Ideal Home Show

Wareham Smith, advertising manager of the Daily Mail, founded the exhibition as a marketing event for the newspaper.

[3] The inaugural Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition was opened by the Lord Mayor of London at Olympia and the Daily Mail explained that you would see: Streets of a town lined with hundreds of bright little buildings of varying shape and design – red roofed cottages, brown bungalows, and gaily coloured pavilions – and moving between them endless lines of interested visitors.Visitors queued to view the furnished houses and to tour a landscaped garden.

A dispute about the content of a room designed by members of the Omega Workshops for the 1913 show was instrumental in the secession of several artists from that group.

[6] The Second World War meant that the exhibition was suspended from 1940 to 1946 but from 1947 onwards it continued to grow, culminating in a huge attendance in 1957 of almost 1.5 million people.

The show continued to "Educate and Entertain" throughout the decades and in 1953, year of the Coronation of Elizabeth II, the exhibition even featured a two-thirds scale copy of the state coach.

In 1957 the British housewife still spent an average of 70 hours a week on housework The 1960s was an era of forward-looking fashion and the first humans on the Moon, yet the most popular house style of the period was mock-Georgian.

Through the 1990s, a new shopping experience was developed for the Show, with entertainment high on the agenda and a mission to provide everything for the home in one environment.

A mannequin of Bassey, dressed in tight-fitting sequined nightie, was stood – arms outstretched – as though she'd just got out of bed to sing "Goldfinger" to members of the public passing through her Ideal Home bedroom.