New  Theatre  Quarterly

http://journals.cambridge.org/NTQ

Additional  services  for  New  Theatre  Quarterly:

Email  alerts:  Click  here

Subscriptions:  Click  here
Commercial  reprints:  Click  here
Terms  of  use  :  Click  here

‘What  Have  We  Got  to  Do  with  Fun?’:  Littlewood,  Price,
and  the  Policy  Makers

Juliet  Rufford

New  Theatre  Quarterly  /  Volume  27  /  Issue  04  /  November  2011,  pp  313  -­  328
DOI:  10.1017/S0266464X11000649,  Published  online:  08  November  2011

Link  to  this  article:  http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266464X11000649

How  to  cite  this  article:

Juliet  Rufford  (2011).  ‘What  Have  We  Got  to  Do  with  Fun?’:  Littlewood,  Price,  and  the  Policy
Makers.  New  Theatre  Quarterly,  27,  pp  313-­328  doi:10.1017/S0266464X11000649

Request  Permissions  :  Click  here

Downloaded  from  http://journals.cambridge.org/NTQ,  IP  address:  138.37.211.113  on  22  Sep  2013
Juliet Rufford

‘What Have We Got to Do with Fun?’:

Littlewood, Price, and the Policy Makers
Joan Littlewood blamed anti-socialist prejudice for Theatre Workshop’s hostile treatment
by the Arts Council. Yet her failure to secure the Council’s backing for the Fun Palace – an
open-ended project for an arts, entertainment, and education centre she developed with
architect Cedric Price – may be better expressed as a collision between anarchy and
bureaucracy. Following Nadine Holdsworth’s 1997 article for New Theatre Quarterly,
‘“They’d Have Pissed on My Grave”: the Arts Council and Theatre Workshop’, in this
article Juliet Rufford argues that the project fell victim to a form of programme censorship
because it broke the rules of culture and professionalism as defined by the major funding
body for the arts. The concept of ‘fun’ is seen as vital to understanding the cynicism of the
policy makers towards Price and Littlewood’s proposals, but also as driving explorations
of intermediality, interactive performance, and performative architecture that have since
been taken up successfully by artists working within and beyond the subsidized sector.
Juliet Rufford is a post-doctoral research associate at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and
is co-convenor of the International Federation of Theatre Research’s Theatre Architecture
Working Group. She has written on theatre architecture, site-specific performance,
scenography, and the politics of space for publications including Contemporary Theatre
Review and the Journal of Architectural Education.

THE FUN PALACE is one of the great might-
have-been projects of the twentieth century.
A ‘socialist dreamworld’, combining partici-
pative theatre, film, science, and technology,
it was conceived by Joan Littlewood in 1960
or 1961 as a means for her to escape the
constraints of traditional theatre and her
own poorly funded position at the Theatre
Royal, Stratford East.1 From early 1963 on-
wards, the young architect and iconoclast
Cedric Price sought a way to embody Little-
wood’s ideas. His solution was both anti-
institutional and anti-architectural. It centred
on a mobile grid of open zones, where a new
dynamics of flux would speak against a
culture of knowing one’s place.
Working with an inter-disciplinary Cyber-
netics Committee, an Ideas Group, and a
host of other specialists whose expertise was
sought for particular aspects of the pro-
gramme, Price developed an adaptive archi-
tectural system that was less a performing
arts venue than a performative facility
caught up in a continual process of building
and rebuilding. Although unexecuted, the
project soon achieved cult status, providing
inspiration for Richard Rogers and Renzo
Piano’s Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris,
1971–77), Rogers’s Millennium Experience
(London, 1996–99), and Will Alsop’s The Pub-
lic (West Bromwich, 2003–8), and stimulating
interest in how temporary architecture, pop-
up theatre, and mobile arts facilities might
help to establish a new politics of space.
This study takes seriously Littlewood’s
claim that the Fun Palace was a totally new
way of making performance in relation to
everyday life and opportunities for learning.
Analyzing the project’s key innovations, it
weighs debates about the Fun Palace’s poten-
tial uses against latent prejudices, established
policies, and emerging lines of thought
about education and the arts at a time of
sweeping economic and cultural change.
The reasons for the project’s failure are
numerous. They include hostility in certain
sections of the press, fear among some local
residents’ associations, the Wilson adminis-
tration’s growing preoccupation with the
Open University, and, most importantly,
difficulties over planning and funding.2
Significantly, this study parts company with

ntq 27:4 (november 2011) © cambridge university press doi:10.1017/S0266464X11000649 313

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013 IP address: 138.37.211.113
those accounts of the Fun Palace’s demise
that centre on the obstacles Price and Little-
wood encountered at local and regional
planning levels (at the hands of Newham
Borough Council and the Greater London
Council) in order to lay a greater share of the
blame on the Arts Council for preventing the
project’s realization.3
The Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB)
had been the main source of financial assist-
ance and advice for artists since the end of
the Second World War, when it took over the
administration of public subsidy from the
Council for the Encouragement of Music and
the Arts (CEMA). Its considerable power, as
Nadine Holdsworth has explained, sprang
from the fact that it enjoyed the ‘controlling
influence’ within a tripartite system of public
subsidy which involved local, regional, and
national funding.4 Although the amounts of
money it disbursed were relatively small, the
Council’s seal of approval was invaluable –
often forming the basis on which local fund-
ing agencies took make-or-break decisions.
By the early 1960s, the Council had made
its reputation as an efficient project manager
during the lead-up to the Festival of Britain,
and was playing a leading role in the cam-
paign to build a National Theatre – a project
that faced at least as many setbacks and
changes of location as the Fun Palace. Had
Littlewood had strong support from the Arts
Council, which she cites along with indivi-
dual and commercial sponsorship, and money
from the local authority levy, as a direct
source of financial aid, things might have
turned out differently.5
Leisure and Fun
Much of the impetus for the Fun Palace came
from the rapid changes in culture, society,
and technology that took place during the
1960s. Automation and new sources of energy
looked set to transform Britain’s economic
and social life – boosting industry and
reducing the length of the working day.6 In a
1964 article for the New Scientist, ‘A Labora-
tory of Fun’, Littlewood built on widely
touted predictions to claim that ‘those who at
present work in factories, mines, and offices
314
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
will quite soon be able to live as only a few
people now can: choosing their own con-
genial work, doing as much or as little of it as
they like, and filling their leisure with what-
ever delights them.’7 But while there was
excitement about the possibilities of the
scientific revolution (Holdsworth gives a
vivid sense of how ‘the mid-1960s were
epitomized by Harold Wilson’s “white heat
of technological change”’) there was also
fear that people would have too much free
time on their hands and that this would be
damaging both psychologically and socially.8
The ‘leisure question’ had been raised
towards the end of the previous decade just
as Britain was entering a period of greater
prosperity after the years of wartime
rationing. In 1959, Harold Macmillan’s Con-
servative Party was re-elected to power with
a manifesto that spoke of the ‘challenge to
make the growth of leisure more purposeful
and creative, especially for young people’.9
For the Conservatives, leisure was allied to
the threat of anti-social behaviour, and it was
the government’s task to steer the nation’s
disaffected youth towards what it regarded
as wholesome pastimes.
Macmillan’s interventionist approach was
shared by William Emrys Williams, the Arts
Council’s Secretary-General from 1951 to
1963. In the year of the Macmillan victory,
Williams put together an unofficial pro-
gramme of social control by which he hoped
that the Council could help stave off ‘welfare-
state passivity’ and delinquency attributed to
‘television, dance-halls, football pools, hor-
ror-comics, and the gladiatorial spectacles of
organized sport’.10 Noting a ‘sturdy but
encouraging minority-resistance to the mass-
produced amenities and distractions of our
time’, Williams recommended support for
such activities as ‘photo-micrography, speleo-
ology, bird watching, Sunday painting, deb-
ating, local history, archaeology, and choral
singing’.11 It is a hopelessly nostalgic (not to
say white middle-class) list.
By the time of the next General Election, in
1964, the Labour Party’s contrasting attitude
highlighted the need to provide subsidy for
non-commercial facilities in order to support
– but not dictate – what people did in their
IP address: 138.37.211.113
http://journals.cambridge.org
Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
Joan Littlewood, Fun Palace promotional brochure (1964). Interior view with individual parts of complex labelled by Price. Reprographic copy on wove paper (36.2 x 59.8

