The 1951 Festival of Britain was exactly that: a celebration of the country’s artistic, design and scientific achievements 100 years after the Great Exhibition. Centred on the newly-opened Southbank site, not far from where the Crystal Palace had stood in Hyde Park in 1851, it was intended to show Britons that their sacrifices in the second world war had been worthwhile, and that they were indeed moving towards what Winston Churchill had in 1940 termed civilisation’s “broad, sunlit uplands” of peace, progress and prosperity. Hugely popular, the festival succeeded in this, and provided what Herbert Morrison, the home secretary of the day, called “a tonic for the nation.” The festival had its detractors, of course, including Churchill himself. It was often the butt of jokes at the time, not least for its 250-foot cigar-shaped aluminium tower: the iconic, but for some reason also comic, Skylon (above). Yet the way the festival exhibited the best of British invention and technology to the world was impressive, and it left physical legacies—the Royal Festival Hall and the Southbank Centre among them—that survive to this day. It made a handsome profit, too. In a period of undeveloped bombsites, severe winters, financial constraints and imperial retreat, and before the 1953 coronation and the end of rationing came into view, the festival provided an exclamation mark in the cultural narrative of postwar Britain.
The emblem of the Festival of Britain, 1960 This year, from 22nd April to 4th September, the Southbank Centre is running a 60th anniversary tribute to the festival that gave it birth: one that tells us almost as much about our cultural zeitgeist in 2011 as about the 1951 exhibition it celebrates. There are some conscious recreations of the splendour of the 1951 festival. John Piper’s mural The Englishman’s Home is on display in the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the first time since it was unveiled in 1951, for example. The Royal Festival Hall has panels from Feliks Topolski’s enormous Cavalcade of the Commonwealth mural, which was commissioned for the festival, but the nostalgia is kept to a minimum, and the moderate modernism of the festival is rightly showcased instead. *** The Britain of today might seem impossibly far away from that of 1951, but what is taking place at the Southbank Centre cannot fail to remind us how loudly the historical echoes still resonate. At first glance, Clement Attlee’s Britain may appear very different from David Cameron’s; the problems of rationing a world away from those of childhood obesity; the concerns of an imploding empire a far cry from those of a converging Europe, an emerging China and a hostile Iran. But are they really? If Piper were today painting his favourite English buildings, and Topolski the present-day Commonwealth cavalcade (which we saw superbly displayed for the royal wedding), would they have executed works so very different? The major political issues of 1951—when Churchill won his first and only general election—were Britain’s involvement in a seemingly unwinnable war (Korea); Middle Eastern unrest with coups and assassinations in Iran, Jordan, Syria and Pakistan; closer European integration (over iron and steel); controversial NHS reforms; disputes over the future of Sudan, Libya becoming an independent federation, and the cooling of relations with the USSR and the descent into the Cold War. The last aside, that list is a rebuttal to those who think there is anything much new in politics. The worship of the future and the new is as barren as the worship of the past and the old; worse, since it lacks even the limited advantages given to hindsight. At least in its vital features, the underlying shape of our country has changed remarkably little in the 60 years since the Festival of Britain. For their Skylon, we can boast the London Eye, taller, more eye-catching and a lot more useful, despite being essentially designed around the idea of a vulgar circus attraction. Even those of us who opposed its erection for the way it trivialised the majestic view of the Thames have taken our children up in it and enjoyed the views. Ralph Tubbs’s “Dome of Discovery” on Jubilee Gardens, which in 1951 was, at 365 feet in diameter, the largest dome in the world, has a modern counterpart in the much larger dome at Greenwich, which is also slipping into the nation’s consciousness in a far more positive way than at the time it was built. The 1951 Dome contained galleries on a number of levels, representing the Living World, Polar, the Sea, the Earth, the Physical World, the Land, Sky and Outer Space, none of which would have been out of place in the Millennium Dome. Just as individuals get popular if they survive for long enough in Britain, so eventually do buildings.
