The Fair-Line and the Good Frontage

Surface and Effect

Stephen Walker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9789811079733
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811079740
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers an extended consideration of the fairground showfront. It combines archival material, contemporary examples of fairs, and a sustained theoretical engagement with influential philosophies of surface, including recent work by Avrum Stroll and Andrew Benjamin, as well as the nineteenth century author Gottfried Semper. Semper's work on the origin of architectural enclosure —formed from woven mats and carpets— anticipates the surface and material history of the showfront. Initial chapters introduce these philosophies, the evolution of showfronts, and the ways in which individual fairground rides and attractions are arranged to form an enclosing boundary for the whole fair. Later chapters focus on issues of spectacle and illusion, vast 'interior' spaces, atmosphere, crowds and surface effects. Informed by a wide range of work from other design and cultural studies, the book will be of interest to readers in these areas, as well as architecture and those curious about the fairground. 

© The Author(s) 2018

Stephen WalkerThe Fair-Line and the Good Frontagehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7974-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Intro: Bostock and the Good Frontage

Stephen Walker¹

(1)

University of Manchester, Sheffield, UK

Abstract

This chapter introduces the main protagonists: the showman Edward Henry Bostock (1858–1940) and two philosophers of surface, Avrum Stroll (1921–2013) and Andrew Benjamin (1952–). It also introduces the importance that Bostock attached to the ‘good frontage,’ the central philosophical ideas concerning surface effects and their space-making qualities, and the relationship that these have with historical and contemporary architectural and cultural theory.

Keywords

FrontageFairground architectureSurface effectSemper

End Abstract

Reflecting on his life as a showman, Edward Henry Bostock (1858–1940) recounts how ‘I decided that the first essential to success was a good frontage, and resolved to do the best with the show afterwards. And I found this policy paid’ (Bostock 1927, 94). Bostock was an internationally well-known and hugely successful showman, part of the Bostock and Wombwell dynasty who were initially famous for their Victorian menageries , later diversifying into circuses and theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. His confession that what’s behind the frontage was something of an afterthought that matters less than the facade guides the investigation in this book, which is less concerned with what goes on in the show, and focuses instead on issues relating to the ‘good frontage’ (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Mr Bostock of Bostock and Wombwell ’s Menagerie circa 1913 (David Braithwaite Collection from the William Keating Collection. Reproduced with permission from the University of Sheffield Library, National Fairground and Circus Archive)

The notion of presenting a good front is relevant for any business in its attempts to appeal to prospective customers or clients. Indeed, Bostock ’s mantra is taken from an autobiographical account of the break he made, in September 1881, with his ‘mother and the dear old show, in order to start out with a small menagerie of my own,’ which he justifies because he perceived his ‘parents’ menagerie had suffered, from lack of an attractive front’ (Bostock 1927, 94),¹ and had thus failed to attract customers. In an increasingly networked world, the ingredients that contribute to this impression have become more varied in kind. For the showman, however, the issue of having a good frontage was, and remains, a physically localized concern (although the symbolic referents that decorate these frontages now circulate in a market with global visual reach). Amplifying certain aspects of Bostock’s remarks, the notion of a front can also carry connotations of untruthfulness, either because the claims made on the front are not delivered by the business concerned, or because the frontage is set up as a distraction behind which something else (usually illegal) is being carried out: the business is a front for something, or in other boundary terminology, it is a ‘fence.’

Although the ‘good frontage’ was—and remains—of major importance to individual showmen, this book will pay as much attention to the collective frontage of the fairground, particularly where this operates to define and enclose the fair, to separate if off from its surroundings (Fig. 1.2). In the UK, fairs set up for just a few days in the centre of villages, towns and cities, in streets and on market places, in car parks and wide boulevards. Fairs also set up on green field sites on the edge of town. In all these situations, the separation between the fair and the world outside is organized along what is known as the ‘fair-line,’ which will be introduced fully in Chap. 2.

Fig. 1.2

Bostock and Wombwell ’s Menagerie, Hull Fair, circa 1906 (David Braithwaite Collection from the William Keating Collection. Reproduced with permission from the University of Sheffield Library, National Fairground and Circus Archive)

In this book, I mobilize some recent (and some not so recent) architectural considerations of surface to address the operation of the fair-line as both an organizer and generator of space. I will sidestep the more extensive arguments about whether the fair should be considered to be architecture.² Commonly, architectural projects are likened to fairgrounds when they are being criticized. For example, Angelica Trachana is down on ‘architects like [Frank] Gehry and [Enric] Miralles’ for producing ‘frivolous, fairground stuff’³; English Heritage Chairman Sir Jocelyn Stevens damned Will Alsop’s proposal for Bloomsbury Square in London for ‘turn[ing] it into a kind of matchstick fairground’⁴; and Sebastian Redecke reports on plans to revisit an unbuilt 1930 project by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with the title ‘Wir wollen keine Kirmes veranstalten’ [‘We don’t want to organise some kind of fairground’] (Redecke 2013). The broader attitudes behind these criticisms will come into play at various points in the main text, revealing perhaps that the fairground, along with other temporary ‘architectures’ and highly decorated facades, indicates a certain return of the repressed into the delicate constitution of architecture. This simplified binary will be challenged in passing.

