2. The 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow

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. In this episode, he visits Glasgow, which hosted a vast Empire Exhibition in 1938, in part a celebration of British industry and engineering, as the threat of another world war loomed over Europe. The clean, bright modern pavilions and streamlined architecture were worlds away from the grimier realities of the Clydeside shipyards. It was also a year of campaigning on another front: the battle to save our countryside, so often closely linked with British identity. The book Britain and the Beast was a collection of polemical essays about the many threats to rural Britain, including - according to the novelist E M Forster - our own Ministry of Defence, who demanded land for military exercises. Neil examines what these activities said about what it meant to be British at the time - and their legacy today. Producer Paul Kobrak