A Tonic to the Nation: Immigrant Contribution to the Festival of Britain
Scheduled to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, this one-day symposium will explore an important but still widely overlooked aspect of the Festival and its legacy: namely, the disproportionately large creative input of those from (mostly) Jewish immigrant families and of former refugees from Nazism – many of them imprisoned behind barbed wire as so-called ‘enemy aliens’ only eleven years earlier.
In so doing, it will invite a closer critical scrutiny both of the nature and extent of that input and of the complex issues of postwar cultural renewal, national memory and identity, patriotism and assimilation, both then and in the present – and by extension highlight the creative contributions of more recent immigrants and their descendants to this contemporary British life.
Comprising a lively mixture of illustrated talks, discussions, a concert and the Royal College of Music exhibition ‘Music, Migration and Mobility’ about émigré musicians from Nazi Europe in Britain, the symposium programme is aimed at both a general and a specialist audience.
The project is initiated and organised by Monica Bohm-Duchen, founding director of Insiders/Outsiders, an ongoing celebration of the contribution made by refugees from Nazi Europe to British culture, in partnership with St John’s Waterloo. Restored after being bombed during WWII, it became the official church for the Festival of Britain and home to two major paintings by German-Jewish émigré artist Hans Feibusch. The symposium and concert form part of “Now I make a leaf of voices“, a series of events celebrating St John’s Festival of Britain heritage, which runs between July and December 2026.
