Festival of Britain

Labour Party cabinet member Herbert Morrison was the prime mover; in 1947 he started with the original plan to celebrate the centennial of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Labour government was losing support and so the implicit goal of the festival was to give the people a feeling of successful recovery from the war's devastation,[2] as well as promoting British science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts.

There were events in Poplar (Architecture – Lansbury Estate), Battersea (the Festival Pleasure Gardens), South Kensington (Science) and Glasgow (Industrial Power).

Festival celebrations took place in Cardiff, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bath, Perth, Bournemouth, York, Aldeburgh, Inverness, Cheltenham, Oxford, Norwich, Canterbury and elsewhere,[3] and there were touring exhibitions by land and sea.

It caught hold quickly and spread first across London and then across England....In an island hitherto largely given up to gravy browns and dull greens, "Contemporary" boldly espoused strong primary colors.

A people curbed by years of total war and half-crushed by austerity and gloom, showed that it had not lost the capacity for enjoying itself....Above all, the Festival made a spectacular setting as a showpiece for the inventiveness and genius of British scientists and technologists.

[7] Herbert Morrison took charge for the Labour government and decided instead to hold a series of displays about the arts, architecture, science, technology and industrial design,[8] under the title "Festival of Britain 1951".

As a result, Labour-sponsored programmes such as nationalisation, universal health care and working-class housing were excluded; instead, what was allowed was town planning, scientific progress, and all sorts of traditional and modern arts and crafts.

The Festival was an attempt to give Britons a feeling of recovery and progress and to promote better-quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities.

Barry selected the next rank, giving preference to young architects and designers who had collaborated on exhibitions for the wartime Ministry of Information.

The Festival's centrepiece[8] was the South Bank Exhibition, in the Waterloo area of London, which demonstrated the contribution made by British advances in science, technology and industrial design, displayed, in their practical and applied form, against a background representing the living, working world of the day.

[8] London Transport ordered its first batch of 25 post-war RF single deck buses fitted with roof lights to provide a fleet of sight-seeing coaches for the festival.

The layout of the South Bank site was intended to showcase the principles of urban design that would feature in the post-war rebuilding of London and the creation of the new towns.

[18] They included: Architect: Hugh Casson Theme: M.Hartland Thomas Display Design: James Gardner The exhibits comprised: An unusual cigar-shaped aluminium-clad steel tower supported by cables, the Skylon was the "Vertical Feature" that was an abiding symbol of the Festival of Britain.

Designed by Leslie Martin, Peter Moro and Robert Matthew from the LCC's Architects' Department and built by Holland, Hannen & Cubitts for London County Council.

He designed the structure as an 'egg in a box', a term he used to describe the separation of the curved auditorium space from the surrounding building and the noise and vibration of the adjacent railway viaduct.

William Feaver describes the Festival Style as "Braced legs, indoor plants, lily of the valley sprays of lightbulbs, aluminium lattices, Cotswold-type walling with picture windows, flying staircases, blond wood, the thorn, the spike, the molecule.

"[8] The exhibits were based on the stock list of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID) and were chosen for appearance, finish, workmanship, technical efficiency, fitness for purpose and economy of production.

The Science Museum in London holds a collection of the Festival's fabrics donated by Dr Megaw; it also includes the official souvenir book by Mark Hartland Thomas.

[44] It has been described as a "turn to a jauntier and more decorative visual language" that was "part of a wider move towards the appreciation of vernacular arts and the peculiarities of English culture".

[57] It set up a panel including Michael Balcon, Antony Asquith, John Grierson, Harry Watt and Arthur Elston, which became a committee of sponsorship and distribution.

[57] When the Festival ended, the Telecinema was handed over to the BFI for use as a members-only repertory cinema club, re-opening in 1952 as the National Film Theatre.

The third part, "Stop Press", showed some of the latest topics of research in science and their emergence from the ideas illustrated in the earlier sections of the exhibition.

"[7] In an essay on the Festival, 17-year-old Michael Frayn characterised it as an enterprise of "the radical middle-classes, the do-gooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, The Guardian, and The Observer; the signers of petitions; the backbone of the B.B.C.," whom he called "Herbivores".

In Frayn's view, "The Festival was the last, and virtually the posthumous, work of the Herbivore Britain of the BBC News, the Crown Film Unit, the sweet ration, the Ealing comedies, Uncle Mac, Sylvia Peters."

In making the Festival the Herbivores "earned the contempt of the Carnivores – the readers of the Daily Express; the Evelyn Waughs; the cast of the Directory of Directors".

"[8] While the idea of the Festival was being worked out, the government and the London County Council were at the same time planning the redevelopment of the South Bank site, including "a number of great buildings, which will form part of a co-ordinated design.

The Festival hastened the reclamation of four and a half acres of land from the river, which "transformed the familiar patchwork of rubble and half-derelict buildings which had for so long monopolised the propect from the North Bank".

[85] The graphic designer Richard Littler, creator of Scarfolk, created a satirical poster for the Festival based on the cover of the original 1951 guide, reimagining the profile of the nation's symbolic figurehead Britannia shooting herself in the head.

[87] A filmed retrospective of the South Bank Exhibition, Brief City (1952), with special reference to design and architecture, was made by Richard Massingham for The Observer newspaper.