Page 11 - VE Magazine- Issue 51 - Free Digital Edition

THE FESTIVAL WAS CONCEIVED as an street festivals after all this tragedy is over. May 1951, and grey battered old London was Like so many streets across the country, including my own, Helpline groups have been set up bringing neighbours together, which is so heart-warming. We certainly will all be coming together for a tonic... or two! The 1951 Festival was an attempt to give Britons a feeling of recovery and progress and to promote better-quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities follow- ing the Second World War. The after-effects of war were still dominating British industry when the Festival of Britain came along in event to commemorate the centenary of The Great Exhibition of 1851. It was the brainchild of Gerald Barry and the Labour Deputy Leader Herbert Morrison who described it as “a tonic for the nation”. At a press conference in 1948 Gerald Barry stated: “1951 should be a year of fun, fan- tasy and colour, a year in which we can, while soberly surveying our great past and our promising future, for once let ourselves go...” In true British spirit, I too have heard talk of beginning to preen herself once again. Office workers, pouring each morning over Waterloo Bridge, paused – as they had from time to time since the new river wall was start- ed in 1949 – to watch the rising on the South Bank, the curious skeletal shapes of what, it was explained, was to be a national gesture of faith in the future, a ‘Festival of Britain’. Wheth- er that gesture ought, in fact, to be made had been a subject of controversy (much the same as the 1851 Great Exhibition) from the start. It was, some protested, an ill-timed frivolity; a monstrous waste of scarce raw materials; a pol- itical stunt by Herbert Morrison – ‘Lord Festival’ as the papers called him! But as time went on, and from the grand- stand of the Victoria Embankment, Londoners looked across the river to watch the rubble mountains giving way to vague, mysterious shapes, the mood imperceptibly changed. All through the summer of 1950 visitors enjoyed the free show of spider men crawling about the complicated steel latticework of sprawling structures. The main structures consisted of The Fes- tival Hall, the centrepiece of the South Bank, which exemplified the rational, democratic and Utopian ideals of the Festival and earned its title of ‘The People’s Palace’. The largest building was The Dome of Discovery, which was a flat, flying-saucer-shaped structure. The most spectacular characteristics of the Dome were its scale and polished roof, the largest aluminium structure ever built. The exterior was so arranged as to provide a canopied area of shelter. These were furnished with the spe- cial chairs designed for the Festival by Ernest Race and Robin Day. The Skylon was a piece of architectural sculpture created as a vertical feature, and cleverly designed to have no visible means of support. The Skylon was possibly the most popular and fondly remembered element of the South Bank. Then there was the Sea and Above left: Detail of the emblem designed by Abram Games. Left: ‘Aerial view of the Festival of Britain, London’, 1951 by JDM Harvey. Below: Millions of www.vintagexplorer.co.uk postcards were produced for the Festival