IP address: 138.37.211.113
cm), DR1995:0188:001:016, Cedric Price archives, Collection Centre Canadien d’ Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Reproduced by permission.

315
spare time. Wilson hadincluded the following
pledge as part of his winning campaign:
It is not the job of the Government to tell people
how leisure should be used. But, in a society
where so many facilities are not provided because
they are not profitable and where the trend to-
wards monopoly, particularly in entertainment, is
steadily growing, the Government has a duty to
ensure that leisure facilities are provided and that
a reasonable range of choice is maintained.12
Price and Littlewood – both committed left-
wingers – wanted to take things one step
further. Unlike the political and cultural
mainstream, which maintained the division
between work and play, their proposals re-
flected what they perceived (albeit naively)
as the imminent dissolution of the work–
leisure boundary as people gained more free
time and greater autonomy over its use.
The notion of fun was central to Price and
Littlewood’s ideas about work, leisure, and
education. One clear (if toe-curling) set of
definitions around this term was put for-
ward by the artist and theorist of telematic
art Roy Ascott, who told fellow members of
the Cybernetics Committee: ‘Fun makers pro-
vide amenities which are unfamiliar. Funsters
have the ability to seek the unfamiliar.’13 A
multi-faceted concept, ‘fun’ encompassed
enjoyment – perhaps, abandon – and evoked
the hedonistic delights of the nineteenth-
century pleasure garden. It captured pop
art’s optimism about consumer choice, the
expendability of objects, and the infinite flow
of thought through media and technology.
It promised the adventurous spirit and
generic eclecticism that had characterized
Littlewood’s work from the early days with
Ewan MacColl and Theatre of Action through
to Theatre Workshop, and what Price later
remembered as her ‘fuck the theatre’ atti-
tude.14 It was about learning through play,
seeking the strange and the new, and ulti-
mately transcending them. Finally, as the
architect Arata Isozaki perceives, fun des-
cribes how the ‘hardware’ of the Fun Palace
was designed to respond to uncertain cir-
cumstances and to re-conceive architecture
as a social-activist tool.15
Price, like Littlewood, was desperate to get
away from the ‘limited range of entertain-
316
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
ment offered by Victorian theatre buildings
and the expensive restaurants of so-called
theatreland, which is, in effect, one of the
most dreary and obsolete parts of London
from an architectural and social point-of-
view’.16 The Fun Palace would bear little
resemblance to traditional theatre, which
Price saw as a socially stratified and unim-
aginative affair. It was to be a space of radical
inclusivity, rooted in a sense of the local but
employing a core logic that could be adapted
to different sites across the world.
Outside the UK, there was enthusiasm
from France, Germany, and Italy; at the invit-
ation of the Tunisian government, Little-
wood had been working on a Fun Palace
scheme for Hammamet, and local groups in
Canada and the US were intent on running
versions in Montréal and Chicago.17
A University of the Streets
Mass entertainment, the attractions of the
circus and the funfair, the recent craze for
day-tripping, and caravanning all fed into the
project. A promotional film produced by
Mithras Films in 1964 shows Littlewood’s
actors using burlesque, slapstick, and circus
skills to embody her sense of what the Fun
Palace had to offer.18 Much of the material
is light and comedic. But there was also
something ‘edgier’ about the endeavour, and
Littlewood was merciless with those who
could not see that. The following excerpt
from a 1965 letter to the editor of the Scotsman
is typical:
Sir, – Nancy Fortheringham, in her article of
March 17th, ‘Leisure as a Pleasure’, refers to the
Fun Palace, a subject about which she is com-
pletely misinformed. This is not in any sense a
conventional pleasure ground, or provider of
amusement and entertainment. Nancy Fothering-
ham’s use of the word ‘leisure’ is as ineffectual as
the rest of her article.19
Littlewood’s aim in developing the Fun
Palace was to mix ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture,
education and entertainment, in a manner
that blurred what she and Price saw as a set
of false distinctions. Such distinctions iso-
lated different groups within society and
restricted people’s capacity to discover new
IP address: 138.37.211.113
experiences. With that in mind, Littlewood
wanted to explore ‘much wider ideas than
could be contained inside formal theatre’,
and the Fun Palace was her bravest attempt
to get beyond the ‘old human categories’
of amateur/professional, entertainment/fine
arts, which had been employed by the Arts
Council since the days of its first Chairman,
John Maynard Keynes.20
In contrast to the elitist academic institu-
tions, which she hated so passionately, the
Fun Palace would be a ‘university of the
streets’, welcoming people of all ages and all
social classes.21
In terms of its playfulness, the project had
much in common with the evenings of
‘anarchy, excitement, and expressive energy’
held at John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s
Kirbymoorside home in 1962.22 The design
team’s approach to the Fun Palace as a
‘short-term plaything’ came closer still to
that of the Scottish beat writer and Situa-
tionist Alexander Trocchi,23 whose Project
SIGMA also concerned issues of leisure and
creativity in the post-industrial age.24 Trocchi,
who met with Price several times during the
autumn of 1964 to discuss the progress of the
Fun Palace, was elaborating his argument for
a ‘spontaneous university’ that would recog-
nize and develop ‘play value’.25
In connection with ideas of tactical play,
the Ideas Group discussed a variety of enig-
matic-sounding activities that they hoped to
set up inside the Fun Palace. These ranged
from Kunst Dabbling and Genius Chat to
Gala Days and Gossip Reviews.26 Some
attractions, like the theme restaurant Captain
Nemo’s Cabin or a simple fairground-style
ride entitled ‘Ski Down the Forest Path’, are
limited in scope. Others were both innova-
tive and provocative.
Among the most interesting of projected
activities from a political viewpoint was a
Pillar of Knowledge, a device that the group’s
convenor, John Clark, saw as comprising
multiple levels of information, which could
be accessed, built up, and edited by users of
the facility.27 And, while Littlewood’s claim
that the Open University stole her idea is far-
fetched, it is no exaggeration to say that with
activities like the Pillar of Knowledge, the Fun
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
Palace team anticipated the democratization
of knowledge represented in freely available,
user-created World Wide Web projects such
as Wikipedia by almost four decades.28
A related concern was how to enable users
of the facility to take control of information
and communication systems. This aspect of
the project is, again, expressed lightheartedly
but the potential for ‘from below’ forms of
political organization (along the same lines
as recent uses of Twitter and Facebook by
activists internationally) was evident in Fun
Palace publicity material, and Holdsworth’s
