The house New Zealand built in England

London : The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, 1950. Oblong quarto, full crushed red morocco by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, London, the panels ruled and lettered in gilt, spine in compartments with raised bands, ruled in gilt, all edges gilt, endpapers creased, introductory text, 35 original photographs mounted on cards with printed captions opposite. Ex-library the University of National Development Library, Canberra, with library stamps and cancel marks to the front pastedown and the text sheet.

In 1950 the Government of New Zealand transported by sea a full domestic house to London for display at The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, to show Londoners what daily life looked like on the other side of the world. This fascinating album documents the exhibition, the transportation of the house and its assembly, the New Zealand women studying in London who served as hostesses for the visitors, and some of the notable signatories who visited the house, including Queen Mary, Princess Elizabeth (later Queen), Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Kent, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and others.

‘This album is the record of a unique enterprise which has successfully served two purposes. It has placed attractively before a multitude of home-lovers in Britain the products of the great Dominion it represented, and it has shown intending immigrants of that Dominion the sort of home life they can look forward to when their turn comes to sally forth. For the first time a complete Dominion home was transported 12,000 miles by sea to be set up, furnished and provisioned in England, so that a great throng of home-lovers might saunter through it and see it in detail, as a portrayal of the way of life on that other side of the world’ – the introduction.

This album is bound and finished to the highest standard by the eminent bookbinders Sangorski & Sutcliffe, no doubt for one of the prominent figures involved in the project. Possibly a unique example, it entered the University Collection about 1957 (the earliest library stamp) and was subsequently deaccessioned, making its way to a charity book fair in Canberra where we acquired it.