Tag Archives: Festival of Britain

The Creatives behind the Festival of Britain – Laurie Lee

In the 75th anniversary year of the Festival of Britain, I am looking at some of the creatives behind the Festival. From those who were involved with setting the overall approach and theme of the Festival down to those who worked on specific tasks to create the displays and pavilions.

Back in July, I looked at Jacquetta Hawkes, and for today’s post, I am looking at someone who in the years after the Festival, would become a very well known author.

This is the page from the Festival guide book for the South Bank Festival site, covering the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion:

Among the names of those responsible for the Lion and the Unicorn, the person who created the commentary (the text to go with the displays and exhibits), there is the name Laurie Lee, an author who would later become very well known for the book Cider with Rosie:

Laurie Lee was born on the 26th of June 1914 in the town of Stroud in Gloucester. Three years after his birth, his family moved to the village of Slad, also in Gloucestershire, a village which would provide the experiences and material for the book that would make his name as an author, and a village that he would have a life long attachment to, moving back to Slad in the 1960s, and where he was buried after his death in 1997.

He left his home in Slad at the age of 19. He travelled to London, where he stayed for a year, busking with his second hand violin and working as a builders labourer, before travelling on to Spain. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Lee was one of a number of British subjects picked up on the southern Spanish coast by the destroyer HMS Blanche.

The destroyer came under attack by anti-government forces. A news report from a crew member of a merchant vessel being escorted by HMS Blanche describes the attack:

“When dawn broke we were glad to see H.M.S. Blanche close to us and five of the rebel’s aeroplanes came over aloft. At first they thought the warship was Spanish and dropped some bombs round her, but none hit her. The aeroplanes then discovered that the boat was an English naval vessel, and continued to escort us into harbour.”

The British Government did receive an apology for the attack as they were informed that “the anti-Government leaders desire to express their own and General Franco’s profound regret for the bombing of H.M.S. Blanche, which they say was mistaken for the Government destroyer Jose Louis Diez.”

He travelled back to Spain in 1937, and joined the International Brigades, who were formed to support the government of the Second Spanish Republic against the Nationalists of General Franco.

Lee’s experiences whilst in Spain during the Civil War and with the International Brigades were described in his book “A Moment of War“.

Returning to England, he wrote poetry, being named one of five little known poets who were “Poets of Tomorrow” in the Bookseller on the 30th of October 1941. His poetry became more widely known during the 1940s, and by October 1945, the Birmingham Mail was naming Lee as a “Midland Poet”, due to his birth in the Cotswolds.

During the war he worked for the Crown Film Unit as a scriptwriter and also with the publications department of the Ministry of Information.

In 1950 he married Catherine Francesca Polge, whose mother was Helen Garman, one of four sisters who were part of the Bloomsbury set.

In 1951 he wrote the script for the Board of Trade film “West of England”, a wonderful colour film that describes a lost way of life, but a film very much aligned with the themes of the Festival of Britain:

There is a wonderful line in the film, where he is describing the continuity of the countryside, and the churches which have “bells that have rung in a thousand years of Christmases”.

He was also writing drama for broadcast on radio, some of which were published, and again the Bookseller on the 6th of March 1948 advertises “The Voyage of Magellan” by Laurie Lee – “The text of the highly praised verse drama which helped to inaugurate the Third Programme in 1946”.

His work for the Festival of Britain started in 1950. Whilst he was writing the commentary for the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion he was also advertising for contributions to a specific part of the pavilion.

I have written about the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion before, most recently in this post, which included the new Wetherspoon’s in Waterloo Station which is themed and named after the Lion and the Unicorn.

I have not written about the specific area in the Lion and the Unicorn over which Laurie Lee had some key responsibilities.

The overall theme of the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion was the British character, language and literature, the instinct of liberty, British craftsmanship, and the area where Laurie Lee had specific responsibility – Eccentricity and Humour.

This display area within the pavilion looked at both British humour and the streak of eccentricity in the British character, and to build this display, Laurie Lee wanted the eccentrics among the British population to contribute. The following is one of many newspaper articles advertising what he was after, from the London Weekly Dispatch on the 19th of November 1950:

“HE WANTS MADMEN TO HELP WITH FESTIVAL SHOW – If you have an eccentric mind, and during a nightmare or in a waking thought, have conjured up the weirdest, most fantastic object, the Festival of Britain wants to hear from you.

One section of a pavilion in next years’ Exhibition will be devoted to the ‘craziest’ conceptions of the British mind.

Mr. Laurie Lee of the Festival staff, eccentric poet, writer of film and radio plays, is the man responsible for choosing four objects that will, he hopes, evoke laughter, admiration, and technical interest.

Junk-Shop Hunt: ‘The main idea is to show in this Crazy Corner, things that will stand up to the foreigner’s idea of the ‘Mad English’ he said yesterday. ‘We want what I’d call fertile madness. for example, if someone told me of a hitherto unknown solution of perpetual motion, it would appeal.

Laurie Lee told me he had already dug into all the junk-shops of the East End of London and Chelsea, as well as in the country, without finding anything more eccentric than a square-rigged model bargue in an ordinary electric light bulb.

He invites ‘British Madmen’ to send written offers of their craziest creations to him at 2, Savoy-court, London, W.C.2.”

This was definently the “men in sheds” section of the Festival of Britain. Laurie Lee was after the sort of creation that use to feature on the “and finally” section of TV news, and on local TV news features.

In January 1951, the West London Observer was reporting on the creations that Laurie Lee was receiving: “They include ‘a machine 20ft square on the best engineering principles, with the sole object of blowing out matches. Says Mr. Lee; Admirable for its particular purpose, but slightly too big. I have suggested he builds a smaller model and perfects it by making it light matches as well. Another offer is a smoke grinding machine. Then, there is a mouse trap maze. This is a really cunning device in rough brick (the rough brick is important, so read on). Lured in by the smell of cheese. the mouse is diverted into dead ends until it becomes hysterical. its frantic running stirs up pepper on the pathways. causing such violent sneezing that it ‘bashes its brains out’ on the rough brickwork.

But, as Mr. Lee wisely points out, ‘you cannot have six months of mouse massacre just for the fun of the thing. How right he is! More than anything, Mr Lee wants little machines that work like mad and do nothing in particular”.

I wonder if Laurie Lee, poet, playwright and script writer, and soon to be author, felt any frustrations with having to deal with this type of submission, however the £11 a week as an Executive Officer in the Civil Service he was earning for his role in the Festival of Britain may have come as a welcome regular income.

In an interview with the Daily Express on the 20th of January 1951 Laurie Lee said that his role was “interesting and exhausting. To overcome this he takes three kinds of anti-nervous pills”.

With the sheer scale of the festival, the short time available before the festival was to open, and limited finances, I suspect that the pressure that Laurie Lee was feeling was common across all those involved.

In the same article he speaks about having just tested some “Walking-on-Air” shoes – he fell flat on his face when he tried them out. He had also received a violin made of matches, a tea-set made of old haddock bones, a pair of motoring goggles with windmill and windscreen wipers attached and some bottled circus clowns (miniatures).

He has also received a “Moral Uplifter”, created by a retired colonel, and worn inside your jacket, and gives out encouraging sounds of “Jolly good show, Hear Hear, applause and even laughs when you tell a joke”.

Also in Lee’s office was a stuffed white rabbit which contained a music-box, however the workings had gone wrong and the rabbit now plays God Save the Queen at unexpected times.

I cannot find a list of all the items submitted to Laurie Lee that ended up in the Eccentricities section of the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion. The text for the guide book was probably finished before the final selection was agreed, but the guide book does state that the visitor would see Tenniel’s White Knight

The White Night is a character from the book “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll. he is an inventor, of the type wanted by Laurie Lee, and the following print is of the White Knight, by John Tenniel who provided illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s book, published in 1871:

Attribution and source: Джон Тенниел, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the illustration, the White Knight is seen sitting on his horse, which is covered in many of his inventions.

He can also be seen on the right in the Eccentricity and Humour section of the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion:

As well as writing for the Lion and Unicorn pavilion, Laurie Lee also wrote captions for other pavilions on the South Bank festival site. A reviewer in the Daily Herald in the days after the festival had opened wrote about the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion “I was especially impressed by the captions, the work of the poet Laurie Lee, who has written captions for several other pavilions as well. These combine point with nonchalance in a way that would be impossible to anyone but a most sensitive artist in words.”

Looking through the Festival of Britain guide for the South Bank and the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion is the only one where there is a named author for the commentary. No idea whether this was because the commentary in the pavilion was considered of more importance compared to the other pavilions, whether it was because of Laurie Lee’s reputation as a poet, or for some other reason.

In the years after the Festival of Britain, Laurie Lee began the strand of his career that would lead to his popular fame as an author.

In 1955 “A Rose for Winter: Travels in Andalusia” was published. This was about a return visit to Andalusia, to find a country that had been broken by the Civil War, but the underlying character of Spain was still to be found.

In 1959, “Cider with Rosie” was published. This was the story of his childhood in the village of Slad, from a time when the way of life in the British countryside was still much as it had been for a very long time, and before modern conveniences such as electricity and the car had arrived.

This is probably Laurie Lee’s most well known book. Turned into a number of TV adaptations and films, radio dramas and a stage play. It was also one of the books used for school English Literature courses and examinations.

Cider with Rosie was followed in 1969 by the second book in Lee’s autobiographical series – “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning“. This book starts when he first leaves his home in Slad, his journey walking to London, then his time in Spain, and ends when he returns to his family home.

“A Moment of War“, published in 1991 tells of his time in Spain and involvement in the Spanish Civil War.

Whilst writing these autobiographical books, he continued to write and publish poetry, along with other books such as “Down in the Valley”, a description of the landscape, life and traditions of his Cotswold home:

And also “Village Christmas And Other Notes on the English Year”, which included both his home landscape of the Cotswolds as well as his time living in Chelsea.

The majority of his books show an intense love of place, the landscape, people and traditions that make a place.

Laurie Lee’s attachment to his home village of Slad lasted all his life. Along with his wife, he returned to the village to live in the 1960s, whilst keeping a flat in Chelsea.

As with my post on Jacquetta Hawks, all the photos I can find of Laurie Lee seem to be in copyright, or taken from a source which appears under copyright.

There is a photo of Lee, along with his wife at the following link: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw251363/Katherine-Kathy-Francesca-Lee-ne-Polge-Laurie-Lee although at the time of writing, the National Portrait Gallery appear to be having problems with loading images.

He died in 1997 at the age of 82, and was buried in the churchyard at Slad.

A typical obituary focused on his book A Cider with Rosie, but also said that he was:

“First and foremost a poet, and his writings were autobiographical. He imposed on his work a vigorous discipline and perfection which might involve rewriting a book three or four times. It meant his output was small, with barely a dozen books published.

