Symposium: Immigrant Contribution to the Festival of Britain

Marking 75 years since the Festival of Britain, St John's Waterloo (a building that was the official Festival Church at the 1951 event), presents this special Symposium.

A Tonic to the Nation: Immigrant Contribution to the Festival of Britain, is day-long Symposium of illustrated talks, discussions and presentations that will explore an important but still widely overlooked aspect of the Festival and its legacy: namely, the disproportionately large creative input of those from (mostly) Jewish immigrant families and of former refugees from Nazism – many of them imprisoned behind barbed wire as so-called ‘enemy aliens’ only eleven years earlier.

The symposium programme includes talks and discussions by various academics on the contributions and visionary inputs of émigré and refugee designers, architects, artists, scientists and photographers to the Festival and to Britain's wider cultural life.

Following the Symposium, in the evening the church hosts Émigré Cabaret, a concert by tenor Norbert Meyn and pianist Christopher Gould telling the story of émigré musicians who rebuilt their lives in Britain during the Second World War.