Fair's (World's) Fair

I moved to Port Talbot in 1986.  In a space of a few weeks I became a dad, sat my finals, got married, moved to Port Talbot and started my PGCE training to be a teacher. The last three all happened in the space of 5 days. Sadly, I was a few years too late to see the Miami Beach funfair on Aberavon Beach.

I’ve seen many photographs of it, even drawn it and my wife Mary remembers it vividly. Now one of the notable features of the funfair was a large structure made of a lattice of metal poles, and spaced on regular intervals across it were a lot of unevenly sized coloured balls, on which was placed the sign Miami Beach. Now, I haven’t been able to prove conclusively that this was the Atomic Structure from the Festival of Britain, but my goodness it was a dead ringer for it.

Okay, so let’s recap. In my last post I mentioned that the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games were staged as part of the 1904 World’s Fair. Well, that got me thinking about world fairs, or expos, in general. Now you know that the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park will be one of my very first destinations when I build my time machine, and this is generally regarded as the first World’s Fair/Expo.

Yet as with many things, it’s not necessarily quite as simple and clear cut as that. For the 1851 Great Exhibition was drawing on a tradition of shows of industry and technology going back into the 18^th century, although maybe none of them were on the same scale as the Great Exhibition. OK, all well and good. What I didn’t know was that on the official list kept by the world sanctioning body, the Bureau International des expositions, London also held the third world’s fair in 1862. The second? Paris.

That’s important, because the 1862 Exhibition was designed partly to outshine the 1855 Paris exhibition. It was originally planned for 1861, but hey, delays in construction are by no means just a 21^st and 20^th century phenomenon. The Exhibition took place in South Kensington on the site now occupied by the South Kensington museums. Was it a huge success? Well, not financially. It made its costs back and a small profit of £790 or so I read. The government of the time had no wish to take over the exhibition hall when the exhibition closed and so it was dismantled and the materials were sold and later used in the construction of Alexandra Palace. There you go. Compare that with the profit made by the 1851 Exhibition, which made a profit of about £186,000, the equivalent of over £20 million in today’s money. The good old Festival of Britain made a loss of about £7.5 million, despite having over 10 million visitors, but then it was never really expected to make a profit.

Do you remember the Millennium Experience? No, me neither. That’s a little unfair. The reason I don’t remember it is because I never went to it. Well, when you factor in that I have five kids who were all aged between 14 and 6 in 2000, not to mention the cost of getting to London and back, I really couldn’t afford it on just one teacher’s salary. Well, couldn’t or wouldn’t, anyway. But I idly googled to find out just how much money it lost, and it’s been really difficult to arrive at a concrete figure. Several hundred million pounds seems a conservative estimate. Okay, maybe this too was never designed to make a profit. But it was certainly designed to attract up to 12 million visitors. Which maybe wasn’t that unrealistic when you consider that the Festival of Britain attracted in total 10.25 million visitors to all attractions and events across the country, and 8 million visitors to the main exhibition on the South Bank in London in just the 4 months it was open. But give a dog a bad name, I suppose.

My brother did actually go to the Millennium Experience and he seemed to enjoy it, as I recall. Come to that, my Mum was 11 years old and was taken to the South Bank for the Festival of Britain, and 3 years earlier, despite her having no interest in sport whatsoever, she was taken by my Grandpa to Wembley to see the Olympic 100m final. The closest I have ever got to attending an Olympic event was when the 2008 torch relay ran past my house. Which actually was quite an event. The only thing I remember that parallelled it was in 2002. The late Queen Elizabeth II was making her Golden Jubilee tour of the constituent parts of her United Kingdom. On the day she visited Port Talbot, when I left for work in the school in the morning, there was nothing to show that Her Majesty would be driven down it later on. By the time I returned home in the afternoon council workers had flung bunting across the street and placed union jacks in strategic front gardens.  (I refuse to answer whether the one placed in mine is still in my garage on the grounds that I might incriminate myself).

Her Majesty and the late Duke of Edinburgh arrived at Port Talbot Parkway station on the Royal Train and got into the limousine that would carry them the couple of miles to Margam Park, which meant driving right past my house. It was a very regal occasion, only marred by the fact that a local character, who had a reputation as what my grandmother might have called a ‘lady of the evening’ leapt out in front of the royal limousine and flashed them. That’s Port Talbot for you, folks.