Lee also represented an era of brilliance and idealism that sprang from the 1930s; he fought in the Spanish Civil War, wrote verse plays for radio, and was a contemporary of such literary figures as Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, George Orwell and Cecil Day-Lewis.”

The majority of his books are still in print, and reading them today, it is clear why he wrote the commentary for the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion, as well as a number of other pavilions across the festival.

I just wish I could write blog posts that are able to “combine point with nonchalance in a way that would be impossible to anyone but a most sensitive artist in words“, as a reviewer of his work for the festival had written.

The Creatives behind the Festival of Britain – Jacquetta Hawkes

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I have written quite a few posts about the Festival of Britain, and as this year is the 75th anniversary of the festival, I want to look at another aspect of the festival – the people behind the festival, those who created the overall theme, architects, individual pavilions, the written commentary in each pavilion etc.

The 1951 festival was a snapshot of Britain at a key point in history. The Second World War was just six years before the festival, and decades of significant change were in the future.

The South Bank exhibition site was the centre piece of the festival, and was split in two areas.

Between County Hall and Hungerford Railway Bridge was the upstream circuit, the focus was on “The Land”, and looked at the land of Britain, the natural scene, the country, minerals of the island, power and production (mainly driven by what was mined from the land), sea and ships, and transport.

The downstream circuit was between Hungerford Railway and Waterloo Bridges, and the focus of this section of the festival was on “The People”, and looked at the people of Britain, homes and gardens, schools, health, sport, and the seaside.

Responsibility for developing what was on display throughout the festival was through several key roles.

Individuals were responsible for developing the overall theme, architectural design and display design. This started at the highest level with the overall concept of the festival, and then dropped down to those responsible for the same role for individual pavilions and display areas.

The following image is the first page from the South Bank festival guide for the downstream circuit on the people, and the People of Britain pavilion:

At the top are the names of those who had overall responsibility for this section of the festival, and under the title “The People of Britain” are the names of those responsible for the pavilion and displays on the people of britain.

I have underlined one name in red – Jacquetta Hawkes – the Theme Convener, the subject matter expert who was responsible for bringing a consistent theme to the pavilion.

Jacquetta Hawkes was born on the 5th of August 1910 in Cambridge. Her father was Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who won the Nobel prize in 1929, along with Christiaan Eijkman, for their discovery of vitamins. Her mother, Jessie Ann Stevens was the daughter of a ship’s fitter from Ramsgate.

Jacquetta developed an interest in archaeology from a very early age, and would go on to establish a considerable career in what was at the time a very male dominated profession.

As evidence of her ground-breaking role as a woman in archaeology, in 1929 she was the first woman to take the Archaeology and Anthropology degree at Newnham College, Cambridge.

After graduating, she travelled to Palestine to work on excavations, and on her return, she married the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes , who she had met earlier at Cambridge.

Jacquetta Hawkes was a prolific author, with her first book, “The Archaeology of Jersey”, being published in 1938.

I have a couple of her books. The first is “A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales”:

The book, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive guide to Prehistoric and Roman monuments, and includes background information, such as the types of monuments to be found, a chronology, a lengthy gazetteer of sites, and, something modern books seem to have lost, a large fold out map.

The book obviously reflects the state of knowledge at the time (1951), but it is still a remarkably useful book for cataloguing and examining so many sites.

Chapter One is titled “The Land of Britain”, and this seems to be a theme that can be found in much of Jacquetta’s work, including the Festival of Britain. Her view of how the land of Britain and the evolution of life on the land are intertwined, and the first couple of paragraphs from the opening chapter sum up this approach:

“If it can be claimed that the whole of our country and not only its surviving antiquities should be seen as the creation of past generations, it is legitimate to go much further, to penetrate below the surface of pasture, arable, woodland and waste and to see the whole substance of the island as one continuous creation. Through milliards of years it has been built and shaped; sometimes lying as a part of a vast continent embracing what is now the Atlantic and North America, sometimes part of the sea-bed of equally vast oceans. tropical, desert, and artic climates have played over it.

So, side by side with the evolution of life, the land of Britain was brought into being; the remodelling of its surface by man belongs to this continuous and still rapidly developing process.”

Whilst the guide to Prehistoric and Roman monuments is at its heart a guide, Jacquetta takes the approach summed up in the two paragraphs above, and expands it considerably in, probably her best known book, “A Land”:

A Land was also published in 1951, I have the 1978 edition (some sources give the original publication year as 1953, however my 1978 edition has 1951 as the original date, and Jacquetta’s introduction is dated 1950).

A Land is not a text book, or single subject book on geology, climate, archaeology, the evolution of life, history etc. but takes all these subjects to construct a story of how the land of Britain has developed, and both the impact on, and the use of the land, by the emergence and evolution of life.

The book links the formation of rocks, minerals and resources to how they were and are used by humans. Granite, Portland Stone, Chalk, Coal etc. all have their origins shown as part of the geological development of the land linked to their future use by people for homes, buildings, industry.

The book is “off its time” – a phrase that implicitly means that almost everything we publish today, will, in the next 50, 100 and more years, also be regarded as containing inaccuracies, not reflect the latest scientific understanding, will have unacceptable views, but as with the story told in “A Land”, human knowledge and culture is on a conveyor belt of continuous change, and the present is just a snapshot in time of both knowledge and culture.

As an indication of how archaeological and scientific advances can impact a book, the introduction to the 1978 edition of “A Land” lists several updates to the 1951 edition.

A Land has been described as being a sentimental and romantic book, and there is a degree of truth to these descriptions, but what I find important about the book is that it presents a way of looking at the country, an intertwined story of continuous evolution – an obvious example being the geological and climate conditions that led to the formation of coal, which was the key source of energy for the industrial revolution, from the start of steam power with Thomas Newcomen’s and James Watt’s engines in the 18th century.

When she wrote “A Land”, Jacquetta lived in Fitzroy Road, just to the east of Primrose Hill, and she references the hill in the opening paragraphs of the book:

“When I have been working late on a summer night, I like to go out and lie on the patch of grass in our back garden. This garden is a square of about twenty feet, so that to lie on it is like exposing oneself in an open box or tray. Not far below the topsoil is the London Clay which, as Primrose Hill bumps up conspicuously at the end of the road. the humus, formed by the accumulation first of forest and then of meadow land, must once have been fertile enough, but nearly a century in a back garden has exhausted it.”

Her mind then begins to wander:

“As I lie looking at the stars with that blend of wonder and familiarity they alone can suggest, a barge turning the bend in Regent’s Park Canal hoots, a soft wedge of sound in the darkness that is cut across by the long rumble of a train drawing out of Euston Station.

The people sitting in those lighted carriages, even the bargee leaning sleepily on his long tiller, are not individuals going to board meetings in Manchester or bringing in coal for London furnaces. For the instant they are figures moved about the map by unknown forces, as helpless as the shapes of history that can be found behind them, all irresistibly impelled to the achievements of this moment.”

And then begins the story of millions of years of the history of Britain.

The Land also shows how in 1950 when the book was written, Britain was still a country with strong regional and local differences.

This was not just with the people, but also how the country was built, with towns and villages often being distinctive by their industries and agriculture and their local building materials, and designs.

This localism was also a thread running through parts of the Festival of Britain, and one of the very many publications associated with the festival, was the following map, published by the oil company Esso, with the title “What do they talk about”:

Published by Esso, no doubt as an incentive to get people out driving and buying petrol to explore the country, if did show a country where many areas were still very distinctive.

Compare that with today, where local areas are much less diverse. Buildings are generally built to very similar designs and off remotely rather than locally made materials, nearly all the industries shown on the map have disappeared, and those that remain are in continual decline (for example in the midlands, a kiln can be seen with the word “Pots”. The midlands pottery industry continues to shrink, with the latest casualty being the Denby factory which shut down their kilns a couple of months ago).

A theme to the festival seems to have been to encourage people to get out and explore their country. As well as the map shown above, there were other festival events across the country, and also a series of “About Britain” guides were published, each with the festival emblem on the front cover.

Each guide covered a specific area of the country and provided a detailed guide, recommended routes and places to see:

Returning to the People of Britain pavilion, of which Jacquetta was the theme convener, the journey through the pavilion was laid out in a chronological sequence, with some of the displays set up as an archaeological dig. Starting from the entrance, the displays covered The Relics Of Our Ancestors, How They Came Here, How They Lived, The Romans In Britain, Men of the Iron Age, The Anglo Saxons, The British Today.

The People of Britain pavilion route from the guide is shown below:

The final paragraph in the festival guide section on the People of Britain reflects on how migration and integration has been part of the development of Britain:

“But though the ancient dead are buried, it is the very blood they brought here that runs in us – yet, whether they came as conquerors or men of peace, all of them suffered a sea change on the way. They were absorbed into the life that was here before them, and themselves became islanders of a land that moulded the thoughts, the feelings, and the behaviour of them all into a whole which is our British way of life and our tradition”.

The above paragraph is another example of why I find the Festival of Britain so useful as a reference point for so much about the country at the time.

The paragraph talks about the absorption of those who migrated to the country in the past, and how all islanders moulded the British way of life. In the decades to come, this would change to a more multi-cultural approach, with issues about absorption, or integration as we would now describe the process.

The Festival of Britain guide names all those who had a role in the creation and design of the festival, with Jacquetta Hawkes being the theme convenor for the People of Britain pavilion.

Reading through the names of those responsible for all the other exhibits and pavilions across the festival, she was one of very few women who had a key role in the creation of the festival.

There is far more to her life than archaeology and the Festival of Britain.

During her marriage to Christopher Hawkes, she had a son, Nicolas who was born in 1938.

Serious archaeology was not possible during the Second World War, so in 1941 she took on the role of Assistant Principal of the Post-War Reconstruction Secretariat, later moving to the Ministry of Education, and then became a Principal and Secretary of the UK National Committee for Unesco, a role she held until the start of her involvement with the Festival of Britain.

The war also marked a change in her personal life, as she fell in live with, and had an affair with the poet Walter J. Turner, and she was devastated when he died of a brain haemorrhage in December 1946.

In 1947, she met the writer J.B. Priestley at a Unesco conference in Mexico, and they fell in love, although unable to marry until 1953, by when they had both been divorced.

J.B. Priestley had written English Journey, which was published in 1934, another useful snapshot of the country as the book covered Priestley’s travels around England.

After her marriage to Priestley, Jacquetta continued to write. She was a governor of the British Film Institute and in 1971 she was a vice-president of the Council for British Archaeology.

Following a short spell on the Isle of Wight, they moved to Alveston in Warwickshire, where she became president of the Warwickshire branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. With Priestley, she was one of the co-founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Following J.B. Priestley’s death in 1982, she moved to Chipping Camden, where she pursued an interest in the old buildings and historic churches of the area.

Her last book, published in 1982, and written with archaeologist Paul Bahn was the “The Shell Guide to British Archaeology“, one of a series of Shell guides, which also includes guides to many of the counties of the country.

