Concretopia
Page 8
The sudden influx of energy played brilliantly to Robert Matthew’s plan to build up his department. He had made the most significant of his early appointments within days of the Festival of Britain being announced: that of talented, easily bored and highly-strung architect Leslie Martin as his new deputy. Martin is generally credited with the design for the Royal Festival Hall, but Matthew had sketched out the initial plans before the appointment was made, working flat out – literally, as a bad back forced him to work lying down – with his drawing board suspended above him on a Heath Robinson-style contraption, and all the while, according to his brother, ‘pumped full of morphia’.6
Building a concert hall next to a busy railway bridge was hardly ideal, and the problem of keeping the rumble of the trains out and the concertos in was a difficult one, solved with an ingenious ‘egg in a box’ design, with the auditorium suspended inside the building to protect its delicate content. ‘Whilst this conception undoubtedly met the scientific requirements,’ Leslie Martin later said, ‘I cannot say that it was achieved by logic. It came, like all ideas, out of the blue, as an arrangement which suddenly seem to fit and to bring into order all the requirements.’7
In the summer of 2011 the Southbank Centre ran a festival of its own, commemorating the 1951 exhibition in a flurry of bunting, beach huts and idiosyncratic events. Abram Games’ famous festival logo – Britannia’s profile topping a star surrounded by bunting – was adapted to make way for branding from MasterCard, as if to hammer home just how far we’ve strayed from the era of the welfare state and nationalisation.
The South Bank and the Festival Hall have long been my idea of the apex of civilisation. As a timid teenager from Croydon I’d travel to watch plays at the National Theatre, rummage for second hand books in the stalls under Waterloo Bridge or hang out in the quiet cafés and drink hot chocolate (coffee being one step too far towards sophistication). Abercrombie and Forshaw’s ‘great cultural centre’ was the place I’d been looking for all my life. And the Festival Hall, beaten up, tired and quiet as it was back then at the end of the eighties, was still one of the most beautiful buildings I had ever seen. There were fossils in the polished marble, contrasting with the warm parquet and the threadbare net-and-ball design carpet that smothered the sound of my footsteps. The glass walls looked out on the Thames, so much of which was shielded from the public by the miles of private developments along the river. There was wood everywhere: ribbed wall panels, cantilevered staircases and chunky curved rails that felt silky smooth to the touch.
Abram Games’ Festival of Britain logo from the cover of the souvenir brochure, and a spread from Design in the Festival, another official publication.
To anyone brought up in postwar Britain, aspects of the design feel familiar from schools, civic buildings and provincial theatres. The brass-tipped cigar shape, so familiar from fifties furniture legs and standard-lamp stems, crops up everywhere, from the shape of the bar to the detail on the balconies. The Festival Hall popularized many styles that were later much imitated elsewhere, but it was built with the best materials around, and as a result retains a sheen of luxury.
Etched glass on the doors of the Festival Hall, just part of the fine detail in this luxurious building.
An extensive refurbishment in the noughties has left us with a brighter, more logical, busier building, bustling from morning to evening with what seem to be locals rather than tourists. Yet even though it’s heaving these days, I still think of it as my secret.
Back in the late forties, over in the Festival of Britain office, another young designer, Hugh Casson, was appointed as the festival Architect. Given a list of exhibits he was expected to deliver in celebration of the British spirit, he set about appointing his own team of architects to create a diverse array of buildings on the small, awkward site split in half by Hungerford Bridge.
To many of the festival’s visitors, it was not only the buildings or exhibits that would have such a startling effect, but the way the entire festival had been laid out. In the Festival Hall café, John Gyford and I took tea amid the melee of the sixtieth birthday celebrations. An unassuming-looking man, balding and casually dressed, he spoke with the ease, charm and confidence of someone used to commanding a room. He recalled how marvellous he had found the exhibition. And it wasn’t necessarily what was inside the different buildings that had attracted him – it was the whole experience.
‘I didn’t talk that sort of language at the time,’ he explained, ‘but I now realise that what I was talking about was design, and the arrangement of buildings and spaces, all that sort of stuff. I just had not dreamt that such things could be. It was a complete revelation.’
