Day-Tripping: Urban Excursions and the Architecture of International Exhibitions

Abstract

This article examines how the architecture of international exhibitions stimulated sensations of moving through space and time. It conducts a detailed study of the principal structures of the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, the first in a series of highly successful events mounted in the so-called “second city of the empire.” Through analysing pictorial representations and textual descriptions, it reconstructs the exhibition’s physical environment and atmosphere, which were perceived as “oriental” in character by contemporary commentators, in order to probe how the architecture of international exhibitions helped render these events sites of imperial meaning-making. Following an interdisciplinary approach informed by architectural and design history, postcolonial analyses of the relationship between nation and empire, and critical museology, it frames the international exhibition as a ritual site and argues that exhibition architecture played a key role in producing a liminal experience for visitors.

Keywords:

• International exhibitions
• architecture and imperialism
• metropolitan popular culture
• Scotland and empire
• virtual travel

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge Dr Sabine Wieber, Professor Michael Wayne and Dr Robyne Calvert who generously read iterations of this text and thus contributed to its evolution and development. I thank them for their incisive feedback and encouragement.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Notes

1 “The Prince Consort Can Claim the Credit,” Times [London], February 23, 1850, 4.

2 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 66.

3 Kylie Message and Ewan Johnston, “The World Within the City: The Great Exhibition, Race, Class and Social Reform,” in Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, ed. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 32.

4 Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 30.

5 See for example International Exhibition season tickets in the collections of Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (London, 1851), Museums Victoria (Melbourne, 1861/London, 1862), State Library of South Australia (Adelaide, 1887), National Museum of Ireland (Cork, 1902), and Owaka Museum Wahi Kahuika (Dunedin, 1925–26).

6 For an analysis of how the passport constructs and defines the nation-state see Radhika Viyas Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 196–214.

7 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995).

8 See for example Auerbach and Hoffenberg, eds., Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851; Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and John M. MacKenzie and John McAleer, eds., Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). A crucial exception is Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

9 For a discussion of the complex interplay between contents and container with respect to museum architecture see Michaela Giebelhausen, “The Architecture Is the Museum,” in New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, ed. Janet Marstine (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 41–63.

10 “Design by Joseph Paxton, F.L.S., for a Building for The Great Exhibition of 1851,” Illustrated London News, July 6, 1850.

11 While Perilla and Juliet Kinchin’s book, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions: 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, 1988 (Edinburgh: White Cockade, 1988) provides a comprehensive summary of the city’s four international exhibitions and the Garden Festival of 1988, it is largely descriptive and contains minimal critical analysis and evaluation. Bob Crampsey’s The Empire Exhibition of 1938: The Last Durbar (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company Ltd, 1988) focuses almost exclusively on the Empire Exhibition, Scotland of 1938 and is largely a personal reminiscence. Shorter pieces by John M. Mackenzie (1999) and Sarah Britton (2010) address International Exhibitions held in Glasgow, but they are only one element within the authors’ broader discussions.

12 James Hamilton Muir, Glasgow in 1901 (Glasgow: William Hodge & Company, 1901, reprinted Oxford: White Cockade Publishing, 2001), 11. All citations from 2001 edition.

13 “The Prince and Princess of Wales left London Yesterday Morning on their Journey to Scotland,” Glasgow Herald, May 8, 1888.

14 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 2.

15 Marta Filipová, ed., Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840–1940: Great Exhibitions on the Margins (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); John M. MacKenzie and T.M. Devine, eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 27.

16 Glasgow International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art 1888: Elliot’s Popular Guide to Glasgow and the Exhibition with Excursion Notes (Glasgow: A. & W. Elliot, 1888), 17.

17 International Exhibition Glasgow, 1888: Official Guide (Glasgow: T. & A. Constable, 1888), 29.

18 Robert Walker, Pen-and-Ink Notes at the Glasgow Exhibition: A Series of Illustrations by T. Raffles Davison, F.S.I.A. with an Account of the Exhibition by Robert Walker, Secretary to the Fine Art Section (London: J.S. Virtue & Co. Ltd., 1888), 3–5.

19 Elliot’s Popular Guide, 47.

20 The Glasgow Exhibition, 1888: Special Number of the Art Journal (London: J.S. Virtue and Co., 1888), 3.

21 International Exhibition Glasgow, 1888, 47.

22 For further information about this group of painters, see Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008); and Hugh Stevenson and Jean Walsh, Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums Publishing, 2010).