Jacquetta wrote and contributed to multiple journal and magazine articles, as well as radio and TV.

Jacquetta was involved in one of the more unusual TV programmes of the 1960s when in 1962 she wrote the script for part of a programme in the BBC Monitor series titled “The Lonely Shore”, with the segment being on “What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?”.

This segment sees archaeologists from the future returning to the site of a lost previous expedition, who had placed their finds on the beach waiting for collection by a future team.

It is brilliant as it highlights the difficulty with interpreting the use and meaning of artifacts from long lost peoples and civilisations. It is almost a parody of the archaeological profession that Jacquetta was for so long, a prominent member.

There is a brilliant bit starting at 8 minutes, 22 seconds where a collecting box for the PDSA (People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals) is interpreted as an altar set-up for the dog cult:

Jacquetta Hawkes died on the 18th of March 1996, and her ashes were buried with those of J.B. Priestley in the grounds of the church in Hubberholm in North Yorkshire.

Archaeology had started with the gentleman amateur, and during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had transformed into professional academic excavation and study of the past.

From the 1950s onwards, archaeology became more scientific, and Jacquetta criticised the reductionist approach that she saw as growing in importance in the profession, rather than the importance of constructing the human past.

She wrote an article for the journal Antiquity in 1967, from which the following abstract is taken:

“Archaeology in is danger of becoming so ruled by its technological and scientific servants that its proper goal of reconstructing the human past is being overlooked. The ingenious new equipment of archaeology attracts to itself a major share of not only money but intellectual effort; the result is that, while historical writing of the quality formerly seen is nowhere emergent, enormous quantities of undigested facts, graphs and tables litter our ever more expensive reports. The time needed to compile these analyses keeps other workers too long uninformed; the excavator may not even live to complete his scientifically showy report. As for controversies in interpretation, pages of correspondence solve nothing that time and new discoveries will not. Meantime, art criticism and studies of religion are neglected because they cannot be tabulated; even the remote stages of the Palaeolithic might be made to reveal more than statistics. A proper balance between science and history, a blend of old and new ideals, must be found if we are to maintain popular interest in archaeology and attract recruits with historical imagination.”

Personally, I believe that the approach criticised by Jacquetta, and her own approach, are both equally valid and important.

The technical and scientific approach, where facts, graphs and tables provide a detailed understanding of a site, city, population and culture, and the approach supported by Jacquetta expands on these individual details, and puts an individual site, facts, graphs and tables within the wider context of both the land and human history.

Jacquetta Hawkes was a fascinating woman, who achieved so much in a male dominated profession, and her book “A Land” is still an inspiration to look at history in a different way – a way in which geology, climate, life and human evolution, industry, agriculture, buildings etc. can all be understood as an intertwined story.

What is missing from this post is a photo of Jacquetta Hawkes. All those I have found online are copyright, or appear to have been taken from a copyrighted source, so here is a link to a photo of her in 1955 at the National Portrait Gallery – a remarkable woman:

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw56556/Jacquetta-Hawkes?_gl=11a7d30k_upMQ.._gaOTE3MDgxNDI4LjE3ODQ5OTExNDU._ga_3D53N72CHJ*czE3ODQ5OTExNDQkbzEkZzAkdDE3ODQ5OTExNDQkajYwJGwwJGgw

The Festival of Britain and the South Bank – 75 Years Later

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For this week’s post, I am back on the South Bank looking at the survivals of, and references to the Festival of Britain, 75 years after the festival started the transformation to the place we see today, starting with:

Festival of Britain 1951 – The Moment That Shaped South Bank

A couple of months ago I was asked by the South Bank Employers Group (SBEG) if I would be interested in working with them to create a series of posters for display across the South Bank as part of this year’s London Festival of Architecture and to mark the 75th anniversary of the landmark 1951 Festival of Britain.

I jumped at the opportunity as the South Bank is an area of the city in which I have long had an interest. I started my first London job on the South Bank in 1979, and it was then that I started looking at my father’s photos, taking the negatives of the photos he had taken of the area starting in 1947, to a local film processing studio to get the photos printed out.

I put together a story to be told across the posters, wrote the text, and provided some of my father’s photos.

The SBEG did all the graphic design, put together the overall layout of the posters, and sourced additional images from the National Archives.

They were installed just over a week ago, so if you walk along the South Bank, you will find three locations where there are a number of posters which tell the story of Festival of Britain 1951 – The Moment That Shaped South Bank.

Last week, we went up to take a look, and for me, it is wonderful to see my father’s photos on display, across the area he explored and photographed almost 80 years ago.

Starting at the South Bank end of Westminster Bridge are the first posters:

These provide a brief overview of the history of the area now known as the South Bank, and also tell the story of Eleanor Coade, and the Lion that stands at the end of Westminster Bridge, originally on the Lion Brewery which stood where the Royal Festival Hall is today:

The design of the posters by the SBEG is brilliant, and it is really good to see Britannia, the blue, red and white compass and the bunting of the festival symbol created by Abram Games back on the South Bank.

The following map shows the location of the posters:

In location 2, between the Jubilee Gardens and the London Eye:

Two more posters on the other side of the above:

Between the BFI and the National Theatre:

Looking towards Waterloo Bridge (on the right) and the National Theatre (on the left):

It was a privaledge to have been involved with the creation of these posters, but by far the best part was the chance to get my father’s photos on display, in the place he started exploring as an 18 year old with a Leica camera purchased from a soldier returning from Germany.

If you visit the South Bank over the summer, please do take a look.

The Sunbathers by Peter Laszlo Peri – Waterloo Station

If you head to the upper level of Waterloo Station, there is a sculpture on the wall which has an unusual history. This is the Sunbathers by Peter Laszlo Peri for the Festival of Britain:

Peter Laszlo Peri had an interesting life. He was born in Budapest, Hungary, on the 13th of June, 1899, and was part of a working class Jewish family. He was involved with art, sculpture, the theatre, architecture and travelled widely across Europe.

In 1932 he was in Berlin, and involved in an exhibition of works organised by the Association of German Revolutionary Visual artists. The works on display were removed by the police, and in 1933 the organisation was banned by the Nazi Party.

The organisation was affiliated with the German Communist Party, who Peri and his wife Mary were also involved with, as Mary was arrested in possession of Communist propaganda. Peri was also in trouble with the authorities as during a political demonstration he had punched a Gestapo officer.

The German Communist Party had also been banned in March 1933.

It was after these events that Peri decided that the only course of action was to leave Germany, and they made the move to England.

I cannot find out what happened to Peri’s wife, Mary. She was Mary Macnaghten, the granddaughter of Charles Booth, who is best known for the poverty maps of London. There is no mention of her after her arrest in all the sources I have found (see end of this section), and in 1965 Peri married the artist Heather Hall, so either Mary had died or they had divorced. This is probably down to my own limited time for research.

Peri initially lifted in a flat in Willow Road, Hampstead, and by 1937 he had found a permanent studio in which to work in Camden.

The studio was at 28b Camden Street, and in the early 1960s the whole area was scheduled for demolition, including Peri’s studios.

A documentary was made about the studios, featuring Peter Laszlo Peri by the documentary company Derrick Knight & Partners. It was shown by BBC2 in 1965, and BFI Replay have the documentary online.

It is a remarkable film because it features Peri, along with the other artists working in a small community of studios. It shows Peri’s work, and as well as the area around Camden Street in the early 1960s.

Click here to view the film on BFI Replay.

As usual, whenever I find something interesting when researching a post, it leads to exploring further, and I wanted to find out where Peri’s studio, along with the studios of the other artists featured in the film, were located.

In the following OS map extract, I have circled number 28b. The number is in the central garden featured in the film, and above and below the garden are numbered buildings, each of which was one of the studios featured in the film.

Camden Street is the unnamed street to the left, and College Place is to the right. Plender Street is the short length of street shown in the upper left corner:

(‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“)

The demolition of the studios, along with all the surrounding buildings, including the terrace houses seen in the background in parts of the film, which ran along College Place, was to clear space for the construction of new housing blocks.

Brayshaw House which today sits on the site of the Mission Hall in the above map appears to be of recent construction. 28b and the artists studios were behind Brayshaw House. I have marked the location of the central garden of the studios with the red rectangle in the centre of the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The film shows that much of Peri’s work was in concrete, including his own special formulation which he called Pericrete, and this is the material used for the Sunbathers.

Whilst Peri was a long term user of this type of material, many of the other works created by different artists for the Festival of Britain were also made out of materials which were cheap to use and quick to create given the time and financial constraints of the festival.

The use of this type of material, rather than a material such as bronze, was, along with the speed with which the festival site was demolished, one of the reasons why very little sculpture and artwork on display at the Festival of Britain survived.

The Sunbathers was lost after the festival closed.

In 2016, Historic England launched a campaign to find lost public artwork, and the Sunbathers was rediscovered in the garden of the Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath.

Historic England launched a funding campaign to restore and display the Sunbathers.

The work was initially on display in the Royal Festival Hall, and in August 2020, it was put on display in Waterloo Station:

The PA photo agency have an image of the Sunbathers installed during the Festival of Britain, on the side of the Underground Station adjacent to the main Station Gate access point to the festival. Click here to view the photo on PA’s website.

Peri continued to work during the 1950s and 1960s, still using concrete, but also experimenting with Polyester resin.

Camden council rebuilt artists studios on the same site, and Peri did return. I am not sure if they are still there. There are buildings on the alignment of the old studios, with a green space in the middle. One building is occupied by an industrial design company. I am not sure what the other building is used for.

Peri did not have long in his new studio back in Camden, as he died in 1967.

Born in Budapest, escaped the Nazi’s in Berlin and lived just over 30 years in London, it is good that Peri’s work for the Festival of Britain is now on display at Waterloo Station, not that far from when it could be seen in 1951:

The estate of Peter Laszlo Peri have a comprehensive website dedicated to his life and work, it can be found by clicking here.

Historic England cover the story of the rediscovery and restoration of the Sunbathers on their website, the page can be found by clicking here.

There is another reminder of the Festival of Britain in Waterloo Station:

The Lion and the Unicorn, Wetherspoon’s – Waterloo Station

Reader and guide Frank sent me an email about the Wetherspoon’s in Waterloo Station. I had not been down to this part of the station (the Sidings) for some time, so did not realise it was open. A visit was needed to see The Lion and the Unicorn:

The pub is named after the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion at the Festival of Britain.

The best description of the pavilion comes from the guide to the South Bank festival:

“The British People are something more than the sum of: men with ancestors, children in schools, families in homes and gardens, and patients in hospitals. They are, in addition, compositions of various particular habits, attitudes, instincts, qualities and characteristic moods. but these attributes, not being tangible, are hard to display ‘in the round’, in an exhibition of tangible things.