We’d both visited the Museum of 1951, an exhibition commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the festival, featuring a nostalgic and engrossing mixture of gentle modernist design, faded relics from the exhibition and oral history. ‘One of the films they’ve got on downstairs about the Festival of Britain,’ said John, ‘was mainly narrated by one of the architects who was involved. I was totally too young to appreciate this at the time, but whereas most great exhibitions, like the World’s Fairs, had been laid out on axial principles’ – John was chopping the air into great right angles at this point – ‘these great axes, this one was laid out on the principle of small spaces leading into and off one another. I could see as he said that how absolutely true that was as an organising principle. I’d never come across something like that before, and so without knowing it was a design principle I was just overwhelmed by it all.’ I thought back to prewar Welwyn Garden City, with its axial layout, and compared it to Harlow, with its wedges, winding roads and deliberate lack of formality: the festival provided another early example of that new approach to laying out buildings. ‘When I was studying planning as a postgraduate student, one of the key books I read was by an American called Kevin Lynch.’ John was referring to an influential 1960 work on planning theory called The Image of the City, which explored the way in which people navigated through urban areas. ‘It was about what was then beginning to be called “townscape”. And he proposed a vocabulary for how to talk about the arrangement of urban spaces and the linkages of openness and closure and the importance of being able to see long distances – or not being able to see long distances. It provided me with the kind of vocabulary that had not been available at the time of the festival.’
The Festival Hall, Dome of Discovery, Skylon and all the other Festival of Britain buildings on the South Bank. © Lambeth Archives Department
Like many postwar planners experimenting with new ideas in ‘townscape’, Hugh Casson decided early on that the layout of the Festival of Britain was as much about what you couldn’t see as what you could. Hungerford rail bridge cut right through the centre of the festival site, so the team decided to use this to help organise the exhibits into two groups. The upstream section by County Hall was to be The Land of Britain; the downstream section by Waterloo Bridge would showcase The People of Britain. Hugh Casson saw the first section as ‘the Origins of the Land, Agriculture, Mining, Industry all grouped around the shining cranium – as we saw it – of invention (hence the Dome of Discovery)’.8 Ralph Tubbs, who had shown his mettle by withstanding the pressure of working in the architecture practice of fearsome Hungarian émigré Ernő Goldfinger, gained the most extravagant commission of the festival for this ‘cranium’. This great umbrella was to house exhibits on the living world, polar exploration, physics, and most dramatically, outer space. His eminent former boss, by contrast, was allocated a rather less impressive structure to design for the festival – a souvenir kiosk on the embankment. George Grenfell-Baines, who’d designed wartime factories, was the perfect person to design the macho Power and Production pavilion, while Basil Spence produced the glass-walled Sea and Ships pavilion, on the site now occupied by the London Eye. ‘The object of an exhibition is to excite and even shock, above all to tell some story quickly and fully,’9 declared Spence, whose building, featuring massive b
isected ships held aloft, wowed the crowds. Yet he felt that his nautical-themed design was treading water: ‘By the time I designed the Sea and Ships pavilion,’ he confessed, ‘I was bored with the stretched glass skin over a frame.’10
A counterpoint to all this masculine endeavour was the downstream section, the People of Britain, built around the LCC’s concert hall site. In Casson’s words this was ‘the Origins of the People through and under the bridge of Education, the English at Home, their character and recreations, the Arts and the Seaside … all grouped around the Festival Hall, still to be built’.11 Here Tubbs’ former colleague H. T. Cadbury-Brown was responsible for the People of Britain pavilion and fountains. ‘It was joyous to work on the first big anything, after years of small exhibitions, alterations and a little housing work,’ he recalled. ‘It was an event for a new dawn, for enjoying life on modern terms, with modern technology.’12 Wells Coates, the Canadian architect of many of Britain’s most celebrated thirties modernist houses, including the pristine white Isokon flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead, created the 400-seat Telekinema, the first cinema in the world designed to show both film and television. The Victorian Shot Tower was transformed into a memorial to the 1851 Great Exhibition, but also housed a radio telescope linked to the Dome of Discovery, where visitors could use it to beam signals at the moon.
