All The Fun Of The Festival

From the Great Exhibition to the London Design Festival, Britain has a long tradition of celebrating creativity, says Clive Aslet

- Clive Aslet

VISIT London from September 14 to 22, and you’ll find weirdness and wonder. The 17th London Design Festival is coming to town, with a display that magnifies gemstones to galactic size at Islington’s Collins Theatre and sees the shoppers’ paradise of South Molton Street transformed by wacky and colourful street furniture. Dotted around the V&A Museum will be 10 artworks, from Avalanche by Matthew McCormick—an introspection on climate change—on the landing of the British Gallery, to This Much I’m Worth by Rachel Ara, reflecting on the history of neon and its use in the sex trade. They’ll be wild, they’ll be vibrant. They’ll also be in the tradition of the V&A, which has its origins in a kind of design festival— the Great Exhibition of 1851.

That pioneer was followed by others—the 1853 Exhibition of Art-Industry in Dublin; the 1862 International Exhibition in London; the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Of the latter, Prince Albert wrote that: ‘No country invests a larger amount of capital in works of art of all kinds than England, and in none almost is so little done for art-education.’ Yet the Great Exhibition’s permanent legacy lay in the South Kensington estate that the exhibition commissioners bought with the money left over from the project—an astonishing £180,000.