23 International Exhibition Glasgow, 1888, 47.

24 James Sellars, as quoted in International Exhibition Glasgow, 1888, 27.

25 International Exhibition Glasgow, 1888, 27.

26 Walker, Pen-and-Ink Notes, 8.

27 International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art: Pen & Pencil Exhibition Number (Glasgow: MacLure, MacDonald & Co., 1888), 2.

28 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 119.

29 Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996); and Zeynep Çelik, “Colonialism, Orientalism, and the Canon,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (1996): 202–05.

30 Solmaz Mohammadzadeh Kive, “The Exhibitionary Construction of the ‘Islamic Interior’,” in Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space, ed. John Potvin (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 39–57.

31 Penny Sparke, “Paradise in the Parlor: Cozy Corners and Potted Palms in Western Interiors, 1880–1900,” in Oriental Interiors, ed. Potvin, 209–13.

32 International Exhibition Glasgow, 1888, 49.

33 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and Son, 1856). For a critical analysis of Jones’ treatise see for example Stacey Sloboda, “‘The Grammar of Ornament’: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design,” Journal of Design History 21, no. 3 (2008): 223–36; and Toshio Watanabe, “Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament: ‘Orientalism’ Subverted?” Aachener Kunstblätter 60 (1994): 439–42.

34 The Glasgow Exhibition, 1888, 3.

35 Andrew Hall, “Architecture of the Glasgow Exhibition Buildings, Scottish Art Review 1, no. 3 (1888): 60.

36 Hall, “Architecture of the Glasgow Exhibition Buildings,” 61.

37 Hall, “Architecture of the Glasgow Exhibition Buildings,” 59.

38 James Sellars, as quoted in International Exhibition Glasgow, 1888, 27.

39 Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 32.

40 “The Prince and Princess of Wales left London Yesterday Morning,” Glasgow Herald, May 8, 1888.

41 Elliot’s Popular Guide, 81.

42 Walker, Pen-and-Ink Notes, 102–03.

43 A colonial merchant who traded in North America and the Caribbean, Patrick Colquhoun was founder and Chairman of Glasgow’s Chamber of Commerce, the oldest institution of its kind in Britain, and was Lord Provost from 1782–1784. For discussion of Glasgow’s “Tobacco Lords” and their involvement in the trans-Atlantic imperial economy see, for example, Stephen Mullen, “A Glasgow-West India Merchant House and the Imperial Dividend, 1779–1867,” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 33, no. 2 (2013): 196–233; and T. M. Devine, Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

44 Elliot’s Popular Guide, 83.

45 Henrietta Lidchi, “The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures,” in Representation, 2^nd ed., ed. Stuart Hall (London: The Open University, 2013), 120–91.

46 “The Retention of Kelvingrove House,” Glasgow Herald, December 10, 1898.

47 The Old Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry (Glasgow: James Maclehouse, 1870).

48 Walker, Pen-and-Ink Notes, 1.

49 Walker, Pen-and-Ink Notes, 118.

50 Walker, Pen-and-Ink Notes, 120.

51 For a comprehensive and trenchant analysis of metropolitan preoccupations with human exhibitions and how such spectacles bolstered notions of racial difference, see Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

52 Pieter van Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798–1851–1970) (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001), 17.

53 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 60.

54 Martin Quern, “A Ballade of Kelvin Fair,” Scottish Art Review 1, no. 7 (1888): 181.

55 Alexander Thomson, Art and Architecture: A Course in Four Lectures, 1874, as quoted in James Schmiechen, “Glasgow of the Imagination: Architecture, Townscape and Society,” in Glasgow, vol. 2, 1830–1912, ed. W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Maver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 496.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/K503046/1].

Notes on contributors

Rosemary Spooner

Rosemary Spooner is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow where she teaches on the Museum Studies MSc programme, and was previously a Lecturer in Design History and Theory at the Glasgow School of Art. Sitting at the intersection of art, design and architectural history, museum studies and postcolonial theory, her work examines the visual and material culture of empire. She is interested in how objects and images moved across different spheres of the British Empire, frequently finding their way into museums and other spaces of exhibition and display, as well as the postcolonial legacies of these itinerant processes.