A pair of inventive industrial designers, Robert Goodden (fresh from ‘Britain Can Make It’) and Dick Russell (who’d styled cabinets for Murphy radios) put together the most famously eccentric exhibit of the festival: the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, derided by some as sentimental and silly, but loved by many thousands of visitors for precisely the same reason. This barn-like structure featured eye-shaped windows and contained a riot of exhibits on everything from law and religion to the ‘national character’, all extravagantly captioned by a young Laurie Lee of the GPO Film Unit, who’d been appointed to the gloriously titled position of Curator of Eccentricities and Caption-Writer-in-Chief. ‘Don’t tease the locomotives – penalty forty shillings’ ran one caption, while another read ‘Storks nesting over the Birdcage Restaurant’.13 Even the restaurants – storks or no – were of exciting modernist design: one was drawn up by early Harlow pioneer architects, the husband and wife team Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew (who also designed the schools exhibit), and another by Leonard Manasseh, one of the innovative souls behind Hertfordshire’s ground-breaking scheme to build prefabricated schools. Casson and his team of over 100 architecture and design staff worked round the clock, desperate to meet the near-impossible deadline for the opening of the festival.
Over at the LCC’s concert hall site a young architecture student, Jean Symons, had volunteered for what could have turned out to be the work placement from hell. And not just because of the site’s swampy conditions. ‘The whistling and catcalls subsided once they got used to having me around,’ she recalled in the remarkable diary she kept of her time working on site. ‘In fact, catcalls became one of my patent methods of finding out where a new gang had started work.’14 The foundation stone was laid in September 1949 and Symons found the process of watching a building rise from plan to completion utterly fascinating. Her diary is full of delicious details of those frantic months. She noticed, for example, that the architects tended to ‘come to the edge of the sheet just where they encounter a tricky detail – a sort of “continued in our next” attitude and “let’s hope that by then someone else will have worked it out”’.15 Similarly, engineers casually allowed additional half-inches to creep in here and there, only for them later to cause mayhem for the builders and window-fitters, forced to re-cut Portland stone or concrete to fit the windows. ‘It was often hard to believe they were all working for the same firm on the same contract,’ she observed.16
Such had been the lapse in civilian construction during the war years that many of the people working on the project had no experience of building anything of such scale. Frank Lloyd Wright, the grand pioneer of American modernism, visited the LCC while they were working on the Festival Hall. Upon meeting Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin the eminent architect exclaimed, ‘Why you’re just a coupla boys!’17 Yet, at 45, Matthew was an elder by the standards of the concert hall or Festival of Britain teams.
The turbulent political situation was a further complication. There had been a general election in February of 1950 and Clement Attlee’s majority was cut from 146 to a precarious 5. Britain was then dragged into what would be the opening conflict of the Cold War: the Korean War that would last four years. At home, meat rations were cut and coal was in short supply. Yet despite the turmoil, by July 1950 the roof was going on the Festival Hall, and the workers celebrated with an impromptu concert. ‘The first music emitted by the piano,’ noted Jean Symons in her diary, ‘is “Put another Nickel in”, and the first concert, after the meal, consists of traditional Cockney and Irish songs. There is a race up to the roof, to crack a bottle of beer over it and hoist the flags.’18
Back in 1949 Casson had realised that something was missing from his already well-advanced festival plan. One of the original concerns with locating it in a notoriously seedy area was how a crowd might be attracted. ‘As the South Bank is a part of London that people don’t ordinarily go to very much,’ Casson remarked, ‘we must try to somehow link the South Bank to the north bank and make it very easy to go from one to the other.’19 A temporary bailey bridge (a lightweight prefabricated design invented during the war) would be constructed next to the Hungerford rail bridge to help lure visitors, but what was needed, Casson now reckoned, was an eye-catching vertical feature to attract attention from the north bank.
