale Street Clearance Area, painted by Molly MacArthur and with doorframes, windows and drainpipes brought from a demolished slum. This mock slum drew the crowds. It was contrasted with orderly sections, each designed by women, showing model housing, statistical diagrams and photographs, town planning by J. F. Abram, flat planning by Elizabeth Denby and outdoor amenities by landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood. A booklet accompanying the 1934 exhibition carried a photomontage by Edith Tudor-Hart on its cover, with a slum contrasting with new housing and a round-cheeked, beaming baby rising from the roof, operating as an optimistic symbol of a healthy new future (Figure 2.18).⁶²

Denby and Ledeboer spotted an opportunity to show yet more vividly the possibilities for transforming housing, by forming a collaboration with new architectural consortium the Modern Architectural Research Group (known as MARS), who they invited to collaborate on a display about the re-planning of slum areas.⁶³ The MARS Group, formed in 1933 as the British chapter of the Modernist architects’ consortium Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), was an association of ‘architects and allied technicians united by a common belief in the necessity for a new conception of architecture and its relation to society’, formed by six members.⁶⁴ Architectural historian John Summerson, a member of MARS, described the group’s name as encapsulating a sense of both their ‘militancy’ and a ‘vision of planetary exploration’.⁶⁵ MARS, like the group around New Homes, had a missionary belief that they could improve people’s lives through ‘good’ architecture. Like other artists’ groups formed in the same year, including the Artists International Association and Unit One, MARS saw exhibitions as central to demonstrating their future vision and to enact this they formed an exhibitions committee early on to start planning. MARS – who identified as an embattled avant-garde – used exhibitions alongside several other methods, including press releases and articles, to campaign for modern architecture.⁶⁶

The resulting 1934 MARS-designed section of New Homes centred on an analysis of slum conditions, with the organising group’s own display showing what they hoped to see in terms of indoor and outdoor play and communal space, using photographs and models, while MARS contributed a didactic analysis of population density in a ‘typically bad slum’, Bethnal Green, through maps, ‘pictorial statistics’ and diagrams showing population density and types of circulation, occupations of residents, housing accommodation and rents in relation to incomes of the employed and unemployed. Understanding the importance of amplifying their messages across media, MARS reproduced the whole of their New Homes display in print in Design for To-Day, the DIA’s magazine.⁶⁷ MARS ably highlighted ‘the problem’ of housing whilst conspicuously failing to suggest ‘the solution’. Excusing this omission, the Manchester Guardian reported, ‘They … are determined not to form conclusions till they know a great deal more’, suggesting MARS was merely in the process of research.⁶⁸

2.18 Booklet for New Homes for Old, 1934. The cover carried a photomontage by Edith Tudor-Hart contrasting a slum with new housing. © Edith Tudor-Hart, The Estate of Wolf Suschitzky. Image courtesy of Four Corners. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder. [JUST USE BOOKLET COVER TOP LEFT QUARTER]

The New Homes for Old series continued, showing the ability of its organisers to continue absorbing up-to-date visual technologies to propel its polemical housing messages. The 1935 New Homes for Old exhibition, held at Charing Cross Station, consisted of a photographic collage of well-planned public spaces lining the walls of the small area, accompanied by the overarching slogan ‘Housing must be planned in relation to the life of the community and to centres of employment. Our cities can be made pleasant for all …’, with smaller texts for each image, model flats and a nursery school.⁶⁹ The September 1936 New Homes saw members of the Housing Centre represented by Ledeboer and Denby collaborate again with MARS and joined by a new organisation, the Architects’ & Technicians’ Organisation (ATO), with the aim of urging ‘better housing and more beautiful surroundings for all ages’.⁷⁰ ATO had been formed in 1935 by architects Francis Skinner, Berthold Lubetkin and other members of the Tecton practice, as a breakaway from MARS, an explicitly socialist group focused to ‘support working class organisations fighting for better housing conditions’.⁷¹ Born in Russia (now Georgia), Lubetkin had studied and worked in Paris before moving to London in 1931 and co-founding the Tecton practice. ATO’s intention was to counteract the increase of slums and unplanned, badly constructed buildings, working in collaboration with the building industry. Unlike MARS, with their vague commitment to ‘further an architecture which serves the needs of society’, ATO was explicitly anti-fascist, with an agenda to create better housing conditions to counter, in their words, ‘reactionary forces of privilege and finance’.⁷² Many criticised the resulting Housing Centre display as too ‘political’, an accusation robustly rebutted by ATO, who believed it was necessarily political to present the issues.⁷³

