A Good Vintage Festival

Over the weekend The Royal Festival Hall took on the cultural mantle of all things 1920s-1980s for Vintage festival, and design was very much at the fore.

Designed spaces were led by Wayne and Geradine Hemingway across ten venues within the building and included the small conceptual North-South Divide pub split along the lines of vinyl applied motorway signs, to the cavernous Soul Casino (the Clore Ballroom dressed up like the Wigan Casino), or Leisure Lounge/Down the back of the sofa – a smaller venue co-curated by I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night and Charity Shop DJs.

Leisure Lounge/Down The Back of The Sofa was dressed by Derby Museums as a home circa 1981.

To make a more homely and authentic evocation Derby Museum’s assistant head of museums Jonathan Wallis says, ‘Rather then make a space which feels it has come from a textbook, the latest objects are from that period but other things are from earlier then that.’

It also gave the museum the opportunity ‘to use parts of our collection we don’t often get the chance to show,’ Wallis adds.

Watching bands from a giant living room is a warm, disarming and uninhibiting experience, we would add.

In the same space I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night had commissioned a self-playing piano created by Designers Front.

A brilliant  but ghostly apparition,  as visitors walk past, motion sensors pick up their movement which depresses keys, the hammers within and the sustain peddle.  Spooky. You can watch their wonderful video here.

Outside, the Vintage Marketplace hosted 250 stalls run by purveyors of clothes, accessories, mid-century modern homewares, records and music.

Design Week was there on Friday, tried to get round everything and still didn’t manage to see it all. Vintage was a trove, and at its busiest over  the Saturday and Sunday according to Wayne Hemingway, who told Design Week this morning, ‘We were mobbed’ and that both days ‘sold out.’