Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  At one point a dispute about carpentry overtime threatened to derail the construction of the auditorium, but when a ballot of workers was taken, only 12 out of 800 voted in favour of industrial action. Even so, the planners were haunted by fear of worker action. ‘One day, when crossing the foyer, I see about 20 men with their arms raised and assume some form of vote is being taken,’ wrote Jean Symons in her diary. ‘A couple of steps later, a light-reflection reveals the sheet of glass they are carrying.’25 In the event, even a fire in the roof of the Festival Hall didn’t stop work being completed a month ahead of schedule in December 1950. It was a near miracle, but both the LCC and Festival of Britain teams hit their deadlines.

  The start of 1951 saw a steady stream of high-profile visitors to the South Bank as the LCC, and Gerald Barry’s festival committee attempted to hype their wares to the world at large. The King dropped by in a torrential rain shower. A string of modern architecture’s luminaries followed Frank Lloyd Wright to visit Robert Matthew’s young team, including former Bauhaus masters Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, and the holy father of modern architecture himself, Le Corbusier, who declared that ‘the whole world will admire your concert hall’26 before fixating on the most startling detail of the entire building, the boxes in the auditorium, extruding from the wall like a succession of filing cabinet drawers. ‘These boxes are a joke, of course,’ he declared. ‘But a good joke.’27

  The much-tweaked Festival Hall in 2013, a building finished just in time for the Festival in 1951.

  Many of the auditorium’s designers at the LCC thought the design of the festival around their hall was a joke too far, one of the team remarking that ‘we despised the Casson approach which was the Festival of Britain; we all thought it was crap, actually.’28 They were not alone: Beaverbrook’s media empire, led by the Daily Express, was energetically stoking anti-festival feeling in a way reminiscent of recent press coverage of the London Olympics. Cheerleaders such as the left-leaning Picture Post leapt to the defence of the exhibition. ‘In its two years a-building the South Bank has, after all, plugged along against the inevitable pressure of sour ill-will from the professional knockers,’ a fiery editorial proclaimed, pointing out that ‘those who most loudly attacked Socialist austerity equally deplored Socialist festivity’.29 Instead, the magazine predicted that ‘Londoners, always last to observe the miracles in their midst, will become abruptly aware of a transformation that will last them long after the Skylon has disintegrated into its million separate nuts.’

  For many architects and designers of the British modern movement, painfully aware that they lagged behind their continental cousins, the success of the Festival of Britain and the Festival Hall was of critical importance: either it would make them, or consign their utopian impulses to the dustbin of history. On the night of 3 May 1951, hours before the Royal gala concert and opening ceremony for the Festival Hall, Robert Matthew, who had done so much to modernise his LCC architects’ department, sat down to dinner with a few friends. ‘Robert displayed not the slightest anxiety about the crucial test to which his great work was about to be submitted,’ recalled one of the guests, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, ‘but continued to play the role of the entirely relaxed and genial host without a care in the world.’30 Now it was down to the public to decide what they thought of this vision of a modern Britain.

  The festival was a nation-wide event, taking place in church halls and village greens around the country as well as on the South Bank, but its centre was in London, where another lesser-known site was built for the occasion. ‘The whole area had an atmosphere of foreboding, gloom and despondency,’ was Jack Godfrey-Gilbert’s initial impression of the district he’d been allocated in Poplar, east London, in which to create a Live Architecture Exhibition. It was on an ‘open derelict landscape, formerly occupied by terraced houses which had been completely devastated by the bombing and cleared away’.31 Poplar had been one of the areas worst hit by the Blitz of 1940-41, and the East End, with its slums and squalor, had been targeted by Patrick Abercrombie and John Henry Forshaw in their County of London Plan. They saw ‘large areas of dreary and monotonous streets’ there, made bearable only by ‘the invincible cheerfulness and neighbourliness of the Londoner’.32 They criticised the haphazard mixing-up of housing and industry, and were convinced that only through lowering the population of the area could decent living conditions be achieved. Instead of the tightly packed back-to-back slum housing, they recommended a radical European solution: ‘a proportion of lofty blocks of flats, placed well enough apart for groups of trees, with terraced houses disposed in regular but not monotonous form, the whole interspersed with open space.’33