recent chapter about the spatial politics of
the Fun Palace project draws on archival
evidence to reveal that Littlewood planned
to invite activists from ‘local clubs, gangs,
societies . . . to assist in programming’ and in
creating an uncensored network of commu-
nications.29
Similarly, the cultural politics of Fun
Palace activities were designed to challenge
the status quo. Ascott outlined an idea for an
‘identity bar’, where visitors could dress up,
modify their identity, and try out new social
roles. At a time when censorship was still
firmly in place, homosexuality was illegal,
and a woman could be raped by her husband
without a crime having been committed, the
emphasis this activity placed on gender, social
role, and performativity challenged stereo-
types in a way that most people would have
found unthinkable. In this optic, Fun Palace
activities were never merely a bit of a giggle
(although this was part of their appeal) but
were attacks on an oppressive system.
‘Housing the Arts’
Littlewood and Price should have been well
placed to secure capital funds for their pro-
ject, since its evolution coincided with a
major drive to repair or replace performing
arts venues that had been damaged during
the Blitz. In 1958 the Chancellor of the
Exchequer invited the Arts Council to look
into the state of theatre buildings nationally
and make recommendations for the future.30
The results of the enquiry formed the basis
for one of its longest-running initiatives: a
programme called ‘Housing the Arts’, which
317
IP address: 138.37.211.113
ran from 1965 to 1988, and was unofficially
resumed in the form of National Lottery
grants for theatre building in the 1990s.31
The Treasury released the money to finance
the Council’s programme of capital expendi-
ture just as Price finished putting the
essential details of the Fun Palace down on
paper. Approaching the Drama Department
in the spring of that year, Littlewood must
have hoped that the increase to the Council’s
grant-in-aid, together with the freeing up of
money for arts provision from local authori-
ties (through Section 132 of the 1948 Local
Government Act), would pave the way for
non-standard venues to be built alongside
the more traditional kind. Other directors
working in London – notably, the Americans
ED Berman and Jim Haynes – were also
exploring possibilities that lay beyond tradi-
tional theatre architecture, and the brief but
spectacular explosion of Arts Labs that took
place in 1968–69 continues to impact upon
theatrical and architectural models.
Moreover, as Holdsworth notes, those
applying for Arts Council funding in the
mid-1960s received an ‘immediate boost with
the appointment of Jennie Lee as the first
Arts Minister, and her publication in Feb-
ruary 1965 of a White Paper, ‘A Policy for the
Arts: the First Steps’.32 Lee showed a keen
interest in architecture, and her paper
appeared to foster greater risk-taking, argu-
ing for ‘informality and experimentation’,
and placing special emphasis on how build-
ing projects that ‘move with the times’ can
contribute to greater artistic freedom and
thus facilitate the development of theatre.33
On closer inspection, though, the White
Paper was less bold than it sounded. Despite
an explicit message to funding bodies about
their responsibilities in supporting emergent
practices, and a plea to ‘enterprising locali-
ties’ to ‘investigate the latest development in
building techniques’, Lee’s comments went
little further than ‘attractive presentation’,
and there was no real discussion about how
design and building methodologies might
develop in the future.34
In a set of ‘Observations on “A Policy for
the Arts”,’ Price commended the Minister’s
interest in temporary projects and mobile
318
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
structures but expressed exasperation that
the ‘possible long-term significance in enab-
ling a more sensitive national amenity grid
has been overlooked’.35 In his opinion, Lee’s
fundamental attachment to existing forms
was preventing the kind of artistic break-
through that other parts of her paper seemed
to endorse. There was too much emphasis on
the rehabilitation of older buildings, too
much emphasis on permanence in the design
of new ones, and too much emphasis on that
‘extraordinarily conservative organization the
Arts Council!’36
Lee’s paper reveals the deep ambivalence
felt by many policy makers about develop-
ments in architecture, urbanism, and the
performing arts at this moment of cultural
transition. For reasons that are ideological as
well as economic, the Arts Council of the late
1940s had backed professional, script-based
theatre and the sorts of buildings that went
with it. Although the period 1946–c.1973 was
characterized by internal power struggles
over the question of experimental activities
and community arts centres, the ‘Housing
the Arts’ initiative – which started later, and
gave out less, than anticipated – focused on
the repair of repertory theatre buildings and
on the creation of a national grid of civic
theatres, following the recommendations of
the 1959 and 1961 reports to the exclusion of
newer ideas about theatre and performance
space.37
Policy and Bureaucracy
There were two major strands to Arts
Council policy in the early 1960s. The first, a
hangover from CEMA’s Pilgrim Trust ori-
gins, was nurturing if paternalistic. Uphold-
ing received models of the visual and
performing arts, it concerned the nation’s
spiritual life, and was often couched in quasi-
religious language. The second, more up-to-
date imperative, revolved around questions
of accountability and good accountancy, and
it betrayed the Council’s nervousness about
handling taxpayers’ money.
It is largely for this reason that the Drama
Department chose to concentrate resources
on a select portfolio of ‘national treasures’ (a
IP address: 138.37.211.113
policy summed up in the maxim ‘Few, but
Roses’) and to establish a pattern of routine
decisions that – whatever else could be said
about them – would look consistent.38 The
change of Chairman, in 1965, from the cul-
turally (and politically) conservative Lord
Cottesloe to the more open-minded Arnold
(later Lord) Goodman brought about a wider
set of practices, but Arts Council policy con-
tinued to be defined within liberal para-
meters.
One of the earliest critiques of ACGB
policy, Karen King and Mark Blaug’s 1973
article ‘Does the Arts Council Know What It
Is Doing?’ uses the Council’s annual reports
as evidence that ‘administrative efficiency
seems to have been the only justification for
the selection of arts organizations’.39 This
overstates the case. The evidence of unpub-
lished records in the Arts Council archive
shows a reasonable range of criteria that
needed to be met by theatre companies seek-
ing financial help, and it is only fair that the
Council should have expected recipients of
public money to handle funds responsibly.
However, King and Blaug are right to note
the Council’s over-attachment to standardiz-
ing practices.
As it began to transform itself from the
small and somewhat eccentric set-up of the
1940s and 1950s into the sizeable public body
of later decades, the Council’s reliance on
categorization and precedent, account keep-
ing and form-filling was less the result of
organizational progress than it was a bulwark
against development and a form of protec-
