British Empire Exhibition
The British Empire Exhibition was a colonial exhibition held in Wembley , London from 1924 to 1925 .
It was on April 23 by King George V opened. The British Empire at that time comprised 58 countries, of which only Gambia and Gibraltar did not participate. The largest exhibition ever staged in the world cost £ 12 million. 27 million visitors were recorded.
The declared aim of the exhibition was "to activate trade, strengthen ties between the mother country and the colonies as well as between colonies, and enable all subjects of the British flag to get to know each other on common ground". Maxwell Ayrton was the architect of the project. The three main buildings were the palaces of industry, technology and the arts. The Palace of Technology was the largest steel building in the world at the time. One of the exhibits was the locomotive No. 4472 Flying Scotsman , which is still famous today .
The buildings were connected to one another by a “non-stop” train tour.
Most of the exhibition halls were designed for a limited period of time and were later demolished; only the Palace of Technology and the British Government Pavilion survived until the 1970s. Wembley Arena was built in place of the Empire Pool and, at the suggestion of Exhibition Committee Chairman Baron James Stevenson , the stadium , which became the home of English football , was retained until it was demolished in 2002 and replaced by the new Wembley Stadium . Accordingly, the official name of the old stadium was "British Empire Exhibition Stadium" until it was demolished.
The British Post issued special postage stamps for the first time on the occasion of the exhibition .
literature
- Donald R. Knight, Alan D. Sabey: The Lion Roars at Wembley. Barnard & Westwood, London 1984.
- Alexander CT Geppert: Fleeting Cities. Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2010.