  In 1947, this district became the Stepney-Poplar comprehensive development area. The CDAs were a new government initiative to speed up the planning and rebuilding of large areas of urban decay. A bright young team were brought in to inject radical new ideas: Arthur Ling, senior LCC planning officer and fervent communist split the vast East End district into eleven neighbourhoods, along the lines of the new town ideal; Harlow mastermind Frederick Gibberd joined him in June 1949 to develop what would become the centre of the first neighbourhood, Chrisp Street Market, in the newly named Lansbury estate; and sociologist Margaret Willis was hired to canvass the existing residents.

  Gibberd developed Willis’ results into a new plan for the area, which became the Festival of Britain’s Live Architecture Exhibition. It consisted of a mixture of permanent and temporary buildings, since the redevelopment of the whole neighbourhood would not be complete until 1954. The temporary structures included a huge temporary café, the Rosie Lee, and a Town Planning Pavilion, and the Building Research Pavilion, home to a spoof mock-Tudor house called ‘Gremlin Grange’, meant to represent all of the basic flaws of the suburban semi, from bad lighting and rising damp to cracks in the walls, leaking water tanks and a smoking fireplace. The permanent buildings included a shopping centre and market square, a couple of pubs – the Festive Briton and the Festival Tavern – and three schools. Walking around Chrisp Street Market today, it remains a recognisably festival-style development, with its slim pillars, flat roofs, atom-diagram railings and classic postwar clock tower, with the hands and hour marks affixed directly to the brick, as in Harlow’s Market Square. ‘I suggested we should not stop at a clock but also make it an “outlook tower” from which to survey the surrounding panorama of dockland,’ said Frederick Gibberd, describing it as ‘a practical folly that gave pleasure’.34 Sadly for the exhibition, the tower was not ready until the following year, and was closed soon after for reasons of health and safety.

  Chrisp Street Market 2011, one of the few remaining relics of the Festival of Britain.

  The market was intended as the focus of local life, or as Robert Matthew put it, to make ‘the community look inward towards itself – to be really neighbourly, in fact’.35 Despite its location in the heart of the East End there’s nothing particularly ‘urban’ about the Lansbury estate, perhaps because it was designed more to exemplify what was being built in the new towns rather than the ‘lofty blocks’ of the inner cities. Some found it ‘a modern oasis set in a vast area of overcrowded streets’,36 but for Gibberd himself, the overall design was ‘conventional and a bit tame’.37

  All over Britain, towns and cities enjoyed historic pageants of their own. The major Scottish exhibit was held in the impressive neoclassical Kelvin Hall in Glasgow: The Exhibition of Industrial Power. Here was a serious counterpart to the English whimsy on show in London, designed by none other than that busy exhibition expert Basil Spence. ‘Since the end of the war the only real work I could get was the design of exhibitions,’38 he recalled in the early sixties.

  In Glasgow his vast scheme included an artificial waterfall to demonstrate hydroelectricity, a Tesla machine that flashed sparks up into a high black dome, a working pit cage, a blacksmith’s forge, and, to celebrate the completion of the National Grid in 1945, two full-sized crofters cottages, one witho
ut electricity and one with all mod cons.

  While the main London and Glasgow events may have been wholesome and educational, there was another side to the festival. A few miles upsteam from the South Bank, in London’s Battersea Park, sat the ultimate in gaudy Americanised amusement: a gigantic funfair. Worthy it was not, but this riot of carousels, big wheels and candyfloss served up a less demandingly festive atmosphere.