tion against the risks associated with collec-
tive action.40 This hindered it from responding
swiftly to new artistic developments. The
growing bureaucratization of the Council
became a real issue for theatre in the 1960s as
the art form started to undergo a series of
transformations that bewildered the Drama
Department’s stodgy leadership.
New activities such as performance art or
theatre that blended ‘serious drama’ with
popular forms or with elements drawn from
other disciplines created special difficulties
for the Council. Since these forms refused to
be governed by the rules of disciplinary
closure, they could not be assessed simply as
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
‘drama’ or ‘music’ or ‘art’, and, in trans-
gressing the boundaries between two or
more spheres of the Council’s operation,
were too often rejected by all. Occasionally,
the Arts Council would use the excuse that
the new activities they were seeing did not
meet the definition of ‘fine arts’ in its 1946
Royal Charter. But the distinction ‘fine’ had
only been inserted in the hope the ACGB
could avoid paying the rates on its Belgrave
Square headquarters (under an exemption in
the Scientific Societies Act of 1843) and, as it
had never fooled local council officers, it was
dropped from the 1967 Charter.41
While professional theatre companies saw
regular increases in subsidy throughout the
1960s, the conservative element within the
ACGB continued to argue that its job was to
distinguish and protect Britain’s dramatic
heritage against other types of activity, and
to ensure that the ‘more orthodox and pro-
fessional variety did not unfairly come to be
tarred with the same anti-cultural brush’ as
fringe activities, community arts, and other
types of experimentation.42
Under attack from artists and pressure
groups, who criticized it for its ‘indifference,
ignorance, and irrelevance to the real needs
of living artists’, the Council eventually
expanded its definitions of theatre and
performance, making a small amount of
funds available for the short-lived scheme
‘Experimental Projects’ (1970–73).43
It was not until 1974 that members of an
advisory panel on Housing the Arts per-
suaded the Drama Department that there
must be ‘flexibility in the way in which funds
are allocated so as to reflect changing prio-
rities’, that resources should be shared bet-
ween different types of project, and that the
Council should be enabled to ‘develop new
lines of policy’.44
Architecture and Anarchy
Littlewood wanted a constantly changing
laboratory for cultural and artistic experi-
ment. Her deliberately loose programme
posed an unprecedented design challenge.
Price would need to accommodate an unfore-
seeable mixture of professional arts and
319
IP address: 138.37.211.113
spontaneous events. The Fun Palace would
include a theatre auditorium for shows
ranging from ‘modern commedia dell’arte and
historical plays’ to ‘audience participation
and individual art’.45 Both Price and Little-
wood agreed that what needed to change in
the theatre was static seating focused on
received forms and content. But, from alter-
native theatre, the options became steadily
more outlandish. They included facilities for
people to make, show, and discard daily
video diaries, to use CCTV to connect differ-
ent zones within the Fun Palace, to commu-
nicate with accidental spectators outside via
enormous TV screens, to play war games
and games of strategy, and to explore scien-
tific gadgets and adult-sized toys. Most
importantly, all this needed to be done in a
structure that could be reconfigured to re-
flect new patterns of usage and yet-to-be-
invented practices.
Responding to Littlewood’s brief, Price
produced plans for a building that would
never need to be finished, a place where time
and space would not be authored by the
architect but composed according to circum-
stance and users’ demands. Working with
the engineer Frank Newby, whose structural
system provided stability while substantially
increasing programmatic flexibility, he
brought about a major change in the quality
of architectural space.46
Price’s ‘kit-of-parts’ solution relied on a
minimal upright frame and a number of mov-
able parts – including space-framed screens,
tensioned canopies, inflatable structures and
unit boxes – that could be displaced by two
enormous travelling gantry cranes. He used
lightweight blinds in place of exterior walls
and doors, and planned to install radial
escalators and multi-level moving walkways
to encourage random pedestrian movement
and unexpected groupings of people. The
giant scale of his main scheme (several vari-
ations were produced in order to suit dif-
ferent sites and budgets) was a way to avoid
particularization of the complex – again,
allowing for the Fun Palace to evolve – and
although the protected-steel superstructure
would have remained a constant size, the total
volume in use might have varied wildly.47
320
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
The project was initially intended for con-
struction on a metropolitan site. However,
parts of the Fun Palace ‘kit’ were not only
interchangeable on a particular site but also
between different sites, so that discrete ele-
ments could be ‘assembled, moved, re-
arranged and scrapped continuously’.48 The
Fun Palace could be sited on land resulting
from slum clearance or urban redevelop-
ment, available for a limited time prior to its
more permanent use. Alternatively, it could
be sited in ‘hard, dirty industrial areas
unsuited to more conventional types of
amenity buildings’, since its mechanically
operated environmental controls allowed it
to meet health and safety regulations.49
A Kind of ‘Guerrilla Architecture’
The Fun Palace was, therefore, a kind of
punk or guerrilla architecture – representing
an alternative, non-commercial form of
urban development achieved through pro-
cesses of devising, adapting, and impro-
vising. A charcoal sketch of the Fun Palace
viewed at night shows just how far removed
Price and Littlewood’s plans were from the
mainstream of architectural or theatrical
thought. The scene is of a post-war metro-
politan wasteland, in which darkly shaded
areas are off-set against a bleached-out cen-
tral portion. To the left, in the background,
two funnel-shaped chimneys recall Blake’s
satanic mills and the belching stink indus-
tries of the previous century. The Fun Palace
– half space station, half pyrotechnic display –
seems to explode out of this setting; search-
beams cutting across the London sky,
projection screens turned outwards to con-
front the surrounding gloom.
Inside this energetic space, people would
be able to make their own decisions; Little-
wood even went as far as inviting users to
‘try starting a riot’.50 In her publicity
material, she spoke of ‘positive conflict’.51
For her, aggression and creativity were
linked. The question during peacetime was
to ‘find a different outlet for man’s taste for
the theatrical delights of war and violence’.52
The Fun Palace was that outlet. As she ex-
plained to the Arts Council’s new Secretary-
IP address: 138.37.211.113
http://journals.cambridge.org
Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
Fun Palace, night-time rendering, (c. 1964), black crayon, felt-tip pen and white ink on wove paper (23.5 x 34.6 cm), DR1995:0188:012, Cedric Price archive, Collection

