EXCERPTS FROM "THE NEW LOOK" BY HARRY HOPKINS, PUBLISHED IN 1963 BY SECKER & WARBURG.
His view of the Festival of Britain concentrates almost entirely on the South Bank Exhibition to the exclusion of all the other events, so references to 'the Festival' are more to the South Bank Exhibition than to the rest of the 1951 nationwide celebration. He even excludes all the other exhibitions in London, but otherwise it is very well written.
(Errors in the original text, which have been corrected, are highlighted in bold: 1924, not 1922; Oyster Creek, not Oyster 'Perch' and Emett, not 'Emmett')
CHAPTER 23, "CONTEMPORARY"
"1951 should be a year of fun, fantasy and colour, a year in which we can, while soberly surveying our great past and our promising future, for once let ourselves go..." (Gerald Barry, Director-General of the Festival of Britain, Press Conference, 14th October, 1948.)
Grey, battered old London was beginning to preen herself again. In St. James' s Park, the newly painted stucco of Nash's Carlton House Terrace shone white through the trees. And office workers, pouring each morning over Waterloo Bridge, paused - as they had from time to time since the new river wall was started in 1949 - to watch, rising over 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."
Whether that gesture ought, in fact, to be made had been the subject of controversy from the start. It was, some protested, an ill-timed frivolity. A monstrous waste of scarce materials. A political stunt by Herbert Morrison - "Lord Festival" as the papers called him. As the warehouses and mean streets which had so long disgraced the south banks of the Thames were torn down in preparation, a process begun by Goering's bombers, the storm grew. The site, announced Professor A.E Richardson would give rise to the most dangerous congestion. Chelsea borough councillors voted to boycott the whole affair.
But as time went on, and from the grandstand 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 spidermen crawling about the complicated steel latticework of a sprawling structure which those-in-the-know said was to be "The Dome of Discovery". By the end of November, when the all-metal roof was in position, the thing looked like some squat, gigantic, mushroom. By March of the following year, when the famous "Vertical Feature" - now officially named the Skylon - floated upon its cradle of cables, people were beginning to experience the first stirrings of the "Festival spirit". There was a growing sense that something unusual and somehow significant was afoot.
On 3rd May, the King speaking into a microphone set up on the west steps of St. Paul's, declared the Festival of Britain open. His voice, relayed by radio all over the world, was firm. Standing there on the steps of St. Paul's with his family around him, he appeared to the watching crowds on Ludgate Hill his usual modest, conscientious self, fully recovered, it seemed from the serious arterial ailment in the legs that had laid him low two years before. But many, when they examined the close-up photographs in the papers afterwards, were shocked to see how drawn and tired his face looked.
That first Friday was a grey, drizzling London day, turning to heavy rain in the afternoon. The gay umbrellas of the Festival's many open-air cafes were sodden and there were pools of water on the paths. Even so, it was soon evident to the eager ticket- holders who streamed across the Bailey bridge - its coloured spinners rattling their invitations from sixty-foot masts - that if the weather was traditional English, the show was not.
In the memories of many on the South Bank that afternoon still stirred memories of the Imperial pomps of the Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924. This, it was immediately clear, was a thousand miles from all that. Here was no Elgarian evocation of our mighty past, but a whole, crisp new world, a clean break.
Making a virtue of necessity, the Festival's designers had taken taken the available materials, wood, plastics, glass, fabrics, asbestos, and combined them with imagination and skill. Aluminium brought lightness and sparkle; wood, showing its natural grain, contributed mellowness; great walls of glass, and light, unsupported ramps of concrete, gave a wondrous illusion of space. Even so ephemeral a material a material as canvas or perforated hardboard was used with highly civilised effect. Chairs, made from wire or bonded sheet-wood, would have baffled Chippendale, yet were strangely comfortable and if, some thought them precious, others found them elegant. Everything, the litter baskets, the signboards, the plant pots, the conical metal lampshades, seemed fresh and new. People soon began to sense that a common approach, a recognisable style, ran through them. It came, to some, as a revelation.
The site proved to have been an inspired choice. The Thames, London's true heart, came into its own again, united old and new worlds across its grey water, lending an almost extra dimension to the tiny, twenty-seven acre, area. From this "South Bank" Londoners discovered a new magic in their city, an aspect familiar, rich, yet hitherto rarely seen- the historic skyline of the Victoria Embankment sweeping down in its stately curve from Wren's dome to the towers of Westminster.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 had been outward-looking; the Festival of 1951 was addressed primarly to the British people themselves. It was not exultant, but psychotherapeutic...
Festival Year resumed the search - and resumed it with a new deliberation. In this new phase of life, the nation groped towards a new balance towards its past, its present and its future. Churchillian historical rhetoric had resounded well enough from the sounding board of war; in the age of Pax Americana, it rang a little hollow. So the "Festival style" was clean, bright, and new. It looked neither to classical Athens, nor Imperial New Delhi, not to chromium-plated skyscraping New York, but to the modest, model social democracies of Scandinavia. It caught hold quickly and spread first across London and then across England. And the name it acquired in doing so was significant, too: 'Contemporary'.
