One of the nice things about attending the Hypercomics preview in Battersea Park was coming across one of my favourite little-known spots in London bathed in golden hour sunlight, which might possibly be the best time to see it.
This spot is what remains of the Festival of Britain Pleasure Gardens, built in 1951, when Battersea Park was filled with a huge fairground, complete with a rollercoaster and a miniature railway based on designs by Rowland Emmett, the Far Tottering & Oystercreek Railway.
Despite the fact that the Festival Gardens featured designs from such luminaries as Emmett and Lewitt-Him and Abram Games, and despite the fact that many of the structures have remained in place for almost 60 years, it was surprisingly difficult to find any information about who designed the garden structures themselves. However, thanks to some judicious detective work, I have finally tracked a name down. He was James Gardner, arguably "Britain's most important post-war exhibition and museum designer" (so say these people), so his absence from sites like Wikipedia or even the Design Museum site seems all the more surprising, especially as the Design Museum does have a page about Ernest Race, the furniture designer who probably designed the lovely Battersea pleasure garden benches (hat tip to George Rex for that bit of detective work).
Although it has been quite hard to find out very much about him, I did eventually track down some information on James Gardner. Thanks to this obituary from 1995, it was possible to learn some more about this remarkable man, who worked as an apprentice to Cartier in the 1920s, and Chief Deception Officer (how cool is that job title?) of the Army Camouflage unit during the second world war, before going on to design the superstructure of the QE2, and the public decorations for Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1953. No small achievements, by any standards, so how come it's so hard to find much information about him? (If you do a search for "James Gardner industrial designer" quite a lot of pages come up, but it took a lot of searching just to find out his name in the first place.)
Gardner also designed the exhibition for Britain Can Make It in 1946, and the catalogue cover has been making the Tumblr rounds in the last couple of weeks, which seems like synchronicitous timing.
But apart from all of that, he designed one of my favourite spots in London, and since that is where I discovered him, I'll let you discover him there too.
on Sep 1st, 2010 at 5:37 pm
http://archiveshub.ac.uk/features/05080301.html
The James Gardner Archive is housed at The University of Brighton Design Archives
on Sep 1st, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Given that in my current job I work with a certain amount of statistics and information provision I think I shall refer to myself as Chief Deception Officer.
New design is looking dandy by the way.
DW x
on Sep 2nd, 2010 at 12:10 am
@Nina: I know, I included that link in my post! It just took a surprisingly long time to find information on the architect through expected channels like wikipedia etc. I'm especially surprised at his absence on wikipedia because several pages refer to projects he worked on, and refer to other people who worked on those projects, but he's notable for his absence.
@Daniel: thanks! I even managed to get it done exactly two years from my first post at this domain. That was just sort of lucky, but nice.
on May 1st, 2011 at 11:23 pm
What a great post with some really gorgeous pictures – thank you for all your hard work to discover more information about that fabulous Festival!