Suffragette City | Gasholder review

Excerpt from the Gasholder review for Suffragette City, London Pavilion.

"It’s February 1912, and Lillian Ball – a working class dressmaker and mother-of-three from Tooting – has just received a letter from Emmeline Pankhurst. Having spent the last few years in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Lillian is familiar with the suffrage movement, however, the morning’s post brought with it a significant change in stakes – she’d been called to take more militant steps in her pursuit of equality."

"Alongside hundreds of other women, Lillian tentatively decides to take up the offer, volunteering her services in a window-smashing campaign in London’s West End. Charged with the slogan “better broken windows than broken promises,” Lillian makes her way to the Gardenia restaurant, a hub of suffragette activity in Covent Garden – and this is where we enter the loop."

"In a replica of this restaurant – all striped in the purples and greens of the women’s movement – the National Archives and National Trust have just launched an immersive reconstruction of Lillian’s experience to mark 100 years since the partial granting of women’s suffrage.   
Upon entry into the faux-Gardenia, which has been set up in Piccadilly Circus, participants are posed with the exact question uttered to Lillian on that night: “Do you want a long or short prison sentence?”

Review by Claire Hand  
Photography by Oskar Proctor  
For the full review please go to Gasholder