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Lecture 08.04.25: A Life in Bat'a Modernism: Straight Lines, Flat Roofs & Planned Communities
A Talk by Sir John Tusa on Tuesday 8th April 2025, 6.30pm, in the Embassy of the Czech Republic, 26-30 Kensington Palace Gardens, London W8 4QY.
Sir John Tusa was born in Zlín. Two days before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, John’s father flew out of Czechoslovakia on a Bat'a company plane via Poland, Yugoslavia and France, becoming general manager and later managing director of the Bat'a factory and its associated village in East Tilbury. British Bat'a Shoes, based on the Czechoslovak pattern, created a pioneering work-living community around its model modern movement factory - estate houses, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and factory buildings all in for 1930s England: a radical concept within the architecture of European High Modernism. Superbly illustrated, the talk includes some 50 slides of Zlín and Tilbury, including historic videos of East Tilbury and Coronation Day celebrations.
"From the Neo-Bauhaus Modernism of my birth town, Bat'a Zlín, to the so-called 'Brutalism' of the Barbican, I have always lived comfortably with Modernism. After all, it is the architecture of my life and times."
Sir John Tusa is a writer, TV journalist and arts administrator.
Price £15 including a glass of wine. Order and pay online here.
Reserve a place (pay at door) here: www.czechfriends.net/friends-events
Upper images courtesy of the Thomas Bata Foundation. Lower image courtesy of Weidenfeld, publisher of 'Making a Noise', the memoir of Sir John Tusa ISBN: 9781474607087
