The empire’s last hurrah?

In the summer of 1924, Scientific American’s ‘Special Correspondent in Great Britain’ warned his readers that, “the size and scope of the British Empire Exhibition, like the British empire itself, is almost too big to be grasped”. Within a vast area of 216 acres – 10 times the size of the famous Great Exhibition of 1851 – the “industries, manner of life and art of the 460 million people of the British empire [were] represented”. The reporter was not only awestruck by the organisers’ ambitions of attracting 46 million visitors during its initial six-month run, but the sheer scale of the exhibits themselves. Constructed in Wembley Park, north-west of London, the sprawling site included “by far the largest sports arena in the world”, “two palaces of industry and engineering”, as well as the latest “developments in telegraphy, telephony and wireless communication”.

But that wasn’t all: there were working models of timber mills, oil wells and mines of all descriptions, as well as sheep stations, ostrich farms, rice paddies and cotton fields. In the exhibition’s Canadian Pavilion, visitors could view a mocked-up Niagara Falls and a life-sized refrigerated butter statue of the Prince of Wales, while the Indian Pavilion boasted snake charmers, acrobats, jugglers and veiled dancers. To the south of the site, in the Empire Stadium, visitors could watch military tattoos, historical pageants and Wild West rodeos, before enjoying the delights of the exhibition’s 47-acre fairground. In another corner, there was even a replica of Tutankhamun’s recently opened tomb.

Other commentators feared that visitors might experience sensory overload once they had paid their one shilling and sixpence entrance fee and clicked through the turnstiles. Indeed, Eric Pasold – a recent immigrant from central Europe – remembered being “overwhelmed” as he made his way around the exhibition and jostled with “Nigerians in their colourful robes, cowboys from Calgary, dusky east African