Pageant of Birmingham

“[Pageants] engender pride in local history and encourage national patriotism, they raise funds for charities, they create fellowship between all classes, they provide an absorbing new interest in life for those who take part, and they bring nation-wide publicity to the town and locality, with resultant benefits.”

— Gwen Halley, Pageant Master, Birmingham Post, 1938

“The programme will support economic recovery in the UK by reanimating towns and cities and expanding our connectivity through new online communities. As the programme unfolds, it will both entertain us and inspire us to imagine what the future might hold.”

— Dame Vicki Heywood, Chair of Unboxed Festival, The Guardian, 2022

The Pageant of Birmingham is a film work and image series exploring the camp, chaotic, and downright baffling history of ’The Pageant of Birmingham 1938’. An enormously expensive city wide performance pageant featuring a fire breathing paper mâché dinosaur and the formation of the city of Birmingham – this timely and satirical response considers the lengths the cultural sector will go to in search of ‘civic pride’.

In 1938, over eight thousand participants from wards across Birmingham took part in a week-long series of performances gloriously entitled The Pageant of Birmingham 1938. Divided into 8 episodes, the performance sought to draw attention to the city’s rich history and to present Birmingham as ‘The Hub of Industrial England’, whatever that may be.

Video footage from the pageant is otherworldly, camp, ceremonial, oversized, and at points utterly bizarre. It includes teams of men dressed as wizards carrying women in cages, mediaeval battle reenactments, and a particularly memorable scene featuring a sixty-feet long smoke-breathing dinosaur named Egbert.

Discovering the Pageant of Birmingham 1938 was somewhat serendipitous, to me it’s definitive Birmingham - rushed together, a little baffling, camp, full of inarticulate yet mystical wonder, and delighted with our own beauty.