Artist-designed huts line the 70-yard “urban beach” on the Thames this year Robert Matthew’s Royal Festival Hall drew much criticism when it was opened in 1951, with about the kindest description being Thomas Beecham’s remark that it looked like “a giant chicken coop.” Yet compared with some of the truly hideous modernist, postmodernist, brutalist and neo-brutalist architecture inflicted on London in the 1960s and 1970s, the Hall deserves to have been the first postwar building to be granted Grade I listed status, as happened in 1988. Anything replacing it now would likely be worse. Tony Blair was wrong to describe Britain as a “new” country; we are patently not one, but the present Southbank Centre’s paean to 1951 shows that we are an old country that can tease out the best of the new as well. Last year alone, 21.5m people visited the Southbank Centre site. To attract such vast numbers—over double the 10m who attended the 1951 Festival, although they paid an entrance fee—implies a powerful impulse towards culture in Britain today, and is a tribute to its artistic director, Jude Kelly. (I’d praise the Board, but I must declare an interest: my wife Susan Gilchrist sits on it.) The population of the country is now 62m, far higher than the 50m of 1951, but to bring people in at much the same rate as the Festival of Britain—which ran from May to October amid huge international fanfare—is a tremendous achievement. There are undisguised nods to the populism of the 1950s in the current exhibition, such as a 70-yard urban beach with 14 artist-commissioned beach huts on Queen’s Walk (left); a Royal Ensign motorbike and sidecar on which you can have your photo taken; a retro fish-and-chip van; artwork by Abram Games, the designer of the 1951 graphics; and archive films that can be watched from original 1950s cinema seats. For anyone who simply wants to wallow in nostalgia, the Museum of 1951 brings together memorabilia, models, videos, photographs and artwork from the period—only six decades ago—when the southern bank of the Thames was little more than a bombed-out area of depressed docklands, but which, through the inspiration of the Festival’s director Gerald Barry and supported by the Attlee government, was regenerated out of any recognition. Yet a questing spirit like Jude Kelly was clearly not just going to turn the Southbank Centre into a museum of the 1950s without stamping her view on the project. Taking four themes from the original festival—The People of Britain, Land, Seaside and Power & Production—she commissioned important works of art, with some palpable hits as well as the inevitable odd miss. *** First, the hits: Heather and Ivan Morison’s Black Pig Lodge, made of Welsh coal from the Neath Valley, looks magnificent. An installation of dry stone walls, Enclosure by Ben Kelly, is a reminder of how close painstaking craftsmanship can get to genuine artistic expression. Urban Fox, a giant straw animal made by Pirate Technics, which represents the English countryside despite its title, is charming, indeed jolly. Other works by Franck Scurti, Lady Lucy, Marcus Coates, Geoff Sample, Lemn Sissay and Andrew Lock are also imaginative, impressive and even inspirational. There was, I suppose, no way that a fanatical monarchist like me was ever going to like the royal family exhibition in the Project Space of the Hayward Gallery, which consists solely of puerile sniggering at the House of Windsor. The Queen wearing a red nose on a £10 note; the Queen’s lips moving on a hologram of another banknote, saying “Take me! Spend me! Use me!”; references to the size of the Prince of Wales’s ears; Alison Jackson’s photograph William and Kate in Bed, which employs lookalikes in a post-coital embrace showing Princess Catherine’s buttocks, with the further implication that Prince Charles had alerted a paparazzi photographer to snap the young couple; a topless Princess Eugenie in mock-Renaissance pose, and so on and so interminably on. There was not a single thoughtful take on a phenomenon that is, as the royal wedding showed, undoubtedly an integral aspect of the branding of modern Britain. What shocked me most about this wasted opportunity was not its demonstrable lack of wit, but the total predictability of the five artists not bothering to find anything to say that couldn’t be seen in Private Eye or Viz any week of any year. Why must artists conform to the kind of anti-monarchist cultural hegemony that they would virulently denounce if it were imposed on them anywhere else in politics or society?
Left, the emblem of the Festival of Britain, 1960 Perhaps the problem is that few artists seem to have much very new or genuinely important to say about the human condition. This depressing conclusion was fully borne out by the new installation that Gitta Gschwendtner has created in collaboration with 50 young refugees, which is intended to pay homage to the installation of ceramic doves that were a popular feature of the 1951 festival. It is hard to tell whether it was the refugees or members of the public who wrote their thoughts on the pieces of paper floating around the installation, but whoever it was, the messages are uniformly banal, clichéd or meaningless: “Peace, peace, peace”; “Make Love Not War”; “I Believe I Can Fly”; “Power to the People”; “For Peace I Would Give My Soul”; “Fairness is Freedom”; “Home is Comfort”; “A Bird Dreams it is Flying.” These sentiments might be fashioned into the lyrics of an entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, but they are unworthy of the 60th anniversary celebrations of a great national cultural occasion. It might work as therapy for the young refugees—and that is fine—but it fails as art. Only four months after the Festival of Britain closed, King George VI died and the accession of Elizabeth II spawned much loose talk in Britain about a resurgence of artistic talent that would be as significant in “the New Elizabethan Age” as the genius of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney had been for the first one. Of course it was not to be, yet the popular consumption of art is as strong by any criterion today as in any earlier age, and is moreover unlikely to suffer greatly as a result of the recent Arts Council cuts. Mastercard is helping to fund these Southbank anniversary celebrations, taking the honoured place that patrons like the Earls of Oxford and Southampton had in Elizabethan times, with the added bonus that no one will attribute to the company the authorship of the works of art. The Southbank is also laying on talks from Gilbert & George and John Berger, design talks from Shumon Basar, Alexandra Harris and Zaha Hadid, and architecture talks from Elain Harwood, Nicolas Grimshaw and Jack Pringle. There will be poetry discussions and readings at the Royal Festival Hall, an exhibition and talk by Tracey Emin, and conversations with Germaine Greer, Darian Leader and the wonderful Norman Rosenthal on sexuality in British contemporary art. Meanwhile, Mark Wallinger has somewhat facetiously changed the colours of the Union Jack to the green, white and orange of the Irish flag in his installation Oxymoron, which will fly from the flagpole on Jubilee Gardens. Yet such is the spirit of good-natured humour at the Southbank that no one will get irritated. For decades it was fashionable to sneer at the Southbank as a parvenu on the cultural scene, and moreover one encased in ugly grey concrete and beige cement, an enemy to loveliness. Sixty years on, it is impossible to think about British culture without reference to the contributions made by the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery, regardless of what one thinks of the skateboarding park and the labyrinthine walkways. So if you spot an element of self-congratulation about the 60th anniversary celebrations over there, that’s because it’s well-deserved, and long overdue. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself.