IP address: 138.37.211.113
Centre Canadien d’ Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Reproduced by permission.

321
General, Nigel Abercrombie, in a letter of
April 1965:
Dear Mr Abercrombie,
Now in my tranquil old age I recall the days
when Theatre Workshop was as revolutionary as
is the Fun Palace now. The resistance to both ideas
was and is strong, and I remember only too well
being told by the Arts Council, as they refused us
help, that we were not a theatre at all. How right
they were. . . .
If there is any possibility of the Arts Council
being interested now in anything but out-of-date
so-called ‘theatre’ I should like to put to you the
basic proposals which underlie the Fun Palace.53
Comparisons are often made between the
Fun Palace and Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42, a
‘found’ space venue set up at the Round-
house between 1963 and 1964.54 But, although
the Wesker project professed radicalism, it
unconsciously repeated the top-down atti-
tude of the policy makers, providing what
the cultural theorist Reyner Banham dis-
missed as a ‘cultural soup kitchen’ of poetry
and opera for the underprivileged.55 By
contrast, the Fun Palace was genuinely anti-
authoritarian – embodying both an implicit
critique of Arts Council-endorsed culture
and of dominant architectural formulations
(especially around notions of authorship,
use, and functional life-span).
Architecturally speaking, it is Constant
Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon, conceived in
response to Situationist ideas about architec-
ture and urbanism, which provides the more
instructive comparison.56 New Babylon dis-
played a similar focus on movement, chance
encounter, architectural and programmatic
flexibility through a series of linked, trans-
formable structures. The ideas informing the
project (notably, Johan Huizinga’s theory of
the homo ludens) were sophisticated and yet
the details were never worked through. Thus,
New Babylon remained a dream whereas
Price’s proposals, which extend from all
aspects of the design into the realms of
planning, cost, and construction, made the
Fun Palace a realistic possibility.
Adding to the radical indeterminacy of
the Fun Palace were Price’s attack on the
architectural ego and his sense that only an
architecture of transience could adequately
322
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
respond to the social and locational instab-
ility that characterized Britain’s new work–
life realities. Arata Isozaki has commented
on how Price’s design became progressively
anonymous-looking as his emphasis fell not
only on the technical aspects (the engin-
eering and the cybernetics) but also on how
best to avoid building a cultural monument.
An Architecture of Transience
Isozaki, whose Osaka Festival Plaza (1966–
70) has features of openness, responsiveness
and transformability in common with the
Fun Palace, notes that the Fun Palace was
‘decisively divorced from the dictates of
post-1930 industrial design’ with its obses-
sive concern over streamlining, revealing
instead Price’s ‘utter disconcern, even apathy,
towards design’.57 Price’s use of charged
static-vapour zones, optical barriers, and
warm-air curtains formed a direct challenge
to accepted industry standards. His aim was
to get rid of any unnecessary rhetorical bag-
gage from architecture so as to concentrate
on identifying needs and finding solutions.
Consequently, the design of individual com-
ponent parts was sacrificed to the workings
of the whole system.
Dismantling notions of authorship and
authority in this way, Price began to elabo-
rate his anarchic, anti-architectural principles
and to deny commonsense associations of
architecture with fixity. The main scheme
would have featured very few enclosed
volumes, and would have been open to all,
free of charge, twenty-four hours a day. By
offering users a ‘free space’, which crossed
the lines between inside and outside, public
and privately owned spaces, Price introduced
uncertainty into architecture (where received
wisdom has always held the exterior and the
interior apart) and undermined the capitalist
control of territory.
Both the main scheme and a proposed
Fun Palace pilot project – designed for a site
in Camden Town as Price and Littlewood
awaited planning permission for their
doomed Lea Valley scheme – represent con-
scious attempts to create a non-deterministic
architecture of ‘planned obsolescence’.58 Price
IP address: 138.37.211.113
was adamant about limiting the Fun Palace’s
working life to a period of about ten years in
order to make room for future ideas and
practices.59 Similarly, the inflatable structures
he used for the pilot scheme were archi-
tectural ‘throwaways’, demountable in about
twelve hours.
With its moving components and cyber-
netic technology, the main scheme went
further than the static, though lightweight,
pilot scheme in imagining an active architec-
tural environment. And, if its malleability
characterized the Fun Palace as standing at
the opposite end of the spectrum from the
proscenium-arch theatres of the nineteenth
century, whose strictly demarcated auditoria
upheld existing social hierarchies, its tempor-
ary status set it far apart from the perman-
ence of that symbol of civic chauvinism, the
municipally sanctioned arts complex.
Price saw theatre along with certain types
of concerts, revues, dances, and workshops
as an activity that did not require total enclo-
sure. Consequently, his design for a circular
theatre, which would have been the chief
performance space inside the complex, shows
a ‘part open’ structure. This would have pro-
vided long views beyond the auditorium and
would have allowed for accidental spectators
to enter and alter the dynamic of the theat-
rical occasion. Perspective views of the Fun
Palace reveal Price’s attention to the move-
ment of bodies, colours, and forms in space.60
He and Littlewood had used the ancient
Greek agora as a conceptual model for the
open areas, but there is a sense here as in
other experimental theatre projects (notably,
in the unexecuted 1963–64 conversion of the
Donmar rehearsal studio in Covent Garden
into an experimental theatre and late-night
meeting place) of an almost Bauhaus-
inspired approach to architecture and event,
in which platforms and terraces become
stages for performance and partying, and the
relationships between performer, spectator,
and object are quite fluid.61
Cybernetics, Freedom, and Control
The communications and systems theorist
Gordon Pask was asked to devise the means
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
by which the Fun Palace would respond
cybernetically to an almost endless set of
