Intro to Eric Brown full article
Intro to Barbara Jones full article
Eric Brown [move to Barbara Jones intro]
A steady current of robust if debased Baroque design in the form of fairground decoration has flowed undiverted through fifty years of Victorian and Edwardian architectural vicissitudes. Curiously enough, it remained unnoticed by the architectural observer. An extremely limited bibliography exists on the subject and we must depend upon descriptions, memory, and faded paper-negatived contemporary photographs for our information on the earlier fairground. The drawings and photographs which illustrate this article form part of the very small amount of serious recording of this extravagant form of public entertainment. It is strange, also, that the valuable lessons of quick demountability and the remarkable achievements in unit construction, worked out forty or fifty years ago by the showmen, have escaped notice in a period of architecture with its eye on the problems of prefabrication.
Barbara Jones [move to Eric Brown intro]
English roundabouts run deisul, clockwise. The practical result of this gesture to ancient ritual is that one mounts the horses correctly from the near, richly decorated side where the eye is glass instead of painted, and the gilded mane rolls more heavily. The offside is only lightly carved, much of the decoration is put on with paint, and this decline is progressive - the inside of the inmost horse is hardly even painted. But everywhere else the decoration is unbelievable in its thoroughness, and any available space on the wooden construction that might catch the eye is embellished with jungle, flower or film-star, while a banner swings in any aerial space not amply filled with animals, their glittering rods or the organ. On the banners may be more jungles, flowers, fruit, or the price of a ride. You have been informed by the rounding board before mounting that the horses are the fastest in the world but yet the safest, that the gallopers provide "Good Riding for all Classes" and perhaps have been "Patronised by Royalty". The horses may be "Arabian", "Galloping", "Prairie", "Mexican", "Mountain", "Blood", "Canadian", or merely "Race"; some of them on small children's rides retain the names of horses of romance, like "Beucephalus" or "Black Bess", but the no less romantic and surprising names of race-horses are most usual on the full-size roundabouts; "Golden Miller", "Bend Or", "Sun Chariot" or rather Freudianly "Jean's Dream".
©1945 Architectural Review