Nevertheless, we should not like visitors – particularly from overseas – to leave the South Bank without having seen, at least, some token and visible reminders of the British People’s native genius. So this Pavilion offers one or two clues to their character.

The title of the Pavilion – ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ – serves to symbolise two of the main qualities of the national character; on the one hand, realism and strength, on the other fantasy, independence and imagination.”

As well as the name, the pub includes a number of references to the 1951 pavilion as well as the festival in general

On the large screen close to the entrance is a rotating series of images, one of which is a photo of the overall Festival of Britain site on the South Bank:

The food menus have a photo of the Lion and the Unicorn from the festival, including a brief summary:

There is also some decoration in the same style as the decoration in the 1951 pavilion.

On the wall at the far end to the bar is an open bird cage, framed by a couple of photos, with birds flying from the open cage:

The photo on the right shows the bird cage and birds as they were presented in the 1951 Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion:

I did wonder whether the one in the Wetherspoon’s was an original from the festival (another find of a lost item, similar to the Sunbathers), so I emailed Wetherspoon’s to ask.

Rather surprisingly for a large company, the same day, my question was forwarded to the person responsible for their pub developments who replied that the bird cage was a replica.

The escaped birds flying from their cage:

The following postcard from 1951 shows the birds flying along the ceiling of the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion:

The plan from the Guide to the Festival of Britain on the South Bank showing the route and subjects covered in the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion:

The following postcard from the festival shows the entrance to the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion. The rear of the Royal Festival Hall is in the background. The pavilion was along side what is now Concert Hall Approach (on the left of the pavilion) and on the site of the Whitehouse Gardens area, in front of the Whitehouse apartments (the old Shell downstream building):

The guide-book acknowledges the challenge of explaining the British Character. The closing paragraphs for the pavilion read:

If, on leaving this Pavilion, the visitor from overseas concludes that he is still not much the wiser about the British national character, it might console him to know that British people are themselves still very much in the dark about it. For them, the British character is as easy to identify, and as difficult to define, as a British nonsense rhyme.

The lion and the unicorn

Were fighting for the crown;

The lion beat the unicorn

All round the town.

Some gave them white bread

And some gave them brown;

Some gave them plum cake

And sent them out of town.

I am not sure how much the average drinker in the Lion and the Unicorn will be aware of the story behind the name of the pub, and the bird cage and birds on the wall, however I believe that Wetherspoon’s are to be congratulated with their choice of name and decoration, and hopefully it will spread a bit more awareness of the Festival of Britain to a few of the drinkers in the Lion and the Unicorn.

The text over the image on the menu includes the words “only the Royal Festival Hall building now remains”, and I find it really strange that the Wetherspoon’s at Waterloo Station has more information on the Festival of Britain than the Royal Festival Hall.

The Royal Festival Hall did have a large celebration over the weekend that marked 75 years since the opening day, however walking in the RFH today, and there is nothing obvious about the Festival of Britain, and the Royal Festival Hall’s place in the festival.

The Royal Festival Hall did have a good exhibition area, along the side wall between the bar that faces the river, and the café at the back. This included the following wonderful model of the festival site:

The exhibition and the model disappeared a couple of years ago, with the area now occupied by what looks like a corporate hot desk space.

There is also an archive area to the rear of the building, but this always appears to be closed, and whilst there is window and display space, there is little on display.

A real shame as the Royal Festival Hall was built by the London County Council for the Festival of Britain, and for the long term. It was the first large public building constructed after the war, and is a really wonderful building.

It would be great to see the Royal Festival Hall putting more of its history back on public display.

For my last connection with the Festival of Britain, I am staying on the South Bank for:

Siegfried Charoux’s Motorcyclist sculpture – Southbank Place

This is Siegfried Charoux’s sculpture of a Motorcyclist. It can be found between the new buildings that occupy the space where the Shell Centre office blocks once stood. It is close to Chicheley Street which runs from York Road to Belvedere Road:

The Motorcyclist was created by Siegfried Charoux and installed in 1962 in front of the recently completed Shell downstream building, and by a strange coincidence given one of the other topics in this week’s post, roughly where the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion was located during the Festival of Britain.

It was installed at its new location in 2019:

The Motorcyclist therefore has no direct connection with the Festival of Britain, however the creator of the work, Siegfried Charoux, does.

Siegfried Charoux was born in Vienna in 1896, and served in the First World War with the Austro-Hungarian Army. He was invalided out of the army in 1917 after being wounded.

A cartoonist and sculptor, he moved to England in 1935 because of the threat from the Nazi’s who disapproved of his left wing views, and who had destroyed one of his works which displayed a sympathetic view of a Jewish figure. He was able to stay in the country as he had the support of the Tate Gallery Director James Bolivar Manson, who sponsored his Home Office application.

He became a naturalised British citizen in 1946, and continued working as a sculptor.

One of his commissions was a work for the Festival of Britain.

The following is a view of the South Bank festival site from the north bank of the river. The Skylon is on the left and the Dome of Discovery can be seen in the background where Jubilee Gardens are today.

Look in front of the Dome of Discovery, just to the right of the flags on the boat and there is a large sculpture facing the river:

This is the Islanders by Siegfried Charoux:

The Islanders was part of the Sea and Ships Pavilion, and intended to portray the struggle and resilience of the British people in their relationship with the seas that surround the country.

The scale of the work is hard to get from the above photo. The earlier photo shows how clearly it was visible from across the river, and if you had stood next to the sculpture in the above photo, your head would have been level with the feet of the three characters. It was truly colossal.

The Islanders was made out of concrete, and was destroyed as part of the demolition of the Festival of Britain site,

Charoux also created another work that was on the South Bank. This was “The Cellist”, which was on display outside the Royal Festival Hall. It was later moved to Kenwood House where it was on temporary display. I have not been able to find any record of where it is now, and do not recall seeing the work on previous visits to Kenwood House.

Charoux created an extensive collection of works and exhibited annually at the Royal Academy between 1940 and 1974.

He died in Hendon on the 26th of April 1967, and his remains were returned to Austria where he was buried in Vienna’s Central Cemetery.

So although the Islanders was destroyed after the closure of the Festival of Britain, Charoux still has a work on display at the South Bank, not far from the original site of the Islanders.

It is part of what fascinates me with the history of London. All the networks of connections you can build between the city of today, and the people and events of the city of the past, including for Peri and Charoux, events in Europe which resulted in their works being part of the Festival of Britain, and works which can still be seen today.

And if you get the opportunity to visit the South Bank, take a look at the posters spread across the three sites.

The Royal Festival Hall at 75

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I have recently released two new walk dates. These are, along with links for details and booking:

Two tickets have just become available for my walk exploring the Lost Streets of the Barbican, this Saturday, the 16th of May

Limehouse – A Sink of Iniquity and Degradation on the 6th of June

Wapping – A Seething Mass of Misery on the 13th of June

This is the post that should have appeared last Sunday, the 3rd of May, which was the 75th anniversary of the official opening of the Royal Festival Hall on the 3rd of May 1951.

Unfortunately, on Friday 1st of May, my web site went down again, coming back online on Sunday afternoon. I wont go into the issues with my current hosting provider (to keep my blood pressure down), but in the next couple of weeks I plan to move to an alternative, and hopefully better performing hosting platform.

So on the 75th (and one week) anniversary of the opening ceremony of the Royal Festival Hall, this post looks at the construction and opening of this South Bank icon.

If you attended the opening ceremony, then you may have purchased this souvenir programme of the event:

The foundation stone of the Royal Festival Hall had been laid on the 12th of October 1949 by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and less than two years later the building would host the King and Queen and other members of the Royal family, with the King unveiling a commemorative tablet in the foyer.

There was then a service of dedication led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the first of a short series of inaugural concerts.

The works performed on the 3rd of May 1951 are shown in the following page from the souvenir programme:

The London County Council had arranged the week of inaugural concerts, and for the coming months there was “a full programme of Festival concerts, ballet, song recitals and light orchestras throughout the summer season and autumn. A season of ballet from July 26 to September 1 will be presented by International Ballet, who are planning imaginative productions of both new and familiar ballets in settings devised specially for the hall”.

The souvenir programme was a comprehensive booklet on the inaugural concerts, with biographies of the conductors along with comprehensive programme notes, which included extracts from the musical score, taking the audience through some of the intricacies of the work, and how some of the instruments in the orchestra had key parts.

It was a programme written for an audience with a serious interest in classical music.

At the back of the souvenir programme were a number of pages of adverts, from companies who had some part in the design, construction and fitting out of the Royal Festival Hall.

Adverts were a common part of the guide books for each of the Festival of Britain locations, and today, looking through these adverts is a rather depressing experience, as they are a list of all the British industries and manufacturing companies that have either closed or been taken over during the last 75 years, however there is one company associated with the Royal Festival Hall that is still in operation:

Harrison and Harrison were Thomas Hugh Harrison, who was born in 1839, presumably in St. Pancras as he was the son of Thomas William Harrison of St. Pancras who had a company manufacturing parts for organ buildings.

The firm of Harrison and Harrison dates from 1872 when Thomas Hugh Harrison set up a manufacturing business in Durham, where the firm was based in 1951, and where it is still repairing and building organs today.

Regarding the Royal Festival Hall, on the website of the company, there is the following: “A hugely influential event was the building of the organ in The Royal Festival Hall in 1954. This landmark instrument, which was restored by H&H in time for its sixtieth anniversary, introduced the British organ world to the classical influence of the continental Organ Reform Movement”.

Their website can be found here, and it is brilliant to see that the company appears to be thriving.

The Festival of Britain on the South Bank opened on the day after the inaugural concert, and the site was already generating some excitement. The South Bank was lit up, and it must have been quite a sight after wartime blackouts and post war austerity, as this article from the May 2nd issue of the London Daily News indicates:

“London’s famous skyline shines bright for the Festival; London’s river picks up the gleam. On the South Bank floodlights and search lights on the exhibition buildings make a blaze of reds, blues and yellows. Against the shadowy Shot Tower is the brilliance of the Royal Festival Hall. Then the Skylon points its finger to the night sky. Above Hungerford Bridge are the illuminated flag-masts of the Bailey footbridge.”

The Skylon was already attracting unwanted interest, as at the start of May:

“Students using grappling irons and nylon ropes, scaled the 295 feet high Skylon on the London south bank exhibition site at midnight and tied to a pole 50 feet from the top, a University of London Air Squadron scarf.

One of them said that five students entered the site late last night and two climbed the Skylon with the nylon ropes 120 feet and 220 feet long and climbing equipment which they had specially made. It was intended to fix the scarf to the lightning conductor but the frailty of the structure at the top made this too hazardous.

The scarf was taken down by workmen.”

Getting within 50 feet of the top was an achievement, not sure I would have wanted to try such a climb:

As well as the souvenir programme, the London County Council had also been involved with the publication of the Official Record of the Royal Festival Hall:

Having the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank was part of the London County Council’s, 1943 County of London Plan, which proposed that the South Bank should become a cultural centre, with a river walkway, public space, offices and homes.

