ABSTRACT
On the morning of the Capitol riots, former-US President Donald Trump deployed another crucial spatial strategy, a collective oratorical rally in Washington DC’s Mall. This chapter looks to another city rarely associated with populist ultra-nationalism – London – to see how the political rally was reshaped in the 1930s as a spatial expression of Fascist ideology in emulation of the Nüremberg pageants in Nazi Germany.
It focusses on two rallies by the British Union of Fascists in exhibition centres in west London: on June 7, 1934 at Olympia, and on July 16, 1939 in Earl’s Court. In showing how the British Union’s tactics under Oswald Mosley changed architecturally, links are made to Fascist Italy and Germany, and to innovations in US corporate capitalism. Mosley’s aestheticisation of politics turned it into mass spectacle, relying heavily on the manipulation of architectural space.
Other 1930s factors are woven in – including concerns about Britain’s declining empire, the ideological views that led a few architects to join Mosleyite Fascism, and the destabilisation by US technologies of British architectural beliefs. The chapter’s final section compares right-wing populism in Britain today to note that ultra-nationalists are now reliant upon US-based transnational media companies to spread Neo-Fascist ideology.
