The architect Edward Mills (1915-1998) was recorded for the NLSC by Louise Brodie in 1997 for Architects' Lives. In this edited extract he recalls his work for the Festival of Britain. "The first exhibition work I did was the Festival of Britain. It had a fixed date for completion because the Queen was going to open it and when they were half-way through actually building it, they suddenly realised they'd forgotten to make any provision for the administration of the exhibition. There was nowhere for the many hundreds of people who actually worked there all the time, for changing rooms, canteens, band rooms, first aid facilities for staff and that sort of thing. They'd forgotten all about this. The chairman of the Architecture Committee was commissioned by Hugh Casson to find somebody to do the job in double-quick time. And so one evening my wife had a phone call - I think I was teaching at the time in the evenings - from Howard Lobb, the chairman of the Committee, saying would I take on the job? So after blinking two or three times and realising we'd got a terribly tight schedule, I said, 'Yes'. Well, it was too good an opportunity to miss and it was very exciting. "

"Our site was a difficult one, it was right along the edge of Waterloo Bridge and part of the site had old vaults left over from the original Waterloo Bridge so our job was to put a building up there, which we did. It was a four storey steel-framed building, light steel. The theory, of course, was that all the buildings were supposed to last for six months only but of course they all had to comply with the London Building Act, and the District Surveyor was as much interested in the buildings on the exhibition site as he would have been in any other permanent building, so in point of fact the buildings could have remained for many years and you can't design a temporary building to last only for six months. We had to comply with the requirements of the London Building Act, the fire requirements and everything else. That's why in my view it was a great shame the thing was pulled down. It ought to have been kept like the Tivoli Gardens and would have become a major tourist venue for London. But that's another story."

"So we tackled this job. It was a tight programme. It was very interesting to me personally because I was surrounded by old friends. The site next door was the Telecinema and that was done by Wells Coates, an old friend of mine. On the other side was the Regatta Restaurant and the East Entrance, done by Max Fry, my old boss and immediately in front of me was Homes and Gardens, done by Katz and Vaughan, Reg Vaughan, an old friend of mine. So it was a little family party, really. But it worked. We managed to get it finished and the building was opened - the week before the Queen opened the main exhibition - by Wilfred Pickles with the Have a Go Show. The canteen, of course, was big enough to hold three hundred people and it had all the facilities that they required and it worked very well."

"The other part of it, which was pure fun, was the boundary of the exhibition site which overlooked Waterloo Station. Hugh Casson, who was the overall designer, wanted a screen there which wouldn't block the light out or wouldn't be intrusive but would break up the pattern of Waterloo Station. So we devised a scheme consisting of coloured balls arranged in panels which in the end became quite well-known. In a sense the science background to the exhibition was the atom and so these were atomical symbols although, oddly enough, it became known as the Abacus Screen, which in a way was equally scientific - the prehistoric calculator. Only a week or two back there was a shot of it in colour on television. Whenever they do anything about the fifties or the Festival, they always include a shot of my screen, which is rather nice. I did the original sketch. It worked very well because it broke up the pattern and it didn't obstruct anything. The only people who complained were the bus drivers because we flood-lit it to begin with and they complained the floodlights got in their eyes so we had to dim the floodlights and in the end we scrapped them altogether. Apart from that, a lot of people remember the Festival of Britain not for the Dome of Discovery but for the Abacus Screen. Sandersons actually produced a curtain fabric using the screen as a basic pattern."

In these edited extracts Hugh Casson (1910-1999) remembers the South Bank site before work on the Festival began:

"[The Festival of Britain was] a device, really, for getting the South Bank done. Herbert Morrison, a tremendously keen South Londoner, had said 'Nobody goes to the South Bank, they try not to go to the South Bank, it's because it's nothing but mud and rotting wharves, and rubble, and industry, and warehouses, misery and poverty, and railway lines. And we must clear it up.' This was about October, and we were rather excited about this. And we went down, and it was, in fact, a very romantic place. There was no embankment wall. There was one tree, which is still there, near the Festival Hall now. It was bisected by a railway line, and, under the arches, were people bashing out mudguards and selling disused motor bikes and that sort of thing. And the railway divided the site almost exactly in half. "

"Downstream from the railway, was the Shot Tower, which had been there for about 150 years, I suppose. And that was working. It was one of the few things on the site which actually was operating. And the Shot Tower is an extraordinary device. It's a factory chimney, with a staircase inside it, and you take hot lead up to the top, and you drop it down, in drops, and the drops don't make tears as you'd expect, to get thicker as they go, they're absolutely perfect globes, and they're tiny, they're absolutely wee, like the shot you get inside a cartridge. And there were two old men, one at the bottom and one at the top. The one at the top was the one with the hot lead, and he dropped it down into a cold bucket at the bottom, and it cooled it off at once, and then it was taken away and sold. And these two old boys were rather like two old fishermen in a boat, they'd been there for years. And they didn't speak, most of the time they were separated by 150 feet of shaft. Later on, I remember, a girl came to us and said she was a poet, and could she come and sit at the foot of the Shot Tower, she thought it might be inspiring. I remember I gave her an admission card to do this, but she never sent me any poem, and I never heard what had happened."

"I took over [design of] the Shot Tower, which was my favourite building on the whole site. And we put [on] the Shot Tower, we put an anti-aircraft gun mounting, and a great dish to send messages to the moon, which was regarded as frightfully advanced in those days. And the Army provided the anti--aircraft gun, and hauled it up the chimney and the rope broke and it dropped to the bottom of the shaft, which was about 150 feet I suppose. And the whole Shot Tower jumped off the foundations. It dropped again, just about half an inch out of where it had been - one solid cigarette. Thank God!"  

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