Nothing is more empty than a deserted fairground. A walk through the White City with no one about, the baroque sculpture collapsing, the plaster façades damp-stained, the halls echoing and dusty, the railway lines for special trains which carried long-dead merry-makers, rusty and grass-grown, is macabre even in broad daylight.And empty race-courses seem emptier than that.But an empty church is full, especially one in which the Consecrated Host is reserved in tabernacle or cupboard in the wall, with a light before it. Such a building may be alarming. One may feel oneself elbowed out by angels, but the emptiness is awe-inspiring, not desolate.
For the truth is that in England and Scotland and Wales fairs and entertainments are the cast-offs of the church. Their ancestors were hurled out of churches when the religious plays acted in naves were considered too secular. They waltzed away into the churchyard and then into a field near the church. And on the date of the patronal feast of the church, in many an English village today, a fair is held in a neighbouring field. When I look at the roundabouts and swings and hoop-la canopies gaily coloured in King’s Lynn, in the same style as barges are coloured at Stoke Bruerne, and as some old-fashioned waggons are still painted, when I see these traditional colours of red and blue and gold and green twisting round the flashing mirrors which hide the steam organ, when I catch sight of flares or electric bulbs reflected in barley sugar rods of polished brass, I think how near the church these really are. I remember they must be derived from canopies over images carried with a mixture of reverence and guffaws, centuries ago in English sunlight. And I wish that this people’s art would come back to churches: a little more vulgarity of painted wood, a little less of the church furnisher and the art-expert and a little more of the fair ground. For this colour decoration of old-fashioned fairs is the oldest and most permanent feature of the architecture of entertainment.
English visitors are often shocked by the garishness of patronal feasts and processions in the towns and villages of Italy and Spain. There, fair and church, entertainment and worship are undivorced. We are shocked because we have still such a Puritan sense of sin about pleasure that we drive it out into the open fields of the world. From these outcast fairs, from strolling players and booths and competitions grew up the entertainment business whose structures are the subject of this article.
Churches are built on reality, in the mystical sense of that word. Fairs, exhibitions, theatres and cinemas are built for daydreams of personal wish-fulfilment, which is a phrase for pride. No wonder then that, unlike churches, impermanence pervades them.
Architecturally, the most impermanent, the most quickly dated of entertainment buildings are exhibitions and cinemas. The first great exhibition of 1851 was undoubtedly beautiful within its limits. I have a peep-show perspective of it. Under a bright light the eye looks down long glass avenues (whose cast-iron columns were originally painted with bright reds and blues under the direction of Mr. Owen Jones, who later designed the pleasant colours of Paddington Station which have now been obliterated by cream paint). The eye is stayed by crystal fountains, statues and hangings, flags of all nations, the great elm trees of Hyde Park which the palace enclosed, ormolu lamps tandards and hundreds of ladies walking about in coloured crinolines. All seem bathed in sunlight. One does really, in this Victorian perspective, recapture the idea current at the time that everything was getting better and better and that this exhibition of the products of Industrial Art was the beginning of a material millenium of peace on earth and good will towards men. But Ruskin, who saw through most things, was suspicious. “We used to have a fair in our neighbourhood—a very fine one we thought it,” he writes in Ethics of The Dust. “You never saw such an one; but if you look at the engraving of Turner’s ‘St. Catherine’s Hill’ you will see what it was like. There were curious booths, carried on poles; and peep-shows; and music, with plenty of drums and cymbals; and much barley sugar and ginger-bread and the like; and in the alleys of this fair the London populace would enjoy themselves, after their fashion, very thoroughly. Well, the little Pthah set to work on it one day; he made the wooden poles into iron ones, and put them across, like his own crooked legs, so that you always fall over them if you don’t look where you are going; and he turned all the canvas into panes of glass, and put it up on his iron cross-poles; and made all the little booths into one great booth;—and people said it was very fine, and a new style of architecture and Mr. Dickens said nothing was ever like it in Fairyland, which was very true.” And he then proceeds to pour scorn on the exhibits. The Crystal Palace was indeed a new style of architecture. It was the first prefab, brought in numbered pieces in carts from the factories and erected swiftly in a public park. There is something ironic in the way this impermanent architecture, so well suited to an exhibition of lifeless industrial products, should have been resurrected in this century to make buildings which of all should be most permanent—homes for families.
The impermanent, utilitarian style of the Crystal Palace was, despite Ruskin’s strictures, just the thing if industrial exhibitions were to continue. Yet later exhibitions, Alexandra Palace (1873), Olympia (1886), Earls Court (1912), The White City (1913), Wembley (1924), to cite London alone, seem to have been inspired by an over-confidence in material success. They are permanent buildings without that flimsy semi-rurality which must have been the charm of Pleasure Gardens like Vauxhall,