More important here, though, is my contention that the articulation of surface effects and their space-making or space-effecting qualities can be pursued by considering the fair-line, and the ‘good frontages’ that it organizes, through the lens of architectural theory. Moreover, I suggest that this particular example of space-making practice can engage and extend architectural theory. On closer inspection, the historical repertoire of the fair’s surface, Bostock ’s ‘good frontage,’ offers a range of surprising parallels with the changing conceptions of architecture’s surface. In Chap. 4, the material , constructional, representational and decorative evolution of the ‘good frontage’ will be introduced, and these parallels will be indicated in more detail. There, it can also be seen that both surfaces have complex relationships to the origin myths of their respective professions.

The contributions of architectural theory will be read in conjunction with the work of two philosophers of surface, Avrum Stroll and Andrew Benjamin . The rationale for this potentially antagonistic combination will be set out in Chap. 3. Benjamin’s ‘theoretical history’ and Stroll’s ‘direct realism’ approach the questions of surface with very different, possibly opposing, concerns and agendas. My intention here is not to try and reconcile them but to bring them into contact with the example of the fair-line, with Bostock ’s ‘good frontage,’ in ways that challenge and extend our understanding of its operation. Stroll pays attention to ‘the commonsense notion of a surface,’ to ‘folk physics or folk semantics’ (Stroll 1988, 11)⁵: he is particularly concerned with how ‘we’ perceive and define a surface, and his writings raise questions that architects and architectural historians should not shy away from. Nevertheless, with the case of the fairground, and the ‘good frontage’ in particular, some aspects of Stroll’s questioning concerning the relationship between surface and depth must be suspended.

In direct contrast to Stroll ’s advocacy of ‘a non-theoretical descriptivist’ approach, Andrew Benjamin ’s contact with surface is to explicitly (re)engage moments from architectural history. Influenced by his namesake Walter Benjamin , he puts fragments of the past to work as a constellation, assembled and interrogated in response to new relationships that emerge from contemporary concerns. In his essay ‘Surface Effects,’ Andrew Benjamin explains how this involves ‘theoretical history.’ ‘What occasions the introduction of theory is the presence of a space opened by a relationship whose formal presence cannot be determined in advance’ (Benjamin 2006, 2). In the spirit of Benjamin’s theoretical history then, this book introduces architectural theory into the space—or the descriptive gap—opened up when faced with the ‘good frontage.’

On a more prosaic historical note, the book will operate within a period that begins, approximately, in the middle of the nineteenth century and continues through to the present day. Again, the rationale and justification for this is set out in Chap. 4, and is closely linked to changing material practices on the fairground. Although fairs have a much longer history, operating for many hundreds if not thousands of years, their purpose, constituency, organization and control have changed significantly over this longer history. (Moreover, there is very little extant material with which to work in any detail earlier than the mid-to-late nineteenth century.) For reasons that will become apparent, this story follows certain material and technological developments that, while specific to the fairground, have strong parallels to broader technological, socio-cultural, architectural and urban changes that were felt across all societies within the Western world. The fairground was, and remains, an environment within which novel experiences have been offered by showmen and taken up by a curious public. Although the variety of these are beyond the scope of this book, one aspect of my main concern with surface effect will acknowledge the changing modes and organization of perception that occurred during this same period. Jonathan Crary ’s work engages these issues through a far broader range of instances and examples, although his interest coincides comfortably enough with the mid-nineteenth-century emergence, the development and culmination (at least in terms of material, labour and size) of the good frontage in the early part of the twentieth century. Crary’s analysis of human perception, individual and collective looking, prompts questions concerning the operation of the good frontage that are taken up in different directions in Chaps. 5 and 6. The role of the surface is discussed there in terms of its involvement in the establishment ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Intro: Bostock and the Good Frontage
• 2. The Fair-Line
• 3. Surface Effect
• 4. From Canvas to Carving, Ornament and Supplement
• 5. Truth to Trompe, Theatre, Spectacle and Illusion
• 6. Spectatorship: The Panorama of the Whole
• 7. Surface and Effect: Architecture and the Patterning of Experience
• Back Matter