"a palace in thunderland sizzling with scientific witches' brews"
But Dylan Thomas's astute poetic eye clearly saw that the Festival's main purposes was to be festive:
"People who have come to the South Bank to study the growth and development of Britain from the Iron Age till now ...will find no braying pageantry, no taxideral museum of Culture, no cold and echoing inhuman hygenic barracks of technical information, no shoddily cajoling emporium of tasteless Empire wares , but something very odd indeed, magical and parochial; a parish-pump made of flying glass and thistledown gauze-thin steel, a rolypoly pudding full of luminous, melodious bells, wheels, coils, engines and organs, alembics and jorums in a palace in thunderland sizzling with scientific witches' brews, a place of trains, bones, planes, ships, sheep, shapes, snipe, mobiles, marbles, brass bands, and cheese, a place painted regardless, and by hand.
Perhaps you'll think I'm shovelling the colour on too thickly; that I am, as it were, speaking under the influence of strong pink. (And what a lot of pink - rose, raspberry, strawberry, peach, flesh, blush, lobster, salmon, tally-ho - there is, plastered and doodled all over this four-acre gay and soon to be gone Festival City in sprawling London.) London: to many of us who live in the country, the Capital punishment. Perhaps you will go on a cool, dull day, sane as a biscuit, and find that the exhibition does, indeeed tell the story of 'British contributions to world civilization in the arts of peace'; that and nothing else. But I'm pleased to doubt it. Of course it is instructive; of course there is behind it an articulate and comprehensive plan; it can show you, unless you are an expert, more about, say, mineralogy or the ironsphere than you may want to know. It's bursting its buttons in an orderly manner, with knowledge. But what everyone I know, and have observed, seems to like most in it is the gay, absurd, irrelevent, delighting imagination that flies and booms and spurts and trickles out of the whole bright boiling; the small stone oddity that squints at you round a sharp, daubed corner; the sexless abstract sculptures serenely and secretly existing out of time in old cold worlds of their own in places that appear, but for one struck second, inappropriate; the linked terra-cotta man and woman fly-defying gravity and elegantly hurrying up a w.c. wall; the sudden design of hands on another wall as though the painter had said: "Oh, to the daft devil with what I'm doing', and just slap-slap-slapped all over the ochre his spread-out fingers and thumbs, ten blunt arrows, or as though large convict-birds, if there are any such, had waddled up the wall and webbed it as they went. You see people go along, briskly down the white white avenues towards the pavilion of their fancy - 'Our Humbert's dead keen on seeing the milk-separators' - and suddenly stop: another fancy swings or bubbles in front of their eyes. What is it they see? Indigo water waltzing to music. Row after row of rosy rolling balls spread on tall screens like the counting beads of Wellsian children fed on the food of the gods. Sheets of asbestos tied on to nowhere, by nothing, for nothing, for nothing is anchored here and at the clap of hands the whole gallimaufry could take off to Sousa and zoom up the flagged sky. Small childbook-painted mobiles along the bridges that, at the flick of wind, become windmills and thrum round at night like rainbows with arms."
Dylan Thomas from "Quite Early One Morning" (as quoted in Bevis Hillier's introduction to the book "A Tonic to the Nation")
