Page 12 - VE Magazine- Issue 51 - Free Digital Edition

The fondly remembered Skylon and all of the key Festival buildings were floodlit during the night Ships Pavilion, The Shot Tower and The Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion. The Festival emblem was the product of a design competition organised by the Arts Council and the Council for Industrial Design. The Festival Office requested submissions from 12 selected designers, representing both the established names of British commercial art as well as some of the younger person- alities of design. Amongst those chosen for inclusion were Reynolds Stone, Milner Gray, Richard Guyatt and Lynton Lamb; amongst Below left and right: The Festival emblem was freely available to official and unofficial users alike. A small selection of items are shown here including a ‘Dan Dare’ pocket watch – when the Festival ended in 1952, a few jewellers who still had these watches for sale, simply replaced the back with a plain one the newer names were Abram Games, Tom Eckersley, FHK Henrion and Robin Day. The brief suggested that the symbol must be suitable for use on letter headings, tickets, posters and badges, and also larger scale for architectural detail. The winning design, by Abram Games, presented Britannia, in pro- file, above a four-pointed star representing the points of a compass to illustrate the truly national aspect of the Festival. A festive spirit was incorporated into the design through the addition of a swag of red and blue bunting that enclosed the date, 1951. Abram Games was fiercely protective of the commercial value and intellectual prop- erty of his designs. However, the Festival emblem was made freely available to official and unofficial users alike. The simplicity of the emblem made it ideally suited for use on any surface and in every size. In just five months more than eight and a half million people visited the Festival site whilst other exhibitions were held in Poplar, East London (Architecture), Battersea Park (The Festival Gardens), South Kensington (Science) and the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow (Industrial Power). There were travelling exhibitions that toured Britain by land and sea, and major celebrations took place in Cardiff, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bath, Perth, Bournemouth, York, Aldeburgh, Inverness, Cheltenham and Oxford. As you can imagine, the souvenirs of the Festival take a very wide range of forms, offering a vast amount of choice for today’s collector! ve 12 / April/May 2020 / ve www.vintagexplorer.co.uk