1. National Remembrance and the 1924 Empire Exhibition

Available for over a year

75 years after the Festival of Britain offered a tonic to a Blitz-hit nation, Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, returns to Radio 4 with a three-part series, examining how celebrations of British identity and togetherness over the past century or so can help us better understand and define who we are now. "The question of who we are, of national identity, of the Union Jack itself, is now the subject of angry political debate," Neil says. "In these three programmes I want to take a step back – to look at six moments over the last hundred years when, as a country, we came together to assert a national purpose, to celebrate and to explore who we thought we were, and to consider our place in the world." "Asking 'who did we think we were then?' might help us answer the question - 'who do we think we are now?'. And to understand why – as a country – we have, for over a century, found that question so difficult to answer." In this first programme, Neil looks at the aftermath of World War One. After conflict in which nearly a million servicemen of the British Empire were killed, how should a nation honour that huge human sacrifice? The immediate answer was to create a National Hall of Remembrance, lined with newly-commissioned memorial art - art that shocked its first viewers. And 1924 saw the opening of a vast Empire Exhibition in Wembley, re-asserting Britain's place in an unstable post-war world. Across two years, the Exhibition attracted 27 million visits - an astonishing number at the time. So what did it say about us? What drew people in such numbers? And what might we conclude from it today? Producer Katy Hickman