CloserStill and Nineteen Group chairman Phil Soar commemorates his mother’s 100th birthday with a look back on a century of exhibitions.
Next month is my mother’s 100th birthday. Despite having family records dating back to 1540, we know of no other relation who has reached such a grandiose age.
Musing as one does, I contemplated what my mother (pictured below) might have known about the exhibition world in her 100 years. Admittedly not very much in 1924, for she was christened Betty Parsons, was not given a middle name, and without Betty even being short for Elizabeth. For her first two winters, she was sewn into her clothes.
So how has our industry changed in the 100 years my mother has been alive?
Even if she had been paying attention, she would have been aware of very little. The Ideal Home Show and The British Motor Show perhaps?
But what changes might she have seen in those 100 years?
Those of us who attended the December 2021 Centenary Celebration of the AEO would have remembered the wonderful presentation prepared by Ian Taylor and Kelly Haslehurst of the NEC and, of course, by Sarah Scott of the AEO. They visually and pictorially gave us a feeling for life in the early 1920s.
Ian gave us a flavour of 1921, the year the AEO was founded: a loaf of bread cost 2p, a pint of milk 5p, a three-bedroomed house in Birmingham £320, the average wage – £2. Australia won eight consecutive Test Matches against England (genuinely), anyone could become a dentist and, perhaps my favourite, any bank in any town in Britain could issue its own banknotes – just like Scotland or Jersey today.
The AEO was founded by the organisers of just seven events:
- Drapery and Clothing Exhibition
- London Fair and Market Food Show
- Show and Leather Fair
- Confectioners and Bakers Exhibition
- Brewers and Allied Trades Exhibition
- Grocers Exhibition
- Montgomery (InterBuild)
It is striking that four of the seven were food/drink events and two were clothing/footwear events. None of these exist today, though they have their successors.
Only Montgomery has survived the whole 100 years. The purpose of the AEO was simple – to fight back against the Government-sponsored British Industries Fair, launched in 1920 in Birmingham, which was trying to steal everyone else’s exhibitors.
The last time the British Government paid any attention
It was probably the last time any British government paid real attention to the trade show industry.
The AEO minutes from 1921 suggest that there was no other objective (not even attacking Olympia on electrical charges) and there was no sense that the trade show industry had any need of a centralising body.
There was no discussion of approaching any other organisers – and, notably, neither Ideal Home (owned by the Daily Mail) nor The Motor Show appear to have been interested. The feeling is that the seven founders saw themselves as one-off enterprises with little need for cooperation. The idea of a “trade show industry” did not exist.
No one was writing anything about trade shows
Looking through the newspapers and literature of the time, it is striking how little there was about exhibitions or trade shows. There were only two dedicated venues – Olympia and Castle Bromwich in Birmingham, which had opened for the British Industries Fair in 1920. Other non-dedicated venues like the Royal Agricultural Halls in Islington or Crystal Palace did hold events of various kinds.
And very few events received any sort of recognition. The big shows were public events running for several days – The British Motor Show first ran in 1903 at Crystal Palace, and Ideal Home first ran in 1908. The British Industries Fair ran in 1920, a post-war attempt to recreate the mood of the Great Exhibition of 1851. It became the most visited show for the next 50 years, and its last outing was in 1957. Other public events which became so familiar began far later – Farnborough in 1948, and the London Boat Show in Olympia in 1955.
The industry didn’t change much for 50 years
The British model was very different from Europe – indeed, you could argue that there was no British model at all. In Germany you could visit events at fairgrounds in Frankfurt and Leipzig which had literally been there for 700 years.
Britain’s major trade shows are very recent inventions. While the now lost InterBuild could trace its history back to 1894, and the forerunner of IPEX launched in the 1920s, our three largest trade events were born far, far later.
Spring Fair first ran in 1950 and moved to the NEC, when the show took off, in 1976. The other two came much later – World Travel Market first ran in 1982 and the country’s biggest show – DSEi – was launched by Bob Munton and Spearhead in ExCeL on 11 September 2001.
The reality is that the industry did not change very much at all between the foundation of the AEO in 1921 and the 1980s.
Unorganised and unrecognised until at least the 1980s
Critical was the opening of the NEC in 1976. It is strange to remember that the Labour Government of the time had been determined to build it outside Leicester. It remains a mystery how it ended up in Sutton Coldfield.
But this did encourage the development of massive events. In 1978, the Motor Show had 979,000 attendees, the largest number ever to attend any UK exhibition (apart from the 1851 Great Exhibition). After Spring Fair moved there in 1976, it was able to expand to quickly fill the whole complex.
But it was probably not until EMAP’s purchase of Spring and Autumn Fair in 1988 that a detectable trade show industry emerged. Blenheim, then a tiny business making just £3m a year, was so annoyed at losing out on Spring Fair, that it immediately bought the Harrogate Gift Fair and an arms race began.
Reed had been expanding slowly in the 1980s but was under the radar and obscured by Reed Business Media (trade magazines). Reed Business Media was run, of course, by the guru Colin Morrison of Flashes and Flames. But suddenly three groups were buying up what they could, where they could. EMAP did not want to venture outside the UK, but Reed and Blenheim looked everywhere.
The dominant triumvirate did not last
But this triumvirate, which seemed so solid at the beginning of 1995, was not to last. Indeed, none of these three names even exist anymore.
Blenheim was sold to UBM in 1995, and then broken up with the US events going to VNU and European events to Reed. UBM itself, having briefly renamed itself Fox and then CMP, was absorbed into Informa.
EMAP was the dominant UK player until the 2000s when it underwent a series of convulsions leading to it being renamed i2i, Top Right, Ascential (and quite likely several other names I have forgotten) before the bulk of the remaining events were sold to ITE, which became Hyve.
Reed, now RX, remained stable as part of Reed Elsevier but has not expanded as much as other players in recent years.
We must be realistic. The world changed a lot in the 1980s and the 1990s. There was a surge of excess capital, of the creation of new companies, of technical innovation leading to unexpected developments. Just one small example. When Blenheim moved to Chiswick High Road in 1990, there was only one restaurant in the whole area (excepting McDonalds) and nowhere to go for a coffee. By 1999 you couldn’t throw a stone anywhere without hitting at least two coffee shops.
The changes to our industry were completely unpredictable in 1995. At that point the large companies seemed permanent, but with the Blenheim sale there began a merry-go-round which has surely not yet ended.
This was driven by financial innovation, easier access to funding, but also real personnel instability in two of the three behemoths. Their growth had been far more rapid than could have been planned for and it was not entirely clear (particularly in the case of Blenheim) quite what the purpose of the business was.
So the history of our industry in the last 100 years falls into three distinct phases. Post-Great War, after the foundation of Castle Bromwich and the AEO in 1920/21, it changed very little until the late 1970s.
The next phase, which lasted from the founding of the NEC in 1976 to the late 1990s, was one of consolidation, growth and apparent stability and publicly quoted companies.
But the next phase, now lasting some 25 years, was to be sudden, dramatic and to completely upend the established order.
I’ll talk about that in the next article – THE FINANCIAL UPHEAVAL.
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