ATO’s more robustly socialist agenda was apparent in its exhibitions. Earlier that year, in April 1936, ATO had shown their commitment to improving poor housing when they mounted the independent Exhibition on Working-Class Housing by the Architects and Technicians Organisation at the Housing Centre on Suffolk Street in central London, with a dramatic presentation of housing conditions and statistics and a catalogue criticising national housing policies. The ATO exhibition toured on to Blackfriars, Liverpool, Manchester, Cambridge and Poplar, each time supported by a sympathetic Leftist organisation, including the Home Counties Labour Association and ATO regional branches, with updates such as screens on the 1935 Housing (Overcrowding) Act added later.⁷⁴

The September 1936 New Homes for Old was mounted in the gallery of the Building Trades Exhibition at Olympia, staffed by members of voluntary housing societies, with layout and setting by Misha Black. It took the strapline ‘Britain is Being Rebuilt’, with the polemical subtext ‘Old mistakes must be avoided’, stating that ‘This exhibition is designed to point out how human needs can be more fully satisfied … A fitting background can be provided to every stage of life: to Infancy, Childhood, Manhood and Old Age’.⁷⁵ It included a focus on infants in nursery school, children at school and play, ‘The Man and Woman in the Home’, ‘Men and Women in the Community’ and ‘The Old in their Leisure’. There was material on planning suitable and ‘dignified’ housing for older people, researched and designed by architect Godfrey Samuel, showing different models from the village to the urban local authority home in Britain and drawing on comparators from Denmark and Sweden.⁷⁶ In addition to displays of plans and photographs accompanied by written commentary, the exhibition incorporated films to draw out particular aspects of the theme. Photographs and models combined with slogans and texts, proclaiming ‘bad conditions breed disease’ and ‘there are too many slums and out-of-date schools’, and mapping the changes in housing stock since 1835, a popular device in British housing propaganda.⁷⁷

2.19 New Homes for Old exhibition at Charing Cross Underground Station, December 1936, with displays showing how good housing conditions improved health. Topical Press. U22228 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The September 1936 New Homes showed a shift in ambition for the appeal of the messages within the exhibition. To reach a greater audience, the committee approached the BBC, asking if they would broadcast a programme about the exhibition and inviting architectural critic Geoffrey Boumphrey to present it.⁷⁸ A smaller version of the 1936 New Homes was mounted at Charing Cross Station in December, again intent on activating audiences.⁷⁹ Displays focused on how good housing conditions improved health; they mapped housing improvements at intervals (from 1835 to 1860 to 1890 to 1918 to the present), showing examples of towns lacking ‘order, health, convenience, comfort’, all accompanied by slogans proclaiming ‘BAD CONDITIONS BREED DISEASE’ and ‘THIS OR THIS – WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEMAND IN OUR HOMES’ (Figure 2.19).⁸⁰

The final New Homes for Old of 1938, once again organised by Ledeboer, focused on rural housing, its centrepiece a five-roomed cottage designed by Justin Blanco White displayed alongside ‘an authentic rural slum house’. It had been occupied shortly before being dismantled, transported and re-erected at Olympia, including bringing its occupant.⁸¹ The New Homes series showed exhibitions to be a suitable means of giving answers to housing problems through exhibitions, particularly when created through alliances between planners, architects, technicians and broadcasters and using all means of representation, from photographs, to film, to building elements.

Government and political activists had identified exhibitions as allowing scope for the presentation of problems and their proposed solutions across subjects such as areas in need of investment and housing in need of improvement. Their use, even in small spaces like Charing Cross, could then be amplified by news media and in broadcasts through the BBC network. The next chapter explores how exhibitions became three-dimensional manifestos during the 1930s in Britain.