The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
London’s Great White City
Imre Kiralfy wowed 1890s Britain by recreating the world, from Venice to India, in theme-park miniature. So why did his fantasy stucco city vanish?
In his 1966 Venice for Pleasure, JG Links wrote that he had only ever known one person to be disappointed by Venice, and that was his aunt. The problem was that, in December 1891, she had been to “Venice at Olympia” at the west London exhibition hall: “Here was Venice as it should have been – ‘beautifully illuminated and perfectly warmed’,” wrote Links, quoting The Times.
“There were thousands of lights and dazzling splendour, battalions of graceful and refined danseurs, and lovely Italian music written especially. On the canal in front of the stage you could float down the silent waters in a Venetian gondola steered by a Venetian gondolier, accompanied by the music of mandolins and songs of serenaders with their never-ending Funiculì, Funiculà. And The Times fails to point out – although my aunt remembered – the gondolas were WHITE.
“In February, she went to Venice for her honeymoon. There were no lights, no warmth, no ‘dancers attired in gorgeous costumes’, as there had been in London. The canals smelt and, worst of all, the gondolas were black. She returned to Olympia but never to Venice.”
What was this warm mirage that left Venice a disappointment? Little trace remains. Yet the man who created it – the impresario Imre Kiralfy
– was famous in his day. This Kubla Khan of Kensington planted popup jungles and moved miniature mountains in his quest to bring the world to London’s unfashionable suburbs. He distilled the spirit of the 19th century in all its wildest dreams and punctured hubris: a Hungarian-Jewish child dancer from Pest, an engineer, composer, businessman and architect, his rise was so fairytale that, by the end of his life, he was receiving royalty in his shimmering stucco fantasy of White City – the Disneyland of its day – but his posthumous obliteration has been all but total.
Kiralfy made his stage debut at the tender age of four, high-kicking folk dances in calf-length boots and military jacket across Europe. In 1869, aged 24, he emigrated to New York, where, with his brother Bolossy, he wowed crowds with ephemeral, casts-of-thousands spectaculars, such as Around the World in Eighty Days, catering to an appetite for “bombastic pseudoeducative historicism”, as Brendan Gregory put it in his 1988 study. Kiralfy styled himself “Master of the Revels for the sovereign people of the United States”: “It has been the dream of my life to produce a combination of all the mimetic arts on a scale at once so stupendous and so perfect as to be worthy…”
In 1887, the brothers fell out and Imre went it alone with The Fall of Babylon – “pantomimic representation in colossal proportions”, as one spectator wrote – with 600 dancing girls, and Babylon painted on a massive drop curtain, 428ft long, in a vast outdoor arena on Staten Island. “No theatre would serve to exploit the vast pictures which I began to conceive in my mind,” said Kiralfy. The show ended with “the leaping of flames from the massive walls and high towers... screams, groans, cries and dropping together of walls, towers and bridges in tragic confusion,” as one critic put it.
As a child, Kiralfy had spent “hours and days studying the action of railway locomotives”. For The Fall of Babylon, he invented a novel method of imposing unison on thousands of dancers and singers:
“All along under the 400 feet of planks which form the stage there are placed tiny bells, and behind one of the walls stands Kiralfy,” a newspaper reported. “He touches the button, like a telegraph operator, with the key one-one-two twoone-one-three-one, and the tiny little feet fly into the air...”
What were Kiralfy’s entrancing monstrosities – art or spectacle? One newspaper called Babylon “a showy and gigantic pastime” appealing to “the mere lust of the eye”. A more sympathetic critic called it “a superlative aggregation of gorgeousness”: “It is as if heretofore you had been looking through the little end of the opera-glasses, which being now swung around to their normal position in your hands, you are struck dumb...”
Kiralfy’s next show, The Fall of Nero, in 1889 had 2,000 performers. Neither play, drama, pageant nor opera, it was, said Kiralfy, quite simply a “re-presentation” of ancient Rome. There was a sea battle in the flooded arena, chariot races, gladiatorial bouts and a “Magnificent Hippodramatic Wild Beast and Equestrian Procession”, with everything from sacred cattle to llamas, “loose and in leash”.
Barnum and Bailey paid Kiralfy to bring Nero to London Olympia – the largest single-span building in Britain – where he proved his spectaculars could work indoors. But he longed to lose the circus stigma. He needed to stage something salubri
g ‘An imposing city of palaces, domes and towers’: Kiralfy’s 140-acre Great White City opened in 1908 ous, more like an Expo. “The idea of ‘Venice’ flashed across my mind... I took a scrap of paper – an envelope – from my pocket and then and there schemed out the idea.”
Kiralfy had visited Venice as an “entranced” 14-year-old, lying awake listening to Verdi composing, across a narrow canal. Thirty years later, with the backing of Lyons Corner House, Kiralfy set out to recreate Venice in London, to reel in the middle-class adventurers of the Thomas Cook era. Under a blue ceiling, he built a labyrinth of 1.25 miles of canal, 20ft wide and 2ft deep, lined with lead, plus an open, flooded lagoon. Sixty gondolas, plied by real gondoliers, glided around Venetian palazzi, built of weathered brick and stucco at onethird scale, and under little arched bridges. There was a Bridge of Sighs and a Rialto Bridge, 40ft wide, not far off its real-life span of 75ft.
