Southside Happenings: Empire Exhibition 1938

Glasgow has a bit of a history of putting on big shows, from the International Exhibition of 1888 through to the Glasgow Garden Festival a hundred years later. The biggest of all these exhibitions however, falls right in the middle of the two.

The 1938 Empire Exhibition was one of the biggest events ever seen in the UK and was imagined as a means of kick starting the Scottish Economy and Industry, which had been in declining into a depression since the end of the First World War (which at the time was still just being called “The World War”.).

The aim of the Festival was to show off the skills and ingenuity of Scotland and the British Empire to the rest of the world and bring in new orders. A team of nine of the top architects of that generation were employed under the master planning supervision of Thomas S. Tait to create a strikingly modernist vision of a future city in Bellahouston Park.

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of this event a project was put together last year to create a digital archive telling the story of the exhibition and allowing you to get a taste of what it must have been like to walk its grand streets. The project has been brilliantly put together by the Digital Design Studio under the supervision of a team of experts and the website is a treasure trove of facts, figures, videos, images and drawings. For example did you know that this was the last big show of the British Empire, that it took ten months to build, was only open for six months but still managed to attract 13m people which was about five times the total population of Scotland.

The main part of the Empire Exhibition project is a intricate 3D digital model of the park and all the principal buildings, which you can navigate with an interactive map. The map can be reviewed on the website but it can also be found at the House for an Art Lover where there is an Interpretation Centre with a continuous loop, a research archive and a small exhibition of memorabilia.

The only thing missing from the project site is a proper explanation of the reasoning to build this amazing park of sculptural buildings but then only to give them a shelf life of six months? It’s similar to when the Garden Festival was constructed, it too proved hugely popular but was closed and dismantled a short while later. If they were both still around what would that section of South West be like today?

In the end however, nearly all the buildings were taken down and removed, some found new life in new locations, like the Palace of Engineering which is now at Prestwick Airport, but most were just dismantled for good. The only real survivor is the Palace of Art which is still in the Park but now serves as a centre for sporting excellence. There’s a nice section on the project website where you can compare images from 1938 to how the same scenes looks today.

The images on the site are a glimpse into a fascinating time capsule, not just of the fashions and styles of the time but also of their ideas of what the future might hold. There is a great deal of optimism and a grand sense of hope for this future expressed in both the park’s layout and the individual building designs. It makes you wonder what Scotland might have become if this enthusiasm had been able to grow uncut by the Second World War which began just nine months after the Glasgow Exhibition Closed.

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