In the summer of 2023, on a bright and brilliant day, I decided to down tools, pull myself away from work emails and take a road trip.

My car was in for service and a family member had lent me their sportscar. I decided to take her for a spin, remembering an antiques market at Kempton Park. I remember that drive out of London on that hot June day: the sun shining, the car moving, the music playing. I remember an incredible sense of freedom.

My child-rearing days are, for the most part, over. My personal obligations to others significantly decreased. I have a good job I love. I earn enough money to have a roof over my head, to pay my bills and to support my children. I have food in my fridge.

I remember thinking that day, on that drive: I have never had it so good.

When I reached Kempton Park, I poked around various stalls. As I was debating whether I needed or wanted some large vintage shop letters and where I would put them, I walked into the market stall of an ephemera dealer. 

There, a whole book of wallpaper samples. Over there, prints and prints and prints, evidently ripped out of old books. And then, a tin box containing political badges.

I gently rifled my way through them intrigued to see if I could find anything related to the monograph I was researching and writing on the relationship between UK political parties and design.

And then my eye fell to a stack of pamphlets, all neatly contained in plastic sheaths, all clearly dating from the 1950s and 1960s. Hastily I fell upon a Labour Party pamphlet, the details of which I could clearly see peeking out from its place in the pile. 

But as I lifted it out, underneath I saw a pamphlet with the familiar Britannia head, and the unfamiliar title Festival of Women. Without thinking much further or rifling through the pile anymore — something which I now admit I somewhat regret — I took both pamphlets, paid for them quickly and left, eager to get home and start researching this festival. I had automatically assumed that my lack of knowledge about the 1957 Festival of Women was my own oversight.

I got home, read through the programme, pulled out the books, sat down at my computer and learnt nothing.

I could not find the Festival of Women; it appears to be missing from the historical record.

Since then, I have been intermittently trying to find out more, to try to understand why such an extraordinarily titled festival had been planned and staged in 1957. And what was its impact on the lives of women in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The discovery of this pamphlet and my research in uncovering the history of this overlooked festival led to me presenting a paper at the Design History Society’s Annual Conference Border Control: Excursion, Incursion and Exclusion, at University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, in September 2024.

This paper, called ‘We Have Never Had It So Good: The 1957 Festival of Women Rediscovered’, was part of the panel Women and Design’s Professional Boundaries, with design historians Professor Anne Massey and Dr Zoë Hendon.

Anne, Zoë and I are now developing the papers for publication, with a view to publishing a small book with my colleague, the designer and publisher Guglielmo Rossi in April this year.