“It is interesting to watch the tourists rambling about the square and bridges, some with their heads thrown back looking up at the picturesque buildings, or idly gazing into the busy cafés, in exactly the same manner as their prototypes at the real Queen of the Adriatic until, after an hour’s pleasant wandering, they sit down at the tables outside the Café Rialto, to be served by pretty waitresses in Venetian costume, their hair floating gracefully over the shoulders as they pass to and fro,” wrote one visitor.
To make it an “exhibition”, there was a certain amount of Murano glass-blowing, but there was also a Kiralfy show – the plot of The Merchant of Venice absurdly inflated into a blockbuster, with a cast of thousands, corps de ballet and a sea battle. Ordinary stage machinery was too small for Olympia, so a panoramic backcloth was wound onto two massive drums. All the solid scenery – staircases, bridges and so on – could quickly be whisked on and off, on wheels, while canvas cutouts of buildings and trees were flown down from the ceiling.
Venice at Olympia was a smash – receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors, “their faces every shade of expression, from the subdued smile to the painful attempt at concealment of all emotion during an evidently new experience,” as a newspaper put it. For his next trick, Kiralfy decided to go bigger: India. He bought the lease for Earl’s Court Exhibition Grounds and set about making another Expo-cum-theme park, this time sprawling outdoors.
Visitors to the Empire of India Exhibition in 1895 alighted from the District Line into “Imperial Gardens”,
fragrant with curries, where a “Maidan Gate” led to the “Indian City”, filled with real ramshackle buildings taken from Pune. Milling around were 200 Indian craftsmen, snake charmers, fakirs and jugglers, on a fixed contract for the season, along with elephants, camels and holy cattle. Inside an “Indian Temple” was a stylised jungle, with life-size models of thousands of insects, snakes, crocodiles, tigers and elephants. There was even a real mosque – only the third ever to be constructed in England.
Empire of India did even better than Venice, running for an extra year, with over 30,000 visitors a day. Earl’s Court established itself as a (less bawdy) successor to the bygone pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, while Kiralfy basked in the borrowed respectability of the peers and maharajas on his committee. As the decade passed, trains ferried more and more punters to Kiralfy’s miniature worlds: the Coronation Fair of 1897, with streets of half-timbered romantic English villages; the Greater Britain Exhibition of 1899, which recreated the Canadian Rockies in a water chute ride, while South African springbok, zebra and antelopes roamed Earl’s Court.
After a 1900 Woman’s Exhibition (the turnstile progressively manned by female attendants), Kiralfy felt, like Alexander, that he had run out of world to conquer. He wanted to build something permanent: “One night I lay awake in bed and, as if by magic, I saw, stretched out in my mind’s eye, an imposing city of palaces, domes, and towers, set in cool, green spaces and intersected by many bridged canals. But it had one characteristic which made it strangely beautiful. Hitherto I had dealt in colour in the shimmering hues of gold and silver. This city was spotless white. I saw it all in an instant…”
The part of west London known as White City is now a tangle of shopping malls, gypsy encampments and flyovers. Then, it was farmland. Kiralfy bought up 140 acres – 100 acres for an amusement park (featuring rides like Wiggle Woggle, Flip-Flap, Roly Poly and the House of Troubles), 40 acres for steel-frame pavilions, in a dizzying array of architectural styles, clad in stucco. Kiralfy himself designed the Court of Honour, modelled on Fatehpur Sikri in India, but more than 20 other architects took on the rest, which sprawled into the Great White City, at a cost of £2 million – a quarter of a billion, in today’s money – and, in Kiralfy’s words, “four years of unremitting toil”.
In 1908, the Great White City opened with the Franco-British Exhibition – the pinnacle of Kiralfy’s career, earning him more cash and attracting more spectators than anything else. When he saw King Edward VII and President Fallières of the French Republic, in the midst of a cheering multitude, “I knew that the result had justified all the labour. It was the proudest day of my life”. Later that year, White City hosted the Olympics, too.
Kiralfy was 63. He thought he had built something eternal. “It would seem strange indeed if the ‘White City’, which was reared with such pains and labour on the barren wastes of Shepherd’s Bush, should have been as evanescent as a summer’s dream,” he wrote in 1909. But that is exactly what happened. Takings dwindled, and the war put a stop to international jamborees. By the 1930s, Kiralfy’s decaying Great White City was pulled down.
Mercifully, he did not live to see it. He died in 1919, aged 74, in a Brighton hotel, fairly rich – he left £136,000 (£7 million today) – and famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He had certainly, as he intended, “contributed to the gaiety of the nations”, but for all his pains he was never knighted, and quickly forgotten. Snobbery prevailed, yet for a while this circus child from Budapest had treated with statesmen.
In Olympia, he built a labyrinth of canals, where 60 gondolas glided under bridges