World Art Deco Day

A celebration of Art Deco in Britain for World Art Deco Day. Elain Harwood will talk about cinemas, seaside buildings, factories and other buildings in this most fantastic of styles, based on her book Art Deco Britain, published by Batsford in 2019.

What Elain finds most fascinating about Art Deco is that so many of the finest buildings were for ordinary people, bringing style to cinemas, swimming pools and public buildings. So while Claridges and the Savoy will be in there, so too will the Carlton, Essex Road and Granada, Tooting cinemas, swimming pools in Northampton, lidos in Penzance and Plymouth, and many buildings well-known to Society members. The talk will look at the origins of the eclectic Art Deco style of the 1920s, and also include examples of the calmer, more sophisticated moderne style that superseded it in the 1930s.

Elain Harwood is an historian at Historic England. Her publications include Art Deco Britain published by Pavilion Books (2019) in association with the Twentieth Century Society. She has also authored many articles for Twentieth-Century Architecture, the journal of the Twentieth Century Society.