The state of the South Bank was described in the plan as follows:

“It is one of the great anomalies of the capital that while the river, from Westminster eastwards, is lined on the north side with magnificent buildings and possesses a spacious and attractive embankment road, the corresponding south bank, excepting St. Thomas Hospital and the County Hall, should present a depressing, semi-derelict appearance, lacking any sense of dignity and order appropriate to its location at the centre of London, and fronting on to the great waterway. This gloomy aspect is intensified to-day by war damage.”

So it was in need of serious improvement.

Across the Festival of Britain site, the London County Council were responsible for the Royal Festival Hall as well as the new river wall and walkway, and their funding, design and construction, was why they survived, whilst the rest of the festival site was demolished soon after the closure of the festival.

A paragraph in the Forward to the Official Record provides a view of the challenge and intentions:

“The Royal Festival Hall is the only building of such magnitude and importance to have been completed in London since war began in 1939; and it is the first new concert hall the capital has had for much longer than that. This building is of great size and complexity – for it is much more than a concert hall – built on difficult terrain and conditioned in its design by the need for utmost economy in the use of steel and other scarce materials, has had to be planned and produced to an inexorable time-schedule and with a vital and uncomfortably close completion date always in mind. Yet the Council has been at pains to provide a building which is everything that careful planning and anxious forethought could make it, and which has been designed to be worthy of the unique occasion of its inception as well as the longer term use for which it is mainly intended.”

There are a small number of photos in the book, and a large number of drawings, including the following view of the external and internal parts of the building:

The numbers refer to: 1 – Roof Garden, 2 – Choir, 3 – Boxes, 4 – Orchestra, 5 – Stalls, 6 – Grand Tier, 7 – Entrance Staircase, 8 – Side Promenade, 9 – Main Foyer, 10 – Restaurant, 11 – Terrace Restaurant, 12 – Escape Stairs, 13 – Terrace.

The paragraph from the forward hinted at the challenges of building on the South Bank. A major challenge was water, as the ground where the Royal Festival Hall was to be built was saturated, and ground water height varied with the tide in the Thames.

The options were either pumping or freezing the ground, and the solution taken was:

“To sink a sort of subterranean fence round the whole building site, some 350 steel pipes a yard apart , driven 20 feet down with their tops connected up to suction pumps. When the pumping began, water was thrown out at a rate of 150,000 gallons an hour, but when the general water level was reduced to that of the pipe ends, half that ejection rate served to keep all the excavations comfortable de-watered and workable down to 20 feet below the surface”.

A diagram from the book showing the layers of strata, with the excavation for the building on the right and the River Thames on the left:

The Official Record looked at the Auditorium:

“Heart and kernel of the whole concert hall building is of course the great auditorium itself, the vivifying principle that alone gives validity to the outer parts and members of its body that encircle it in protective, ordered complexity. So it is the auditorium that will here be more critically judged than anything else, more keenly discussed and therefore longest remembered.

All else is but accessory and ancillary to this one essential element; the elegant restaurants and terraces, the foyers and bars and all the rest – mere handmaidens in helpful, agreeable attendance.

Spatially the auditorium is immediately satisfying, probably partly because one unconsciously realises that it is so exactly shaped for its particular job. Nothing has been done in the way of embellishment to detract from this obvious functional fitness, and indeed one guesses – and again correctly – that such decoration as there is is all calculated to promote the prime purpose of the Hall: the hearing of good music.”

One of the features of the seats in the auditorium was the use of sound absorbing glass fibre in the pads of the seats, to eliminate the sound of a seat tipping as well as to create the effect where an empty seat had the same acoustic properties as an occupied seat.

Boxes lining the walls of the auditorium:

There was a considerable amount of research into the acoustic properties of the auditorium:

One of the unique features of the Royal Festival Hall is that when you enter the building and stand in the foyer, it is not immediately obvious where the auditorium is located. The foyer presents a wide open space, with thin columns supporting the structure above, with only bars and reception desks in view.

The auditorium is suspended above the foyer, a design that needed a clever means of support with four stairwells at each corner constructed within a bastion to support the auditorium. The following image from the book shows how the auditorium is almost a capsule suspended within the overall building:

The main foyer, with one of the bars to the left. The sloping floor of the auditorium forms the ceiling:

One of the themes of the Festival of Britain was the use of new designs for even the most basic of functions, and in the restaurants of the Royal Festival Hall, this included newly designed chairs, with a rubber cushioned seat, and a dumb waiter made out of tubular metal, timber and aluminium:

The auditorium was by far the most important feature, but restaurants were also an important part of the overall visitor experience, and for those dining in the restaurant with a window seat: “At night a new prospect is revealed as the lights shine across the river”:

Design of the terraces and gardens around the hall were just as important as the interior, and long before the large terrace that we see today was built in front of the hall, there was a lower and smaller upper terrace “from which there is a magnificent view of the river and the northern embankment”:

As with the souvenir programmes, in the official record of the Royal Festival Hall, there were a number of adverts for companies involved in many aspects of the building, including Cox & Co of Watford, who were responsible for the auditorium seating:

One of the aims with the design of the Royal Festival Hall was to make use of the latest technologies available for building such a concert hall. As well as theatre and sound technologies, this also included air conditioning and heating systems, and the following photo from the book shows heating pipes which threaded through the building:

One of the challenges with designing and building so quickly, along with the use of new technologies was that the design had to change as construction progressed.

The installation of air conditioning, heating pipes and electrical cables required the drilling of unplanned holes in the buttresses of the hall that gave support to the auditorium as well as many of the walls.

As well as the design of the interior, the importance of the auditorium, and the use of the latest technologies, one of the other key features of the Royal Festival Hall was its location on the South Bank, directly overlooking the Thames, and the building was intended to present an impressive view:

As mentioned earlier in the post, the South Bank was in a dismal state, and the LCC plan proposed significant new buildings along the South Bank which would mirror the buildings along the North Bank, and the above image shows how the Royal Festival Hall was intended to be the first part of this.

This is an issue I have with the South Bank today. The walkway is lined with trees and especially when they are in leaf, they do obscure much of the view of the Royal Festival Hall from the north bank.

Trees are key in the built environment. Not only do they improve the visual aspect, they also provide shade, have a cooling effect etc. however, for the short space of the walkway in front of the hall, removing the trees would restore the view of the Royal Festival Hall as was intended by the designers and developers.

My father took a whole series of photos of the South Bank showing the area before it was cleared ready for the build of the festival, and then construction.

The first of his photos is from 1947 and shows the site prior to demolition. The Royal Festival Hall would be built on the site of the lion Brewery, which is to the right, with the Coade Stone Lion on the top:

A view on the South Bank. The large building is the Lion Brewery after the Lion had been removed:

Building the foundations of the Royal Festival Hall:

The Shot Tower is the tall tower in both photos:

Looking across the site, the tall houses in the background were in Howley Street, which has long gone, replaced by the slip road that runs between Belvedere Road and the roundabout at the southern end of Waterloo Bridge:

The above image gives an indication of the depth of the foundations.

One of the objections to the Festival of Britain was the impact it would have on both materials and workers, who were also desperately needed for post war reconstruction of the homes, offices and factories that has been destroyed by bombing, and general deterioration since the 1930s.

There was a wonderful book published specially for the Festival of Britain by the Association of Consulting Engineers. The book is a comprehensive exploration of many large infrastructure and construction projects in which the association’s members were involved. The book included a section on the Royal Festival Hall, with a detailed description of the design, construction and challenges.

The following image from the book shows the Royal Festival Hall in the foreground, with the build of the Dome of Discovery in the background, with the rest of the site being built around. The image provides an idea of the sheer scale of the construction of the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank:

Back to my father’s photos, and this one shows the build of the Royal Festival Hall well underway:

And finally it has been completed:

Photo showing detail of the terraces at the front of the building, much the same as the print from the official record shown earlier in the post:

The Royal Festival Hall on the 3rd of May 2026, on the 75th anniversary of the opening ceremony:

The large yellow object on the left is a work called Pin Drop by Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, created as part of the 75th anniversary and is “reimagining the iconic Skylon for the digital age”.

The Royal Festival Hall is a result of a 1943 LCC plan, as well as using the South Bank for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

A wonderful building, but what I find really remarkable is the speed at which it was built. Just over three years from design to the opening ceremony.

The Festival of Britain, which opened to the public on the 4th of May 1951, was though much more than just the South Bank.

If you would like to explore the festival in more detail, you may be interested in the following posts:

An overview of the South Bank festival is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/the-festival-of-britain-south-bank-exhibition/

A walk around the upstream circuit of the site is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/walk-round-festival-britain-upstream-circuit/

And a walk around the downstream circuit is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/festival_of_britain_downstream_circuit/

The Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea are explored here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/the-festival-of-britain-pleasure-gardens-battersea-park/

The Festival Of Britain – Maps, Football, Guidebooks. Science And Abram Games is a look at some of the publications that went with the festival as well as the Exhibition of Science at South Kensington: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/abram_games/

An Optimistic View Of The Future is a look at some of the adverts from the 1951 Festival Of Britain: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/an-optimistic-view-of-the-future-adverts-from-the-1951-festival-of-britain/

The Exhibition of Architecture at Poplar is explored here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/lansbury-exhibition-of-architecture/

and here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/exhibition-of-architecture/

The strange story of the Festival of Britain and the Atomic Bomb is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/the-festival-of-britain-and-the-atomic-bomb/

Hopefully the site will be up and stable if you would like to read these, and all being well will be on a far more stable hosting platform in the next couple of weeks.

The Exhibition of Industrial Power and London Archaeology

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The Exhibition of Industrial Power and London Archaeology – two completely unrelated topics in today’s post. The first, I will come to in a moment, whilst London Archaeology is the first post of the month “Resources” feature, where I look at some of the resources I use, and which you may also find helpful, to understand and explore London’s long history. London Archaeology resources will be at the end of the post.

But first, if you have been reading the blog for some years, you will know I have an interest in the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Just six years after the end of the Second World War, the Festival was a huge undertaking in terms of planning, resources, construction. etc. at a time when the country was very short of these resources along with the cash needed to pay for a festival.

There were many who argued, with some justification, that all the resources and money would be far better spent on the rebuilding that the country still urgently needed.

The Festival of Britain was though intended to help show the country both to the nation and to the rest of the world. The long history of the country and its people, the arts, design, creativity, science, industry and manufacturing capabilities of the country.

Designers, sculptors, authors, architects all contributed to show a very different post-war world, an optimistic view of the future after years of war and rationing.

Whilst the South Bank exhibition was the main festival site, and the place that is most commonly associated with the Festival of Britain (and where the Royal Festival Hall is today one of the few, physical survivors of the festival), the Festival covered the whole country.