  On 3 May 1951 at 11am, exactly 100 years after Victoria’s opening of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, King George VI declared the Festival of Britain open, and all the good intentions and the years of work were suddenly put to the test. John Gyford visited the festival twice as a child – three times if you counted the funfair at Battersea. His childlike delight was still palpable some 60 years later. ‘It was the sheer sense of novelty and revelation and amazement, even down to the level of things like these chairs’ – he indicated the metal-framed chairs we sat on in the Festival Hall café – ‘and obviously these aren’t the original ones. But even the idea of spindle-legged furniture was a complete revelation. Lightness and airiness and all that. In the film one of the designers says they quite deliberately went for light colours because at that date, before the clean air act, the buildings of London were black. And that was a complete amazement to me, that you could have buildings that weren’t either soot-stained Portland stone or battered red-brick. Some of it was quite dramatic, like the Skylon, and the size of the Dome of Discovery. But over and above that it was all the other details – it was the furniture and the colours, both on the stupendous scale and on the novelty scale.’ And novelties there were in spades, from hot air balloon flights to pearly kings and queens who would whisk you away on a boat trip to the Battersea pleasure gardens. Impresario Eric Morley, who in 1949 had dreamt up the format for Come Dancing, one of television’s first hits,ii created a media sensation with his festival bikini contest. When the press dubbed the contest ‘Miss World’ Morley’s second mega-brand was born. Geraldo and his orchestra played each afternoon and people danced on the fairway. Rare butterflies were bred on the site as part of an exhibit on British nature. There was even a high-wire crossing of the Thames. As people flocked from all over the country to the South Bank, Mary Brown in the Daily Mirror felt bound to remind her readers not to take advantage of their relatives’ hospitality when visiting the festival: ‘Unless your London relative lives in a mansion – remember that she too is a sixteen-hour day housewife.’39

  Reactions to the extraordinary exhibits varied widely: some detected a preachy tone (‘Why carve up all over the place hollow pomposities like “Land is the blanket of man’s birth, his launching ground to the stars?”’ complained the Daily Express40) while others disliked the contemporary aesthetic. ‘Awful steel chairs, all modern, no grace and no beauty and no elegance,’ was how one visitor, Vere Hodgson, saw the schools exhibit. Yet when it was dark and the lights came on she found herself charmed: ‘Now it is all lovely. The Skylon looks fine inside the exhibition.’41 Rapidly becoming the star of the festival, the Skylon found itself the recipient of the sincerest form of flattery when Mr E. Gilbourne, Mr J. W. Wildey and Mr H. R. Towlson took six weeks to build a 32-foot high replica from scrap metal to decorate their street for a carnival in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. Picture Post took great delight in describing the Daily Express’ outrage that the festival looked likely to be a success, noting gleefully that the paper was now ‘complaining crossly that the Skylon is held up by wires, and not by magnetism’.42 For its part, Picture Post reckoned that the Dome of Discovery ‘might be thought the most exciting piece of functional architecture of contemporary times’.43 Although what exactly that function might have been was unclear.

  Much like the summer of 2011, when the Festival Hall held its sixtieth anniversary celebrations, 1951 was the wettest for some years, but that didn’t stop 8.5 million visitors turning up to experience the modernist curio on the South Bank, and the same number again tucking into wet toffee apples in the Battersea funfair. ‘What everyone I know, and have observed, seems to like most in it,’ wrote Dylan Thomas, with characteristic passion, ‘is the gay, absurd, irrelevant, delighting imagination that flies and booms and spurts and trickles out of the whole bright boiling.’44 Even the hard‑to‑impress Architectural Review declared it ‘the greatest architectural event of the postwar years’.45 The final day of the festival was Sunday 30 September, a gala headlined by Gracie Fields having taken place the previous evening as a last huzzah. ‘The thing that left its longest memory with me in some sense,’ John Gyford said, with a certain sense of melancholy,

  ‘had nothing to do with the quality of the exhibition. As we got towards the end of our second visit here we were sitting over, down on the corner, almost opposite one of the entrances to County Hall where one of the exits was, and we were more or less getting ready to go. And I suddenly realised that we’d never come back – ’cos this was it, and none of this would ever be here again. And that was the first moment I think that I can recall suddenly understanding that not everything lasts. It wasn’t an intimation of mortality, but it was that sort of realisation that nothing is forever, which – I was 12 at the time – was quite an eye-opener. I mean, I didn’t break down and go into a nervous collapse, but I can remember quite clearly suddenly realising that, and I’ve never forgotten that, it was one of the key moments of my growing up.’

