| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Becky E. Conekin. "The Autobiography of a Nation": The 1951 Festival of Britain. (Studies in Design.) New York: Manchester University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 260. Cloth $74.95, paper $24.95.

Recently, British social and cultural historians have become increasingly exercised with exploring the constructed and evolving nature of national imaginings within Britain. Becky E. Conekin draws on this scholarship (which to date has concentrated predominantly on the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries) in her new book on post-World War II British society and a significant moment of national self-definition: the 1951 Festival of Britain. Planned by the resource-strapped Labour government as a reward for twelve years of war and reconstruction austerity, and as a declaration about recovery, the festival was presented as a nonpartisan narrative of the British national character, past and future. Conekin reads the events and exhibits of the festival as a text. Her aim is to understand the vision of the festival's architects, designers, and planners—all of whom, significantly, were trained in the 1930s—and how they intended to present the nation's story in 1951. And in this book we do indeed get a strong sense of what festival director Gerald Barry and his political boss, Herbert Morrison, were trying to impart; we also get Conekin's fine analysis of the festival exhibitions and what they "said" to their audiences.

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