There was a Festival Village, a touring exhibition on an old aircraft carrier, football matches organised with European teams, music and literary festivals etc. all branded with the Festival of Britain design.

There were seven main festival sites:

The main South Bank Exhibition
The Exhibition of Science in South Kensington
The Exhibition of Architecture in Poplar, East London
The Festival Ship Campania, which toured major ports around the country
The Travelling Land Exhibition which went to Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham
The Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow
The Ulster Farm and Factory Exhibition in Belfast

In London, there was also the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea, not one of the exhibition sites, but a major, and well visited part of the festival where there were gardens, rides, illuminations after dark, cafes and restaurants etc.

The main exhibitions each had their own guide book. These were detailed guides to the exhibition, and contained a wealth of information on the exhibits and wider context of each respective exhibition.

Each guide book had the Abram Games designed Festival of Britain emblem on the front cover, but with a different colour background for each exhibition, with the rest of the guide following the same style and approach to content.

The guide books provide a wealth of information on not just the Festival of Britain, but also the country in 1951, and I have been trying to collect one of the guide books for each festival site, and I recently found one of the two that I am missing.

The guide book cover for the 1951 Exhibition of Industrial Power at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow:

My other guide books are shown in the following images, the first three are the South Bank, South Kensington Science Exhibition, then the Exhibition of Architecture at Poplar:

My final three are the Festival Ship Campania, the Touring Land Exhibition, and then the Pleasure Gardens at Battersea:

There is now only one of the main Festival of Britain guide books that I need to find, the Ulster Farm and Factory Exhibition held in Belfast. This guide book follows exactly the same format as the main guide books shown above. I have seen a couple in exhibitions, but have never found one for sale.

Next year is the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, and it would be great to find the Belfast guide by the end of the year.

I have written about the other exhibition sites in previous posts over the years, and will now look at the Glasgow Exhibition of Industrial Power.

The guide book starts with some background to the exhibition:

“In common with the other Festival exhibitions, Industrial Power is not a trade fair. Nowhere in these halls will you find stands set aside for commercial exhibitors. The exhibition has been planned, from the turnstiles to the exit, to tell a story – the story of Britain’s tremendous contribution to heavy engineering. It is a story which concerns not only machines, but the men who made them. It sets out to show not only British inventiveness, but the effect it has had on the world. Against this background are shown the outstanding products of British heavy engineering in the present day.

The theme is simple. Heavy engineering is the conquest of power. There are two main sources of raw power used by heavy engineering today. They are coal and water. There is therefore a coal sequence and a water sequence which unite towards the end of the exhibition in the Hall of Railways and Shipbuilding.”

The exhibition was visited by Princess Elizabeth, the future queen, in June 1951, however in a reminder that although this was six years after the end of the Second World War, the country was still involved in the Korean war, as in the same report of the princess visiting the exhibition, she also “included at her own special request a visit to soldiers wounded in Korea who are now in Cowglen Military Hospital, where she had a rapturous reception”.

As with the other exhibition sites, at Glasgow, the story was presented to the visitor as they walked through a series of Halls which focused on individual aspects of the overall theme. Walking through the Glasgow exhibition, there was a Hall of Power, of Coal, Steel, Power for Industry, Electricity, Railways and Shipbuilding, Irrigation and Civil Engineering and Hydro-Electricity.

The final part of the exhibition was the Hall of the Future, which offered a vision of a source of power for the future.

The route through the exhibition and the individual halls is shown in the following plan from the guide:

A very vivid example of how the country has changed since 1951 was that coal was a central theme of the Exhibition of Industrial Power, as coal was the main energy source for almost all British industry, electricity generation and domestic energy use.

The Hall of Coal celebrated this fact, and the intention of the displays were to leave the visitor with evidence that:

Coal sets the wheels in motion and keeps Industry thriving
Coal is the basis of the Machine Age

The displays took the visitor from the geological formation of coal, where plants took energy from the sun, through to the process of mining coal, and to help with providing the visitor with the experience of mining coal, there was an artificial mine as part of the exhibition.

To make the experience as real as possible, there were two National Coal Board cages which could take 30 visitors each. There was a descent of only 16 feet to the “mine”, however to make this as realistic as possible, the descent commenced with a jerky start to simulate a big drop, then a slow descent and a sudden stop at the bottom.

Having reached the artificial mine, visitors would see a full sized section of a modern, 1951 coal mine, complete with working machinery, manned by a team of Scottish miners.

As well as the modern mine, there were also historical displays showing how mining had evolved, including when children and women formed a significant part of the mining workforce, when miners had to descend to the coal face hanging on a chain rather than within a cage, the role of a 17th century fireman who would descend to the mine at the start of a shift, wrapped in wet rages, to set fire to the gas that had accumulated and clear the workings.

Unfortunately, there are no photos of the exhibitions in the guide as it was published in advance of opening, however it does contain drawings of the some of the halls and exhibits.

This is the Coal Cliff in the Hall of Power:

And the Hall of Coal from the pit cages:

The approach to how information was presented, the mix of physical objects, illustrations, sculpture, reliefs, lighting, written descriptions and the theme of taking the visitor on a journey was the same in Glasgow to all other Festival of Britain exhibitions, including that on the South Bank, although in Glasgow the exhibition was dedicated to power and heavy industry.

What these black and white illustrations do not convey is the use of colour throughout the exhibition. For example, as part of the display showing how coal is formed, there was a symbolic sun, created by bright, pulsing bulbs, to represent coal’s origin in heat.

The other halls followed a similar approach, with the Hall of Steel covering the historic development of the material from the work of Darby, Huntsman, Cort, Neilson, Bessemer, Siemens, Brearley and Hadfield, the “fathers of the steel industry” as the exhibition described them, through to the processes used to produce steel in 1951, the modern machinery and working practices.

The Hall of Electricity again starts with the discovery of electricity: “Electricity is invisible, and can be measured only by its effects. That is why it remained hidden for so long, a latent force in human history, its power unsuspected“, and then runs through how electricity is generated, the modern power station, and uses Sir Charles Parsons as a central figure in the development of large scale generating systems.

The Hall of Hydro-Electricity told the story of places throughout Scotland where the flow of water is used to generate electricity. The last section of the hall covered the Severn Barrage, a proposed project to make use of tides on the River Severn to generate large amounts of electricity.

Generating electricity from the large tidal range of the River Severn has been an on / off proposal for the last 75 years, since the Festival of Britain, and the Severn Estuary Commission reported in March 2025, their recommendations that such a tidal project was feasible.

I suspect that there will still be discussions on such a project in 75 years time.

The Hall of Shipbuilding and Railways included “a great ship-like structure that runs the length of the hall”.

As with all the halls, the story of the development of shipbuilding and the railways was told, starting from first developments through to the latest technology, and the displays included “a magnificent locomotive which will be exported to the Government of Victoria when the exhibition closes”.

Rather ironically, given the exhibitions focus on industrial power, Scotland was suffering power cuts in 1951, and on the 15th of June, 1951, many Scottish newspapers reported that “Exhibition Plunged In Darkness. The £400,000 Exhibition of Industrial Power at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, was plunged into darkness for almost an hour today by an unexpected power cut. Visitors who had just entered the hall to tour the exhibition were left standing in total darkness where a few seconds before they had been gazing at vivid artificial lightning flashes”.

Power cuts appear to have been common throughout Scotland in 1951, later in June the Paisley Daily Express was also reporting that Paisley, along with most parts of the country were suffering power cuts for more than an hour, that there was a ten percent voltage reduction, and that the exhibition in Glasgow again suffered power cuts.

The final hall before visitors left the exhibition was the Hall of the Future.

In this hall the visitor looked down into five pits, each of which covered one of five men who influenced heavy industry in the past, or may do so in the future. These were Watt, Trevithick, Faraday, Parsons and Rutherford, and above the pits a shining cone flashes lightning and represents the limitless future through the promise of nuclear power.

The Hall of the Future:

The design of the guidebook for the Exhibition of Industrial Power was identical to the other Festival exhibitions, whether on the Southbank, Poplar, or the Festival Ship.

The text was intended to educate, and did not (to use a modern phrase), “dumb down” or patronise the reader, but it was also of its time.

As with all the other exhibition guidebooks, the one for Glasgow included a range of colour adverts for companies who had provided their products for exhibition, or who were involved in the theme of the exhibition, so we have Wolf Electric Tools:

English-Electric (with the advert also emphasising the use of coal as a source of energy):

Another common theme of all the exhibition guide books is that the majority of the companies advertising in the books have long since either closed or been take over by foreign competitors, and the adverts from the Exhibition of Industrial Power show just how much the decline of heavy engineering and manufacturing industry in general has been in the last 75 years.

Conveyancer Fork Lift Trucks:

Another advert for English-Electric, this time about their expertise in hydro-electric power:

John Brown shown in the following advert was a major Scottish industrial company, which included a significant presence in marine engineering and ship building. The company built multiple war ships and the liners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth 2.

After a series of mergers, the engineering part of the company was taken over by Kvaerner in 1996, who closed the engineering works in 2000, and the Clydebank shipyard ended up as part of the French Bouygues Group in 1980, who closed the business in 2001.

Thomas Smith & Sons – one of the major industrial crane manufacturers of the country and with a significant export business. Their cranes were also used on docks throughout the country, so were probably to be found in the London Docks.

Again, after a series of mergers and take overs, the company has all but disappeared, but there is a very small part of the business surviving within another group, but not at all recognisable to a visitor to Glasgow in 1951:

The British Oxygen Company:

The British Oxygen Company started off in 1886 as Brin’s Oxygen Company after the two French brothers who founded the company – Arthur and Leon Quentin Brin. The company was renamed the British Oxygen Company (BOC) in 1906.

In the early 2000’s BOC was one of the largest industrial gas suppliers in the world, however a few years later, the company was purchased by the Linde Group of Germany.

Interestingly, BOC’s former head office in Windlesham, Surrey was apparently designed in the form of an Oxygen molecule.

The following is from Google Maps and I think I can see the similarity (the map may not appear in the emailed version of the post, go to the website here to view):

Crompton Parkinson, a major manufacturer of electrical power equipment:

British Aluminium – another company that has disappeared, however the Lochaber hydro-electric plant and pipelines shown in the illustration in the advert are still in use, generating electricity for an aluminium smelter owned by Alvance British Aluminium, the one remaining aluminium smelter in the UK:

The Standard Vanguard:

Thomas W. Ward Ltd – a steel working and construction company, who also had a major business in ship breaking:

In the Hall of the Future, the future of power was through the potential of atomic power and the splitting of the atom. John Laing advertised their work in building and civil engineering with the construction of the Atomic Energy Establishment’s Windscale Works, today known as Sellafield. Today, John Laing are more of an infrastructure investor, rather than a construction firm.