eventualities. Pask’s contribution concerned
the complex as a whole, but he also had
strong ideas about the sort of theatre he
wanted to see happening within it. Claiming
that the dramatic structures, plots, and dia-
logues of traditional scripted theatre are too
restrictive, Pask sought to alter the relation-
ship between performers and spectators by
outlining various strategies for a cybernetic
re-routing of the dramatic dénouement.62
According to Pask, theatre is a control
system involving a ‘well attested but badly
defined “feedback” whereby the actors can
sense the mood of the audience and play
their parts in order to effect it’, while audi-
ence members, in identifying with indivi-
dual characters, wish to control or influence
their actions on stage.63 In place of this tacit
(and somewhat unbalanced) agreement, Pask
called for theatre to be modelled explicitly on
audience choice and genuine interaction
through the provision of communication
pathways that enable audience members to
anticipate the options open to a character at a
given point in the drama and determine the
outcome for themselves.
In order to allow audiences to become co-
writers of the drama, Pask advocated ‘flexible
plot structures with many choice points and
a very much richer structure than is custom-
ary in the theatre at the moment’.64 Eventu-
ally, he believed, playwriting would become
more closely related to computer program-
ming, and the writing of characters’ ‘thoughts’
would take precedence over the writing of
dialogue since this is what would yield the
best opportunities for audience intervention.
Besides troubling the traditional active–
passive designation between performers and
spectators in the theatre, Pask’s goal was to
increase interactivity between different users
within the Fun Palace complex – between
users and the space, and between users, space,
and urban context. At a time when exhibition
interactives too often tend towards gim-
mickry, and CCTV has been put to Orwellian
uses, it is hard for us to appreciate the revolu-
tionary aspect of Pask’s contribution, which
was greatly to enhance the possibilities for
323
IP address: 138.37.211.113
intelligent architecture. As the architect Usman
Haque explains, this was not about making
another piece of high-tech lobby art that responds
to flows of people moving through the space. . . .
It is about designing tools that people themselves
can use to construct – in the widest sense of the
word – their environments and as a result build
their own sense of agency.65
Thus, the Fun Palace would structure and be
structured by the events enacted in, on, and
through it.
Pask used this cybernetic theatre (his pre-
ferred term for the Fun Palace project) as the
material experiment through which the design
team could investigate notions of performat-
ivity and co-operative interplay. His involve-
ment took the Fun Palace project out of the
realm of ‘mere’ physical space and into the
amorphous space of new media, artificial
intelligence, and mass communications, help-
ing Littlewood and Price more effectively to
‘facilitate the emergence of an ephemeral
subjectivity through the theatricality of com-
munication’.66
Programming the facility for fun was not
without its complications: as Committee
members got further into the brief, they be-
came anxious about achieving the right bal-
ance between prescribed uses of the space
and user-led experiments, between freedom
of movement and crowd control, and bet-
ween freedom of expression and anti-social
behaviour. At one meeting of the Cybernetics
Committee, Ascott asked his colleagues: ‘At
what stage do we decide that tastes are
depraved, and should not be catered for? Are
we going to formulate a set of rules?’67 The
project’s promoters might insist that they
were ‘not there to dictate’, and that the Fun
Palace itself ‘strives to be without fixed pre-
conceptions’, but someone would have to
take responsibility.68
The number of self-imposed restrictions
increased in direct proportion to the element
of anarchy implied by the programme. With
one gesture, Littlewood’s scientists drew on
biological models to broaden the scope for
unhampered growth. With another, they
constructed ‘feedback inhibitors and other
forms of control to filter out neurotic
324
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
behaviour and to protect the Fun Palace from
being used in ways not intended by the
project’s originators’.69 This Catch-22 situa-
tion says much about their fears that they
would be censored.
For the authorities to support the Fun
Palace project, they would have to be able to
accept as legitimate the idea of subsidized
culture as pure experiment. There was a
fundamental clash of values involved. Clark
saw that the Fun Palace
presents in its literature an almost infinite series
of possible uses and delights whilst insisting
upon the highest degree of adaptability and
flexibility to suit the demands of the users. This is
its first dilemma. It presents no tangible reality to
the uninitiated. It is undefined possibility and
potentiality.70
Exit the Arts Council
Price’s ‘undefined’ architecture was part of
that commitment to preventing cultural forms
from becoming fossilized. Like him, Little-
wood was only too happy to bring down the
old order. But, in her haste to get as far away
as possible from the British theatre establish-
ment, she used to insist that what she was
doing had ‘nothing to do with the theatre,
the concert hall, or any other formal arts’,
which she wrote off as ‘reactionary non-
sense’.71 This was bad strategy. If the design
team thought it a positive advantage that the
Fun Palace defied straightforward explan-
ation (publicity material asked: ‘What Is It?’),
the Council used the project’s openness as an
excuse to keep the chequebook shut.72
Officially, at least, the question of funding
was still on the table in April 1965.73 But
Holdsworth, who details the ‘mutual suspi-
cions’ that plagued all Theatre Workshop’s
dealings with the Arts Council, believes the
Council saw Littlewood as a liability: ‘crea-
tively ad hoc, administratively irresponsible,
and lacking in accountability’.74 The fact that
Price’s cost-analysis exercises and planning
applications had now reached an advanced
stage did not persuade the Drama Depart-
ment to revise its opinion.75
Abercrombie (a former civil servant at the
Admiralty) had little regard for the Fun
IP address: 138.37.211.113
http://journals.cambridge.org
Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
Cedric Price, interior perspective of the Fun Palace (c. 1964, reprographic copy of pink and green pencil on wove paper (26.4 x 40.4 cm), DR995:0188:525:003:001, Cedric

