Guinness o'clock

The Festival Pleasure Gardens in Battersea Park were created as an amusement park for the Festival of Britain in 1951. One of its main attractions was a 25-foot-high novelty clock built by the brewing company Guinness. This looked like a Heath Robinson contraption but was actually a sophisticated piece of engineering designed not only to tell the time but to offer an elaborate, four-minute-long clockwork display involving models of characters from Guinness advertising.

Crowds gathered to watch the clock in action and it was so popular that copies were built and sent around the country. They continued to delight visitors to many seaside resorts until the 1960s. The last examples were sent to the scrapyard in 1966.