It was decided to launch a competition. A total of 157 entries were received, and in January 1950 it was revealed that the dynamic partnership of Powell & Moya had won with a structure that became known as the Skylon: a 250-foot, 12-sided hollow metal structure, to be made from steel and aluminium. Philip Powell and Jacko Moya were both still in their twenties, but when it came to audacious competition victories they were already veterans. In 1946 they’d triumphed in a rather different Thames-side project – to turn the bomb-damaged wasteland of Pimlico into a vast housing estate of 1,600 flats. Not completed until 1962, Churchill Gardens became one of London’s most significant and influential modern housing estates, still held in high regard by residents and architects alike.
‘Jacko and I did separate entries,’ recalled Powell of their Festival of Britain design. ‘I did a pyramid, a slightly tapering thing, with a zigzag bracing and a coloured pattern, but Jacko’s first sketch felt so right that there was no point going further and we collaborated after that.’20 Moya’s design would then undergo a transformation at the hands of Felix Samuely, their former lecturer at the Architecture Association whom they had also requested as engineer on the project. In Moya’s words he turned the Skylon into ‘something so simple and clean looking that it seemed quite remarkable that it could remain standing’.21 Samuely’s engineering expertise meant that the heavy cables the team had envisaged to hold up the floating cigar design were either drastically reduced or dispensed with altogether. Moya may have had the inspiration, but it was Felix Samuely’s talent that ensured that the ‘vertical feature’ was given the one quality for which it is so fondly remembered: that of seeming to be lighter than air. A final stroke of genius ensured that this late addition to the festival plan by its most youthful team would become the most memorable. A further competition was held to find a name for this extraordinary structure, won by writer Margaret Sheppard Fidler (wife of the chief architect of one of the new town development corporations, at Crawley). ‘We toyed with words like Skyhook and Pylon,’ she said. ‘Suddenly it seemed that “Skylon” would be a good name for this beautiful and exciting adornment to the London sky.’22
The other colossus of the festival was Ralph Tubbs’ vast aluminium umbrella, the Dome of Discovery. With a diameter of 365 feet, this was the largest aluminium structure in the world. While workers on the Skylon dangled at dangerous heights
with a minimum of safety equipment, those in the Dome faced a whole other world of problems. ‘Work inside the Dome was uncomfortable and very dark,’ the artist Barry Evans recalled. Not ideal conditions in which to paint a vast mural representing Captain Scott’s ship, ‘Discovery’. ‘The atmosphere was damp and cold, the lighting was minimal, one electric lamp of 100 watts for a 20 foot or so wall … We were dressed in winter clothes and wearing mittens.’23
Meanwhile, from her vantage point on the roof of the Festival Hall, Jean Symons looked out at Ralph’s Tub and the Thames beyond: ‘St Paul’s seemed to be rearing its head, looking across at Big Ben and saying, “Even if this interloper is going to be the biggest dome in the world, it is only temporary and it is very flat”.’24
As the festival launch date neared it became clear that the LCC team would have neither the time nor the money to complete the concert hall to plan, so elements were dropped to ensure that there would be something serviceable open in time for the festival. Plans for a small hall, art gallery and backstage space were postponed, and instead a temporary back wall was erected from asbestos cement panels.
The acoustics of the concert hall were deemed to be of paramount importance. The ‘egg in the box’ scheme cancelled out the rumble of the trains, and acoustician Hope Bagnall was employed to ensure that the hall’s sound quality would compete with the best in the world. While the outside of the building was being finished with Portland stone, and lobbies were being stuccoed, the auditorium had been lined with high-quality materials rare in any buildings of the austerity generation, such as Derbyshire marble. Fabrics were hung around the auditorium, and doors were insulated with leather. The celebrated designer Robin Day, who along with his wife Lucienne would go on to revolutionise the domestic taste of a generation, was employed as furniture consultant, designing the seats in the hall with the aim of minimising reverb and echo. When all the leather, fabric and wood were in place in the hall, it emerged that Bagnall’s team had done the job of minimising unwanted reverberation rather too well – instead of a recommended concert hall reverb time of 2.2 seconds, they had ended up with a deadening 1.5 seconds. It would be decades before this could be put right.