In an island hitherto largely given up to gravy browns and dull greens, 'Contemporary' boldly espoused strong primary colours. "After that long grey winter," wrote a woman reporter, visiting the Festival, "this galaxy of colour was like a glass of champagne. Everywhere I looked brought fresh impact - vivid reds, blues, greens, lemon yellows - bubbles pricking my nose."
Everywhere, pervading the Festival grounds, was this strange "un-English" atmosphere of space and light and sparkle. And when night fell, the whole Festival acquired a new magic, with the Skylon shining mysteriously in the sky, the diners in the new Festival Hall's restaurants gazing through that huge glass wall over the dark glistening waters, and down below the river boats coming and going, carrying visitors to the rocco delights of the Festival Pleasure Gardens - opposite the long-vanished Cremorne- and located, improbably, in Battersea.
It was a premeditated departure, all this - the colour, the striped umbrellas, the open-air cafes and the rest, a deliberate disowning of the old Puritan "taking-our-pleasures-sadly" tradition, a ceremonial re-erection of the maypole. It was a throwing off of the stifling weight of Victorian grandeur, a clearing out of the last of the Wolseley helmets, Zulu assegais, and faded Edwardian red plush from the national attic.
The famous old English Philistinism was likewise being ritually discarded. With its emphasis on design, its many murals, sculptures, reliefs and "mobiles", commissioned from old and new British artists, the Festival - in a manner quite unlike any earlier one in Britain - was suffused, almost dominated by the arts...
In the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, designed to present "The British Character", the visitor, entering, was confronted by a lion and a unicorn in plaited straw, tugging on a rope which opened a wickerwork cage from which streamed white plaster doves. At the end of the floor, Tenniel's White Knight - a disembodied purple-gloved hand patting him on the back- presided on a prancing steed over an area devoted to British "Eccentricity and Humour"...
Meanwhile, out at Festival Gardens, Nellie, the wayward locomotive of the Far Twittering and Oyster Creek Railway, loving constructed with preposterous funnels, weather-cock, frying-pans and cobwebs to the design of Emett, of "Punch", was drawing crowded trains through Tottering Woods! ...
It was a pleasant idea, and, by 1951, we were able to include under the vast canopy of the Dome of Discovery much that lent it colour. There were those two key, war-forced inventions, Watson-Watt's radar and Whittle's - and the world's first turbo-jet engine. There was the medical revolution in which Fleming's discovery of penicillin at St. Mary's had been central. On display under the Dome, too, was a model of the atomic pile which that winter was to warm the buildings at Harwell...
The crowds, milling on the South Bank, craned their necks to exclaim at the vast wing span of the Brabazon airliner as it flew over the Festival grounds, a 130-ton, 100 seater giant, designed - as they had so often read in the papers over the past few years - to beat the Atlantic head-winds and fly to New York non-stop...
It was not, in fact until 1951 that the "marriage of art and science" so prematurely by Prince Albert in 1851 really began to find its feet. It proclaimed itself, for instance in the beauty of the Comet, dictated by aerodynamics, yet achieving perfection of form. It announced itself, more controversially, in the Festival Hall, the first modern postwar building in London, a scientifically designed concert hall with seats for 3,000, insulated and suspended like an egg on a cradle, a place of space and light and simple gaiety totally unlike anything the capital had known before. It showed itself at a thousand points in the Festival, where a large number of young architects and designers had been given the chance of their lives and had seized it with both hands.
The time had been ripe. For these young men "modernism" was no longer the unsure and brittle affair of chromium-plate and "streamlining" it had all too often been in the interwar years: it was the air they breathed. So the young, for once, built their world - and the young acclaimed it. When 1950 ended Britain had stood poised between the old world and the new. The Festival of 1951 gave her a playful push, over the threshold, into the Future.
Thus the Festival's therapy was effective therapy. The Korean War might drag miserably on. Prices might spiral. But Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Citizen and their children, as they trudged around the bright pavilions, ate ice-cream under the striped umbrellas, put on their "3-D" polaroid spectacles in the "Telecinema", watched the "water mobile" splashing away outside Basil Spence's Ships and Sea Pavilion, or took a river-boat down to Battersea, were conscious not only of aching feet but of widening horizons.
While they remained within the Festival's twenty-seven-acre "New Britain", euphoria continued. But the moment they stepped beyond the bright coloured screen, and picked up a newspaper, the dream dissolved abruptly.
"It was nice, wasn't it, last year, Festival Year? It was the nicest thing that happened in England in the whole of my life." (Marghanita Laski writing in "The Observer", 1952)