IP address: 138.37.211.113
Price archive, Collection Centre Canadien d’ Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Reproduced by permission.

325
Palace. In a memo, written the morning after
Littlewood had held a large promotion party,
he admits to having arrived too late to see
the explanatory film.76 Having found the
speakers’ presentations ‘difficult to grasp’,
he failed to catch the names of any of the
project’s Finance Committee, and struggled
to work out what size or number of Fun
Palace sites were being discussed as a series
of figures ranging from £750,000 to £10m
‘started flying round the room’. Abercrombie
decided that the proposals contained ‘no
trace of artistic work such as might call for
Arts Council interest, apart from the one
phrase: “a place where theatre will hap-
pen”.’ 77 Jo Hodgkinson, Head of Drama,
scribbled a quick: ‘What have we got to do
with fun?!’78 on Abercrombie’s note before
passing it on to his colleague Eric White, who
quipped: ‘We do have some already!’79
It would be tempting to conclude that the
Arts Council’s final answer that it ‘cannot
help with the (splendid) fundamental aim’ of
the Fun Palace but w[oul]d be ‘sympathetic
towards the minor elements of good music
and theatre when the opportunity arises’
suggests that there was less risk-taking dur-
ing what is widely hailed as the golden age
of Arts Council funding than one might
expect.80 However, the true significance of
that emphasis on ‘cannot’ is to highlight how
the development of the subsidized arts in
Britain has been conditioned by bureaucratic
definitions and boundaries as much as by
politics, economics, and personal tastes. The
Fun Palace simply did not fit into the exist-
ing ACGB pigeon-holes.
Price and Littlewood continued to look for
a backer throughout the 1960s and into the
early part of the next decade, but their search
was in vain. By 1975 (European Architectural
Heritage Year), when Price declared the Fun
Palace project officially over, there was little
to show for this important forerunner of con-
temporary performative architectures and of
interactive theatre, apart from ‘a collection of
withering memos and tentative promises’.81
In a handwritten letter of c. 1965, Little-
wood tells Peggy Jay, Chairman of the Parks
Committee at the GLC, how ‘the old infra-
mafia-movement which haunts bureauc -
326
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
racies is holding up the chance of new
systems of education starting here.’82
Her words give an acute sense of how artistic
relevance and growth can be stifled by the
rigidity of funding regulations.
Throughout the Arts Council’s history,
policy and patronage have been directed
towards predetermined outputs. This has been
true even when, as in recent years, outputs
have fallen outside the consecrated areas of
cultural production – whereas for Littlewood
and Price the point of theatre and of architec-
ture is to allow us to think the unimaginable.
Notes and References
This article forms part of the research project ‘Giving
Voice to the Nation: the Arts Council of Great Britain
and the Development of Theatre and Performance,
1945–1995’ (University of Reading/Victoria and Albert
Museum). It was researched and written with generous
support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
and Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre
for Architecture. I am most grateful to these organiz-
ations, to colleagues at Reading and the V&A, and to the
NTQ reviewers for their help.
1. Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, ‘A Laboratory
of Fun’, New Scientist, XXII (1964), p. 432–3, at p. 433.
2. According to Nadine Holdsworth: ‘Lee became
immersed in plans for the Open University after
becoming minister for the Department of Education of
Science and, for many, plans for the Open University
superseded the Fun Palace as a more tangible social
experiment that could have lasting benefit for a broader
spectrum of the national population.’ Nadine Holds-
worth, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), p. 228.
3. The most detailed account of the search for sites,
the submission of planning applications, and the prob-
lems the team encountered at local and regional
government levels is supplied in Stanley Mathews, From
Agit-Prop to Free Space: the Architecture of Cedric Price
(London: Black Dog, 2007), p. 82–176. Mathews argues
that the Fun Palace suffered chiefly because of the
reorganization of London’s local government in the
mid-1960s, and the replacement of the London County
Council (LCC) with the larger and less sympathetic
Greater London Council (GLC).
4. Nadine Holdsworth ‘ “They’d Have Pissed on My
Grave”: the Arts Council and Theatre Workshop’, New
Theatre Quarterly, XV, No. 57 (1997), p. 3–16, at p. 3.
5. Joan Littlewood, ‘Proposed Fun Palace for
London’ (1965), in the London County Council archive,
London Metropolitan Archives: LCC/CL/PK/01/103.
6. Among the many social histories of Britain that
provide information about social life, and cultural and
arts policy in relation to changing technology in the
1960s, see Stuart Laing, ‘The Politics of Culture:
Institutional Change’, in B. J. Moore-Gilbert and J. Seed,
ed., Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the
1960s (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 55–73.
IP address: 138.37.211.113
 7. Littlewood, in Littlewood and Price, ‘A Labora-
tory of Fun’, p. 432.
8. See Holdsworth ‘“They’d Have Pissed on My
Grave”’, especially the section: ‘Cultural Confusion in
the Sixties’, p. 9–11.
9. Conservative Party, ‘The Next Five Years: The
Conservative Party’s Manifesto for the 1959 General
Election’ <www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/
con59.htm> accessed 4 November 2010.
10. William Emrys Williams, memorandum to the
Drama Department on leisure-time and leisure activities
(1959) in the archive of the Arts Council of Great Britain,
Victoria & Albert Museum and Archive of Art & Design,
London: ACGB/38/15.
11. Williams, memorandum: ACGB/38/15.
12. Labour Party, ‘Let’s Go with Labour for the New
Britain: the Labour Party’s Manifesto for the 1964 Gen-
eral Election’ <www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man
/lab64.htm> accessed 4 November 2010.
13. Roy Ascott, Cybernetics Committee, minutes
from the second meeting of the Committee at the
Architectural Association, London, 17 March 1965:
DR1995:0188:525:001:008.
14. Cedric Price, interview with Stanley Mathews,
22 January 1999, fragment transcribed in Mathews, From
Agit-Prop to Free Space, p. 66.
15. Arata Isozaki [1975], ‘Erasing Architecture into
the System’, in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Cedric Price: Re:
CP (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003), p. 25–47, at p. 35–6.
16. Cedric Price, ‘Fun Palace Project: Preliminary
Report’ (c. 1964) in the Cedric Price archive, Centre
Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architec-
ture, Montréal: DR1995:0188:001.
17. Cedric Price, ‘Camden Pilot Project Report’,
(1965) in the LCC archive, London Metropolitan
Archives: LCC/CL/PK/01/103.
18. DVD copy of a 16mm negative reversal film of
the Fun Palace by production company Mithras Films,
1964: DR2003:0006.
19. Joan Littlewood, letter to the editor of the
Scotsman, 22 March 1965: DR1995:0188:525:001.
20. Gerry Raffles, letter to the Arts Council, c. 1973:
ACGB/34/68.
21. Joan Littlewood, ‘Non-Program: a Laboratory of
Fun’, in Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, ‘The Fun
Palace’, The Drama Review, XII, No. 3 (1968), p. 127–34, at
p. 130.
22. I am grateful to Simon Trussler for pointing out
this connection. For more information about these events,
see Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance (London:
Routledge, 1992), p. 107 and p. 118–20.
23. Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, Fun Palace
publicity material, c. 1964: DR1995:0188:001:016.
24. Alexander Trocchi, ed., SIGMA Portfolio (London:
Project SIGMA, 1964–196?). See also Alexander Trocchi,
‘SIGMA: a Tactical Blueprint’ (1963?) <www.notbored.
org/sigma.html> accessed 28 September 2010.
25. The extent of inter-influence between SIGMA
and the Fun Palace remains unclear and yet, as Mathews
points out, ‘affinities would hardly be accidental, since
both grew from common ideological and artistic roots’.
Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space, p. 113–14.
26. Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, Fun Palace
promotional pamphlet: DR1995:0188:525:003:004. See
also John Clark, ‘Ideas for the Fun Palace’: DR1995:0188:
525:003:024.
27. John Clark, recorded in Cybernetics Sub-
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
Committee, ‘Form and Amenities’, minutes from a
meeting held at Holborn Town Hall, 5 March 1965:
DR1995:0188:525:001.
28. Murray Melvin, former actor with Theatre
Workshop and current archivist at the Theatre Royal,
Stratford East, remembers that Littlewood was furious
that her project had been sidelined, claiming that the
basic idea for the Open University had been hers.
29. Holdsworth, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre, p. 210–11.
30. Material relating to the Housing the Arts
Committee of Enquiry (1958–9) is contained in ACGB/
43/93.
31. The results of the Housing the Arts Committee of
Enquiry were published as: Arts Council of Great
Britain, ‘Housing the Arts in Great Britain, Part I: The
Needs of the Metropolis / Housing the Arts in Scotland /
Housing the Arts in Wales’ (London: ACGB, 1959), and
Arts Council of Great Britain, ‘Housing the Arts in Great
Britain, Part II: The Needs of the English Provinces’
(London: ACGB, 1961).
32. Holdsworth, ‘“They’d Have Pissed on My
Grave” ’, p. 10.
33. Jennie Lee, ‘A Policy for the Arts: The First
Steps’, Government White Paper presented to Parlia-
ment by the Prime Minister by command of Her Majesty
in February 1965 (London: HMSO, 1965), paragraph 7.
See also paragraph 10.
34. Lee, ‘A Policy for the Arts’, see, in particular,
paragraphs 8 and 54.
35. Cedric Price, draft article, ‘Observations on “A
Policy for the Arts” Government White Paper’ (1965):
DR1995:0188:525:005. Price’s ‘Observations’ also appear
in Ellis Hillman, ed., Essays in Local Government: Vol. 2
(London: Merlin Press, 1967), p. 173–4.
36. Price, ‘Observations on “A Policy for the Arts”’:
DR1995:0188:525:005.
37. The ACGB Committee’s main recommendations
as outlined in the Arts Council of Great Britain, Sixteenth
Annual Report: ‘Partners in Patronage’ (1960–61), p. 13–14,
are: the creation of a circuit of between twelve and
eighteen No. 1 theatres to receive touring productions of
opera, ballet, and drama nationally; the creation or
renovation of a repertory theatre building in every town
of more than 200,000 people; and the creation or
renovation of a public hall suitable for performance in
every town of not less than 100,000 people.
38. Arts Council of Great Britain, Sixth Annual
Report (1950–1), p. 34.
39. Karen King and Mark Blaug, ‘Does the Arts
Council Know What It Is Doing? An Inquiry into Public
Patronage of the Arts’, Encounter (1973), p. 6–16, at p. 14.
40. My views are based on Crozier’s critique of the
Weberian ideal bureaucracy. See Michel Crozier [1963],
The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (London: Tavistock, 1964).
41. Keynes had tried to avoid paying rates on the
ACGB premises by using the Scientific Societies Act of
1843, which allowed exemption for ‘fine arts . . . pro-
vided that such Society shall be supported wholly or in
part by annual voluntary contributions’, but local coun-
cil officers did not consider the ACGB’s grant-in-aid to
classify as ‘voluntary contributions’. See Richard Witts,
Artist Unknown: an Alternative History of the Arts Council
(London: Little, Brown, 1998), p. 151.
42. Nigel Abercrombie and Keith Jaffrey, Council
Paper 447, paragraphs 9 and 10 on ‘New Activities’
(1970), quoted in Robert Hutchison, The Politics of the
Arts Council (London: Sinclair Browne, 1982), p. 109–10.
327
IP address: 138.37.211.113
 43. The accusation against the Arts Council was
made at a conference of 350 artists and others held at St
Katherine’s Docks, London on 8 June 1969, and was
printed in issue 10/11 of the newsletter Circuit. It is
quoted in Hutchison, The Politics of the Arts Council, p. 106.
44. From an Arts Council ‘Bulletin on Housing the
Arts’ (1974): ACGB/38/45.
45 London County Council, ‘Request for Lease on
West Ferry Open Space by Miss Joan Littlewood’, 10
Sept 1963?, p. 1, in the LCC archive, London Metro-
politan Archives: LCC/CL/PK/01/103.
46. For a detailed discussion of the structural engin-
eering, see Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space, p. 77–81.
47. Cedric Price, draft article, ‘The Approach to
Planning’ (c. 1964), p. 5: DR1995:0188:525:001.
48. Ibid., p. 4
49. Ibid., p. 5.
50. Littlewood and Price, Fun Palace publicity
material: DR1995:0188:001:016.
51. Joan Littlewood, ‘ “Theatre” or Fun Palace?’, c.
1964, p. 49–51, at p. 49: in the Theatre Workshop archive,
Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London. No archival
reference is currently available.
52. Ibid., p. 49.
53. Joan Littlewood, letter to Nigel Abercrombie, 14
April 1965: ACGB/34/68.
54. The ACGB was reluctant to get involved with
Centre 42.
55. Reyner Banham, ‘People’s Palaces’, New States-
man, 7 August 1964, p. 191–2, at p. 191.
56. Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘New Babylon: an
Urbanism of the Future’, Architectural Design, XXXIV,
No. 6 (June 1964), p. 304–5.
57. Isozaki, ‘Erasing Architecture into the System’,
p. 35.
58. Planned obsolescence was a lifelong principle of
Price’s. See Cedric Price, The Square Book (London: Wiley
Academy, 2003), and also: Cedric Price, ‘The Built
Environment: the Case Against Conservation’, The
Environmentalist, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1981), p. 39–41.
59. Littlewood and Price, ‘A Laboratory of Fun’, p. 433.
60. See the group of conceptual drawings: DR1995:
0188:010-033.
61. Cedric Price, sketches and drawings for the
Donmar conversion (1963–4): DR0212: 001-016.
62. Gordon Pask, ‘Theatre Workshop and System
Research: Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre’ (1964):
DR1995:0188:525:001:009.
63. Ibid., p. 4.
64. Ibid., p. 6.
65. Usman Haque, ‘The Architectural Relevance of
Gordon Pask’, in Lucy Bullivant, ed., 4dsocial: Interactive
328
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Sep 2013
Design Environments (London: Wiley, 2007), p. 54–61, at
p. 61.
66. Mary Louise Lobsinger, ‘Cybernetic Theory and
the Architecture of Performance’, in Sarah Williams
Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, ed., Anxious Modern-
isms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture
(Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian
Centre for Architecture; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000), p. 119–39, at p. 122.
67. Ascott, recorded in the minutes of the Cyberneics
Sub-Committee, ‘Form and Amenities’ (1965), point 3.
68. [John Clark], ‘Assessment of the Fun Palace
Project’, p. 3: DR1995:0188:525:005. This 9-page report in
the collections at Centre Canadien d’Architecture/
Canadian Centre for Architecture is unsigned but
matches a duplicate identified by Nadine Holdsworth
(2011) as having been authored by Clark in 1966.
69. R. J. G. (Richard Goodman of Brighton College of
Technology? Or, Reginald Goldacre, Chester Beatty
Research Institute? Or R. Gregory, Cambridge
University? All three were members of the Cybernetics
Committee), ‘Fun Palace: Biological Models’, 25 March
1965: DR1995:0188:525:003.
70. [Clark], ‘Assessment of the Fun Palace Project’,
p. 3: DR1995:0188:525:005.
71. Peter Fiddick, interview with Joan Littlewood,
‘Passionate Belief in Her Fun Palace’, Liverpool Post, c.
1964: ACGB/34/68.
72. Littlewood and Price, Fun Palace promotional
pamphlet: DR1995:0188:525:003:004.
73. M. J. McRobert, letter to Joan Littlewood, 20
April 1965: ACGB/34/68.
74. Holdsworth, ‘“They’d Have Pissed on My
Grave” ’, p. 6.
75. Detailed estimates for the Fun Palace scheme
(dated 1965) can be found in DR1995:0188:525:001.
See also Mark Crinson, ‘In the Bowels of the Fun Palace’,
Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net (2007) <www.
metamute.org/en/In-the-Bowels-of-the-Fun-Palace>
accessed 21 October 2010, for a similar viewpoint.
76. Nigel Abercrombie, internal memo, 1 April 1965:
ACGB/34/68.
77. Ibid.
78. Jo Hodgkinson, undated annotation on ibid.
79. Eric White, annotation dated 4 April 1965, ibid.
80. Nigel Abercrombie, annotation dated 14 June
1965 on letter from M. J. McRobert to Joan Littlewood, 20
April 1965: ACGB/34/68.
81. Jane McKerron, ‘Who Will Support the Fun
Palace?’ Tribune, 29 April 1966.
82. Joan Littlewood, letter to Peggy Jay, 1965?:
LCC/CL/PK/01/103.
IP address: 138.37.211.113