The Origin of the British People: Archaeology and the Festival of Britain

Extract

A hundred years ago, when Paxton's Crystal Palace went up among the elms of Hyde Park, it would never have entered the mind even of the Prince Consort that it should contain a section devoted to British Antiquity. The Great Exhibition was a glorification of the Present, of Progress, and its most conspicuous salute to the past took the form of a proliferation of Gothic ornament, and Pugin's gorgeous Medieval Court. The 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition on the South Bank will include a pavilion illustrating the Origin of the British People with material drawn almost entirely from the discoveries of British archaeology made since 1851. I do not think that this can be regarded as a tribute to the progress of our subject in any simple sense, rather it is a result of the development of the historical consciousness so characteristic of our time, and of which this progress itself forms a part. However, without further metaphysic, it remains a fact that one of the two official lines of entry into the South Bank Exhibition will be through a pavilion where many hundreds of thousands of people will find it difficult not to give at least a passing glance at a display of British prehistory.