Babcock – once a major manufacturer of power station equipment. industrial and marine boilers, and many other heavy industrial products, today they are more a defence equipment supplier, including naval ships, ground vehicles, equipment support etc:

The Exhibition of Industrial Power was not as popular as the organisers expected, with attendances averaging between 1,500 and 3,500 a day.

The following is typical of the news reports of the time:

“MOST DISCUSSED EXHIBITION IN SCOTLAND – In three weeks the Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall comes to an end. If nothing else, it has been the most discussed exhibition ever held in Scotland. And perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that many of those who have joined in the discussion have never visited it to see what all the talk is about.

Why haven’t the crowds flocked in? That is not merely a puzzle to the organisers – it has perplexed all manner of people. ‘Too technical’ say some. ‘Not technical enough’ declare others. ‘ A designers dream’, ‘A designers nightmare’.

So the conflict of opinion has swayed back and forth – in speeches, conversation and correspondence. Many have averred that it is not a woman’s show, yet many women who have visited the Hall have been full of praise for what they have seen.

Flattering too have been comments of overseas visitors, many of whom had already toured London’s South Bank. ‘Better laid out’, ‘More compact’. ‘a wonderful achievement story’ – comments such as these have been made.

The great mystery of 1951 still remains unsolved. Soon the Exhibition will be only a memory but it seems not unlikely that it will live on as a debating point for a long time to come. And even yet the missing thousands may materialise in a final rush to see for themselves the cause of all the commotion.”

There were incentives to visit the exhibition, for example, specific tickets winning a prize of a paid trip to the South Bank exhibition in London, so on the 10th of July, Mr John Campbell of Glasgow won a free air trip to London to visit the South Bank as the 150,000 visitor to Glasgow.

There were also organised trips to the exhibition from across Scotland. These included school trips, as well a trips organised by local Labour party organisations, for example the Arbroath Labour Party organised a visit for 300 in June, which included the provision of a special train to take visitors to Glasgow.

Overall, the Exhibition of Industrial Power was considered a success. There seems to have been a good number of international visitors as one of the apparent achievements listed was the amount of foreign currency brought in during the exhibition.

After closure in October 1951, many of the items were taken back by their manufacturer, some were auctioned off, others were scrapped.

I have not found any photos of the interior of the exhibition, however the following film does show the exhibition being opened by Princess Elizabeth, and a brief walk around some of the exhibits:

The Festival of Britain guide books help to illustrate just how much the country has changed in the last 75 years.

The Glasgow Exhibition of Industrial Power shows just how significant has been the decline and loss of heavy engineering and manufacturing. A loss that did not just impact businesses, but has also had a significant social impact in multiple old industrial areas of the country – a social impact which is still very present.

Now I just need to find the Ulster Farm and Factory exhibition guide book to complete the set.

Resources – London Archaeologist and the Archaeology Data Service

Archaeology is the way we understand so much of London’s physical past, along with the lives of people who once lived in the city. Despite how much the city has been redeveloped over the past few decades, and indeed has been through very many developments over the centuries, there are always new finds that help to tell the story of London’s long history.

Whilst major discoveries make the local and national news, that is plenty more that does not, but which deserves a bit more publicity.

One of the ways of following the work of archaeologists in London, and the latest discoveries is through the publication London Archaeologist, of which the following image is of the latest issue of the four times a year publication:

The cover image is of an iron eel spear, and to give an idea of the type of contents, the autumn edition features excavations at 14-19 Tottenham Mews in Camden as well as excavations at 1 Liverpool Street which has the title “The Dead Marshes” to highlight the historic location of the place.

These two articles are detailed, for example the Liverpool Street report runs to seven pages of text, maps, site plans and photos.

There are also articles about previous finds such as a Roman cremation found on the Old Kent Road, along with the results of new research on the large quantity of Roman painted wall plaster found at the Liberty excavation in Southwark.

A subscription to London Archaeologist is a great way to keep up to date with excavations and general archaeology across the city. The current price of an annual subscription is £22, and details can be found at the following website:

https://www.londonarchaeologist.org.uk

A brilliant thing about the publication is that if you want plenty of reading to explore archaeology across London, then back issues of the publication from issue 1 in 1968, through to the end of 2023 are all available for free, and to download at the Archaeology Data Service, and as an example of the early content available, there is a fascinating article in issue 1 in 1968 on the Roman House and Bath at Billingsgate by Peter Marsden.

The archive provides more than enough fascinating reading for the dark winter evenings, but there is far more to the:

Archaeology Data Service

Firstly, the link to the archive of London Archaeologist at the Archaeology Data Service is here:

https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/series.xhtml?recordId=1000237

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is the “leading accredited digital repository for archaeology and heritage data generated by UK-based fieldwork and research”, and it is apparently the oldest repository for archaeology and heritage data in the world, having been established in 1996.

The search methods to explore the database takes some practice, and getting some experience with how to frame queries, but if you are interested in the huge amount of archaeology and heritage across London (and the rest of the country), it is well worth the effort.

The homepage of the ADS is here:

Archaeology Data Service

and at the top of the page there are a number of menu options, but to provide an idea of the breadth and depth of contents, I will click on the Search option, where you can then search the Data Catalogue or the Library.

The Library is a database of archaeological investigations and consists of either a summary of a record held in another archive, or a downloadable report (click on “Available from ADS” on Access Type on the left column of options to select records where the reports are available).

As an example, searching the Library for “Wapping”, there are a number of records, many are a brief abstract, but there are a number with a full, downloadable report.

One of the records is titled, and includes a PDF download of the full report “LAND AT THE HIGHWAY, WAPPING LANE, PENNINGTON STREET AND CHIGWELL HILL, (PARCEL 4) LONDON E1
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT”.

This plot of land is unusual in Wapping in that it is still empty and surrounded by hoardings. It is between Tobacco Dock and The Highway, and is adjacent to the derelict Rose public house (if you have been on my Wapping walk, we walked past the site towards the end of the walk, heading up from Tobacco Dock to The Highway).

The document is a detailed, 524 page report on excavations at the site, including full background detail such as the geology and topography through to a large listing of all the finds.

The location of the empty and derelict land in Wapping (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Back at the Search Data page, clicking on Data Catalogue brings up another screen, and at top left you will see “Filters” with below this a search box.

Searches can be detailed and specific, but just enter “Wapping” and on the right a whole range of search results are listed, 188 in total (although be careful as there are a number of other Wappings around the country, hence the need to explore how to make specific searches).

The first record covers: “An English cargo vessel which stranded near Flamborough Head in 1891 in fog”, nothing to do with London you might think, but clicking on the Resource Landing Page provides more details from the source, and the “Wapping” was a steam collier that carried coal to London and was known as an “up-river” or “flatiron” due to her low superstructure and with masts that could be lowered allowing the ship to pass under the many bridges of the Thames.

Interesting that a ship that carried coal along the east coast was also able to travel far up the Thames to deliver its cargo, including passing under bridges.

I have been tracing the remains of Civil War defences in Wapping, and a quick search for “Wapping Fort” found the following:

“Fort Number 1 of London’s Civil War defences was in Wapping, south of the Church of St Georges-in-the-East. The common Council resolution called for a bulwark and a half, with a battery at the north end of Gravel Lane, which is where Vertue showed it. Lithgow however refers to it as a seven-angled fort close by the houses and the River Thames Rocque’s map shows a mound on the generally accepted line of the ramparts at the junction of the present Watts Street and Reardon Streets, which would accord more with Lithgow’s location. Lithgow’s description is of a palisaded earth fort having 9 portholes with guns for each.”

If we look at Rocque’s map, then we can see the mound quoted in the above reference to the Civil War fort in Wapping:

Which is roughly within the red circle in the map of the area today (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Many of the records returned after a search do not contain details about the site, but can be a brief abstract and / or records of where the information can be found, however there is still plenty to be discovered, and the availability of the London Archaeologist archive at the ADS is a wonderful resource in its own right.

Where there is information in the ADS, such as the detailed reports on excavations, the potential location of a Civil War fort in Wapping, or the collier of the same name that had been designed to carry coals down the east coast, then through to central London, it all helps provide a greater understanding of the city.

The Guinness Festival Clock, London Clock Makers and the Corn Laws

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One ticket for my walk Limehouse – A Sink of Iniquity and Degradation for next Sunday has just become free. Click here for details and booking.

A mix of subjects for this week’s post, the first comes from my fascination with all things Festival of Britain, and where we can see aspects of the festival to this day.

Part of the Festival of Britain in 1951 was the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea. I wrote a post about the pleasure gardens which can be found by clicking here.

The Pleasure Gardens were where people could have some fun. The other London exhibitions, such as the main festival site on the Southbank, and the Exhibition of Architecture in Poplar, were intended to be educational and informative. To tell a story of the history of the country and the people, industry, science, design, arts etc.

The Battersea Pleasure Gardens were also different to the rest of the festival sites, in that the Pleasure Gardens allowed commercial sponsorship, which covered not just advertising and sponsorship of places and events in the gardens, but also the provision of display items by commercial companies.

These had to go along with the general theme of the Pleasure Gardens – they had to provide some form of entertainment, fun, enjoyment, and one of the more prominent of these commercial displays was the Guinness Festival Clock:

I was recently in Ireland, which included a couple of days in Dublin, and a mandatory visit to the Guinness Storehouse, their rather impressive and very popular visitor centre in the city.

One of the floors in the centre is devoted to Guinness advertising over the years, and I was really pleased to find they had a large model of the Guinness Festival Clock:

The Guinness Festival Clock was one of the most popular attractions at the pleasure gardens. Every quarter of an hour it would burst into action with characters appearing and moving, the triangular vanes at the top opening and spinning and doors opening at the lower front to reveal the Guinness Toucan.

The Guinness Festival Clock was designed by the partnership of Lewitt-Him.

Lewitt-Him were two designers who had come to London in 1937 from Poland. Both were from Jewish families.

Jan LeWitt was born in Czestochowa in 1907. After three years travelling across Europe and the Middle East, he started work as a graphic artist and designer, and was also involved in practical activities such as machine building and in a distillery.

George Him (who had changed his name from Jerzy Himmelfarb) came from Lodz, where he was born in 1900. He had a more academic start in life, initially studying Roman Law, then obtaining a PhD in the comparative history of religions. He then began to study graphic art, and in 1933 met Jan LeWitt, and started collaborating on designs, where their style was described as being “surrealistic, cubist and with humour”.

Their move to London was possible as their work had been brought to the attention of Philip James at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Peter Gregory at the publishers Lund Humphries.

Their move to London was timely as two years later Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany, and their Jewish background would have meant almost certain death.

The outbreak of war also created significant demand for their skills, with the need for graphic designers to work on numerous books, posters, pamphlets and maps, many of which were in support of the war effort.

After the war, they continued to work on a wide range of projects, from commercial advertising, illustrations for books and magazines, and exhibitions.

