EXHIBITIONS
Ideal Home Exhibition. (Olympia).
THE war seems to have changed little in the English home. There is no sign of any radical change in taste and no suggestion that we are ripe for a new domestic look. Almost all the furniture, carpets, lamps, fires and so on that are to be seen have been firmly
planted in millions of homes for the last twenty years, and apparently are popular enough to be everlasting. This is a pity, for many of them are ugly both in design and material. Some of the newer inventions, it must be admitted, are even worse ; for example, the tables, trolleys, trays and other furnishings constructed of colourdysed aluminium, look as though they were a by-product of nuclear fission from the deserts of New Mexico. But the ideal room (which for most people is still the average room) can be seen as easily in the window of one of the multiple furnishing shops round Oxford Street as in the hall of Olympia.
It may be that the seeds of a revolution in taste are to be found in the new houses, and that we shall be able to work down from than to their contents. Easily one of the most interesting things to be seen at Olympia is the two-storey Hawksley aluminium house, which is more than just a larger edition of the well-known aluminium prefab bungalow. In spite of a fiddling little porch this house manages to be compact and sturdy and at the same time to retain the grace and lightness of its material. The main sitting-room is large (15 ft. 7 in. by it ft. 6 in.) and the small dining-room is made pleasantly light with French windows. Upstairs, in addition to the bathroom, there are three. good-sized bedrooms. This house has not yet gone into production. Saving of one sort or another is the recurrent theme of the exhibition. Apart from being told how to save money and save fuel, we are shown thousands of ways of saving time, work, thought, effort or trouble. This is an exhibition of gadgets, most of them sensible and useful gadgets. The kitchen of the English home has progressed enormously during the past ten years, whatever may have happened to the sitting-room. There is less of a contrast at Olympia than might have been expected between what you can buy and what you only look at and wait for. Most of the kitchen and household equipment is available at once and in good quantities, though presumably the export drive is responsible for the almost total absence of china and pottery. For those who enjoy what may be called the sideshows of an exhibition such as this there is a replica of the top of Nelson's Column, with Nelson staring out through his two blind eyes over a sea of cotton-wool ; there is a display of film sets which looks like an aquarium and an aquarium which looks like a film set. In the stand of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries you can look through a magnifying glass at a pest pathetically known as the
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