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Abstract
Joan Littlewood’s Stratford Fair, a late manifestation of her Fun Palace idea, aimed – through community-led and temporary playgrounds – to reclaim public land compromised by local government slum clearance in East London. Scholarship to date has discussed the Fair as a trigger for the political imagination of local youth, but not the central role that media played in the constitution of its public agenda. This article explores the archive as an active site of representation of the Fair. Recorded and circulated through monthly diaries, the Fair’s events generated affects that fostered attachment and identity, while its distributed media archive maintains a latent regenerative potential and invites plural historiography.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor Mark Dorrian for important comments and suggestions made during the development of this article.
Notes
1 “Report – Week of 6th March, 1968,” folder DR 1995:0188:525:003, Cedric Price Archive, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).
2 Joan Littlewood, Joan’s Book: Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History as She Tells It (London: Methuen, 1994), 64.
3 Murray Melvin, interview with the author, November 9, 2014.
4 “Land Use – Stratford E15,” letter from Cedric Price to Joan Littlewood, dated February 1, 1974, folder DR 1995:0188:525:003, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
5 “Report and Accompanying Drawings […] [for] the Use of an Area of Public Open Space as Pilot Project – in the Content and Operation – for some of the Aspects of the ‘Fun palace’,” folder DR 1995:0188:525:005, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
6 Roy Kozlovsky, Architectures of Childhood. Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England (New York: Routledge, 2016), 48.
7 On local activism provoked by the Greater London Development Plan, see Michael Hebbert, London: More by Fortune than Design (Chichester: Wiley, 1998), 85.
8 Letter from Joan Littlewood to Lord Harewood, October 10, 1966, folder DR 1995:0188:525:003, Cedric Price Archive, CCA. For the planning appeal, see “The Fun Palace Planning Appeal,” folder DR 1995:0188:525:003, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
9 “Stratford Fair. Agenda,” DR 1995:0188:525:003:012, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
10 “Minutes of Meeting Held at Blackheath, Saturday Jan 27, 1968,” folder DR 1995:0188:525:003, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
11 Joan Littlewood, Bubble City (London: The Fun Palace Trust, 1968), 17.
12 See Nadine Holdsworth, "Spaces to Play/Playing with Spaces: Young People, Citizenship and Joan Littlewood," Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12, no. 3 (2007): 235, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569780701560164.
13 Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press), 14.
14 Ibid., 11.
15 Ibid., 14.
16 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1984 [1980]), xii (original emphasis).
17 Planning Application, dated June 7, 1972, folder DR 1995:0188:525:004, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
18 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 82.
19 Ibid., 83
20 Ibid., 87.
21 “Easter Monday March 31st. Stratford Fair,” folder DR 1995:0188:525:004, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
22 “The Fun Palace Trust – The Fun Palace Minutes,” Theatre Royal Stratford East (TRSE) archive, London. A copy of this document exists also in folder DR 1995:0188:525:004, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
23 “Jan Sender Diary 1975,” p. 4, TRSE archive, London.
24 “Report on Kids Village Easter Fair – Two Week Easter Holiday,” in folder “The Fun Palace Trust,” TRSE Archive, London.
25 Ibid.
26 “Diary Report – Kids Town – December 1974,” TRSE Archive, London.
27 “Report on Kids Village Easter Fair” in “The Fun Palace Trust,” TRSE Archive, London.
28 Ibid.
29 “Minutes of Meeting Held at Blackheath, Saturday Jan 27, 1968,” folder DR 1995:0188:525:003, Cedric Price Archive, CCA.
30 The agencies listed include: Representatives of the “Education Offices” in Stratford, as part of the group “Local Authority;” “Councillors and Influential People;” “Trust and Grant-Awarding Bodies” such as the Arts Council of Great Britain and Greater London Arts Association; and “Trusts,” such as City Parochian Foundation, National Playing Fields Association and Gulbenkian Foundation.
31 File 15: Open Space Utilisation Programme E15 (OSUP). DR 1995:0257, Cedric Price Archive, CCA. The acronym OSUP stands for ‘Open Space Utilisation Programme’ in the project’s title, while the caption in Figure 1 of this paper notes ‘Open Space Urban Program’ following the archive’s reference. Available online: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/collection/object/397076 (accessed October 9, 2018).
32 For instances of distribution, see “January Diary,” which is available in the TRSE archive, the Michael Barker Collection at the University of Texas and the Cedric Price Archive, CCA; “Uses of Land Awaiting Redevelopment 1967–1975” is both at the Cedric Price Archive and the Arts Council of England Archive. See Holdsworth, “Spaces to Play/Playing with Spaces,” 304. For processes of archiving, the classifications of the Fair’s documents could obscure relevant connections with the larger Fun Palace project.
33 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 130.
34 Ibid., 329.
35 Significantly, the Stratford Fair is omitted altogether from the “Cedric Price Supplement,” a collection-with-commentary of work from Price’s office published in the magazine Architectural Design between October 1970 and January 1972, despite the resonance this supplement has with the throw-away quality and user-driven ethos with which the Fair actively constructs its media archive. See “Cedric Price Supplements, Architectural Design, 1970-71,” in Samantha Hardingham, Cedric Price Works 1952-2003: A Forward-Minded Retrospective, Volume 2: Articles & Talks (London: Architectural Association Publications and Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016), 144-207.
36 Stratford Fair is not part of Colin Ward's rather gender-biased study of playground experiences that aim to re-connect the child to the city; see Colin Ward, The Child in the City (London: Bedford Square Press, 1990 [1978]), 194–5. Ambivalent captions accompany key drawings of Stratford Fair in Samantha Hardingham's comprehensive retrospective of Price's work: left, "Sketch summarizing the horizontal and vertical schematic layout for Fun Palace, 1974"; right, "Cartoon on the subject of adaptability and multiple uses of one building." Samantha Hardingham, Cedric Price Works 1952–2003: A Forward-Minded Retrospective, Volume 1: Projects (London: Architectural Association Publications and Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016), 52–4.
37 I refer particularly here to Holdsworth’s scholarship on Joan Littlewood, as well as to the non-scholary initiative of funpalaces.co.uk, initiated in 2014 across the UK.
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Ana Bonet Miro
Ana Bonet Miro is a lecturer in architectural design and architectural technology and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has been a registered architect in Spain since 2000. Her research interests lie at the intersection of architecture with the cultural studies of play, technology and education; she is currently investigating Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace program during the 1960s and 1970s.