  Eight weeks after the festival closed its doors Clement Attlee, stuck with his wafer-thin majority, set the date for the second general election in 18 months. In one of those quirks of the British electoral system, a not-exactly-resurgent Conservative party claimed victory with half a million fewer votes than Labour. Winston Churchill’s ‘government of national nostalgia’ was not predisposed to embrace the socialist, modernist spirit of the Festival of Britain.

  Yet even before the government had a chance to intervene, the temporary exhibits were set for rapid dismantling and demolition. ‘The Telekinema, the Lion and the Unicorn, the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon are likely to be preserved, though homes have not yet been found for all of them,’ reported the Manchester Guardian in early October, well before the election. ‘There have been several bids for [the Skylon] for seaside resorts,’ they noted, before urging that ‘if they use a fraction of the imagination that the festival authorities had, the Ministry and the council between them should be able to find some way of using the site to the advantage of London.’46

  But the saga dragged on without resolution. ‘A landing ground for hover planes is being considered,’ reported the Daily Express in December. ‘And the government hopes the LCC will move the Dome of Discovery to the Crystal Palace.’47 In the end no homes were found for any of the glorious temporary structures, and demolitions were well on their way by May 1952. The dismantling of the Skylon took six weeks, the same time it had taken the intrepid Ilkeston trio to build their replica. The structure was sold to London scrap merchants along with the aluminium Dome of Discovery and the remains of several of the other metal-framed buildings. Art from the festival was scattered around the country: Henry Moore’s beautiful, specially commissioned bronze sculpture ‘Reclining Figure’ ended up in the National Gallery of Scotland. The few relics left on the site included the Telekinema, which was renamed the National Film Theatre, and was only demolished in 1957, its replacement built beneath Waterloo Bridge. The lion, rescued from the top of the old pre-festival brewery, still stands beside Westminster Bridge.

  The Festival Hall, the reclaimed South Bank, its embankment and railings, and the Lansbury estate remain the three major architectural legacies of the summer of 1951. The Festival Hall has endured a number of structural changes over the years. It took over a decade to replace the temporary back of the building, whose rugged grey asbestos cement tiles had been the feature most admired by the ‘hard’ – and perhaps rather contrarian – faction within the LCC, who despaired at what they saw as the ‘effeminate’ Scandinavian modernism that characterised both the hall and the festival.iii


  Every 10 years, it seems the lost festival buildings are mourned and the Festival Hall is celebrated in exhibitions and the media. The sixtieth anniversary celebrations were the most extensive yet, with their recreation of the beach and beach huts on the embankment, a kinetic sculpture erected in honour of the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion and a multimedia exhibition in the basement. A year after the festival closed, Marghanita Laski wrote a gloomy epitaph, commenting that ‘far from marking a rung on the ladder of progress, this might be the furthest pinnacle we could reach.’48 Two decades later, The Times published the recollections of Paul Overy, who had been just 11 at the time of the exhibition. He remembered ‘those people walking past bright, light, glass-and-metal pavilions in their long, shapeless dark coats and hats, waltzing in the evening drizzle to the music of Geraldo’.49 For these people, as for John Gyford and for many thousands more, the festival was a hugely significant event – a putting-away of warlike things and an affirmation of a bright new future – and the swift demolition of its buildings a cause for mourning. ‘Why, oh, why did they have to pull that down, the silver dream bubble of my childhood?’ demanded Paul Overy of the scrapping of the Dome of Discovery. Marghanita Laski was even more emotional. ‘It was the nicest thing that happened in England in the whole of my life.’