One of the first post-war exhibitions in which they were involved was the “Britain Can Make It” exhibition in 1947 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. As with the future Festival of Britain, the 1947 exhibition was intended to show the technical and manufacturing capabilities of the country, as there was a need to dramatically increase exports and a national demand for foreign currency due to the impact of the war on the country’s finances.

The “Britain Can Make It” exhibition became known as the “Britain Can’t Have It” exhibition, as the products on display were aimed at the export market, rather than being available for domestic customers.

Four years later, and the type of design that included Lewitt-Him’s approach to surrealism and humour could be found across the Festival of Britain, with the Guinness Festival Clock being a perfect example.

The festival clock at the Guinness Storehouse is a working replica, and the following short video shows the clock in action, along with a screen to the side of the clock, showing the original Guinness Festival Clock at Battersea (if you receive the post via email, you may need to go to the website by clicking here to see the video):

The popularity of the Guinness Festival Clock was such that Guinness commissioned eight full size travelling clocks, which then travelled across Ireland and the coastal resorts of Britain. Two of these clocks were also sent to the US, so Lewitt-Him’s work for the Festival of Britain ended up providing a very successful means of advertising for Guinness.

The Guinness advert from the Guide to the Festival Pleasure Gardens included a view of the clock, and a poem about the Walrus and the Carpenter’s visit to the Southbank festival site and the pleasure gardens in Battersea:

The Lewitt-Him partnership ended in 1955, as Jan LeWitt wanted to concentrate on more artistic projects, including the design of sets and costumes for ballets held at Sadlers Wells, whilst George Him continued as a commercial graphic designer with a large portfolio of customers for his advertising work.

They both continued to be based in London, until George Him’s death in 1981 and Jan Lewitt’s death in 1991.

Now back to London, but continuing with a clock based theme.

At the junction of Fleet Street and Whitefriars Street, next to the Tipperary pub, there are two rectangular blue plaques on the curved façade of the corner building:

The plaque on the Fleet Street side of the building records that two famous clockmakers, Thomas Tompion and George Graham both lived at the site:

I will start with Thomas Tompion as he was the elder of the two, and was more influential in the manufacture of watches and clocks, and could be described, as stated on the plaque, as the “The Father of English Clockmaking”.

The plaque states that he was born in 1638, but the majority of sources give his date of birth as 1639, in Northill, Bedfordshire (for example Bedford and Luton Archives and Records Service, and the Science Museum). Only one year, but an example of how it is difficult to be exactly sure of dates with the distance of time, and for those who were not born into a well known and documented family.

He arrived in London in 1671, and it was his meeting with Robert Hooke three years later that would help make his name as a clockmaker.

By 1674 Tompion appears to be living and working in Water Lane, the original name of Whitefriars Street, when it ran from Fleet Street all the way down to the Thames. Strype’s 1720 description of the lane is not that flattering:

“a good broad and straight street, which cometh out of Fleet Street and runneth down to the Thames, where there is one of the City Lay-stalls, for the Soil of the Street. This Lane is better built than inhabited, by reason of its being so pestered with Carts to the Laystall and Wharfs, for Wood, Coals &c, lying by the Water side at the bottom of this lane.”

The relationship with Hooke seems to have brought Tompion plenty of information about ways of making clocks and watches, and new developments in the profession, for example, one of the mentions of Tompion in Hooke’s diary is this, from the 2nd of May, 1674 (note that Hooke calls him Tomkin in his early diary entries, but then changes to the correct spelling):

“To Tomkin in Water Lane. Much discourse with him about watches. Told him the way of making an engine for finishing wheels and a way to make a dividing plate; about the form of an arch; another way of Teeth work, about pocket watches and many other things”

Tompion, along with Hooke met King Charles II on the 7th of April, 1675, when Hooke showed the King his new spring watch which was one of Hooke’s attempts at designing a watch that would enable the calculation of longitude at sea. This required very stable time keeping, compensating for the movement of a ship and changing weather.

Charles II requested that a watch be made for him, and Tompion built the watch to Hooke’s design, however this seems to have caused a breakdown in their relationship, as Hooke was frequently complaining to Tompion that he was taking too long to finish the project.

Things did not go well after completion, as after the watch was presented to the King, he complained to Hooke that “the weather had altered the watch”. Hooke’s deign had not yet factored in temperature compensation.

Thomas Tompion:

© The Trustees of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Despite any issues with the watch for the King (which appears to have been mainly Hooke’s design), Tompion’s reputation as a clock and watch maker grew rapidly. He experimented with a number of designs and manufacturing techniques to improve the reliability and accuracy of his clocks and watches, and these variations can be seen in a number of his clocks that survive.

The following watch is an example of Tompion’s work from the period 1700 to 1713:

© The Trustees of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The following side view provides an indication of the complexity of early 18th century watch manufacturing. For reference, the watch is just over 29 millimetres thick and the diameter of the dial is 41 millimetres:

© The Trustees of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

From about 1685, Tompion started to number his clocks and watches, so it is possible to estimate how many he produced. Somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000 watches and around 550 clocks.

Thomas Tompion died in 1713, and as the plaque informs, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

His reputation as a watch and clock maker would continue for long after his death, as this advert from the Kentish Weekly Post on the 17th of June, 1732 illustrates:

“This is to give notice that all sorts of watches are made, mended and sold by Samuel Kissar, who is lately removed from St. Margaret’s-street to the Crown and Dial in Bargate-street, Canterbury.

N.B. He has a watch to sell made by Mr. Thomas Tompion, it being one of the best watches in Kent.”

An eight-day clock by Tompion from between 1695 and 1705:

© The Trustees of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

As Thomas Tompion became successful, he needed help in his workshops, and this led to him taking on additional staff, which is where George Graham, the second name on the plaque comes in.

George Graham started working for Tompion in 1696 when he was employed at the age of 23 as a journeyman (a trained worker), as he had already completed an apprenticeship with another clock maker, Henry Aske.

A few years earlier in 1687, Tompion had taken on Edward Banger as an apprentice.

Both Graham and Banger married in to the wider Tompion family, as George Graham married Elizabeth, who was the daughter of Tompion’s younger brother James, and Edward Banger married Margaret, the daughter of Tompion’s sister, also Margaret.

The practice of senior workers and apprentices marrying into the owner’s family seems to have been reasonably common.

George Graham became a key member of Tompion’s business and he seems to have had the same attention to detail as Tompion, as well as an approach to improvement and invention with the increasing accuracy and performance of clocks and watches.

George Graham was also a well known astronomical instrument maker as these instruments shared many features with clocks and watches where metal working was needed, with instruments built with increasing accuracy (whether measuring time, or the position of a star in the sky).

As far as I can tell, Thomas Tampion died without having had any children who could take over the business. He left the business to George Graham, who announced this in the London Gazette in December 1713: “George Graham, nephew of the late Mr. Thomas Tompion, who lived with him upwards of seventeen years and managed his trade for several years past, whose name was joined with Mr. Tompion’s for some time before his death, and to whom he had left all his stock and work, finished and unfinished, continues to carry on the said trade at the late Dwelling House of the said Mr. Tompion, at the sign of the Dial & Three Crowns, at the corner of Water Lane, in Fleet Street, London, where all persons may be accommodated as formerly.”

Seven years later, George Graham moved a short distance, and announced in the London Gazette in March 1721: “George Graham, watchmaker is removed from the corner of Water Lane, in Fleet Street, to the Dial & One Crown on the other side of the way, a little nearer Fleet Bridge, a new house next door to the Globe and Duke of Marlborough’s Head Tavern”.

What is interesting with these announcements is the description of the place where George Graham was located. They are all graphical descriptions where the names that would have been on the signs at or next to Graham’s location are given.

The following image shows three of George Graham’s long case clocks, made between 1740 and 1750:

© The Trustees of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The pendulum can be seen in the clock on the right, and the type of pendulum was one of George Graham’s inventions – the mercurial compensated pendulum.

Using mercury at the base of a pendulum was a clever method to compensate for temperature variations.

With an all metal pendulum, when the temperature rises, the pendulum expands and gets longer, which impacts the accuracy of the clock.

When a glass vial is at the bottom of the pendulum, the pendulum rod still expands making it longer, however the mercury in the glass vial responds to the increase in temperature by rising up the glass vial, and because mercury is a heavy mass, the rise in the height of mercury against a lengthening pendulum, keeps the overall centre of gravity at the same place, so the clock continues to keep time as temperature changes.

In 1721 George Graham was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1722 he was elected as Master of the Clockmakers Company, and as well as clocks and watches, he continued to work on astronomical instruments, and other scientific instruments such as a micrometer.

George Graham died in 1751, and the following is a typical newspaper report of his death: “Last Saturday Night died, in the 78th Year of his Age, that great Mechanic Mr. George Graham F.R.S. Watchmaker in Fleet-street, who may be truly said to have been the Father of the Trade, not only with regard to the Perfection to which he brought Clocks and Watches, but for the great Encouragement of all Artificers employed under him, by keeping up the Spirit of Emulation among them.”

After his death, George Graham was buried in the same grave as Thomas Tompion in Westminster Abbey.

Although the plaque states that Thomas Tompion was the “Father of English Clockmaking”, the reports that followed the death of George Graham described him as the “Father of the Trade”.

I do not think there needs to be any competition, both Tompion and Graham seem to have been equals in their craft, and their ability to improve and invent clocks and watches.

There is a second plaque on the corner of the building, and the following photo shows the plaque on the Whitefriars Street side of the building:

The Corn Laws were a set of laws implemented in 1815 by the Tory Prime Minister Lord Liverpool due to the difficult economic environment the country was in following the wars of the late 18th and early 19th century.

The Corn Laws imposed tariffs on imported grains and resulted in an increase in the price of grain, and products made using grain. These price increases made the Corn Laws very unpopular with the majority of the population, although large agricultural land owners were in favour as they made a higher profit from grain grown on their lands.

The Corn Laws were finally repealed by the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1846, and they reflect a tension between free trade, and tariffs on imports that can still be seen in politics today.

John Bright was born on the 16th of November, 1811 and was the son of a Quaker textile manufacturer in Rochdale. Having been born into a Quaker family, Bright became involved with the type of political causes favoured by nonconformists.

Bright met Richard Cobden in 1835 and in 1840 he became treasurer of the Rochdale branch of the Anti-Corn Law League. Bright was a gifted public speaker, and in the campaign to repeal the Corn Laws he would travel across the country speaking and campaigning for the cause.

He was an MP for Durham, then Manchester and finally Birmingham. After the repeal of the Corn Laws, Bright continued to campaign for free trade, including a commercial treaty with France, which resulted in the1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty which lowered customs duties between the two countries.

Richard Cobden was born on the 3rd of June, 1804 in a farmhouse in Dinford, near Midhurst in Sussex. His only time in London appears to have been after his father died, when Cobden was still young, and he was taken under the guardianship of his uncle who was a warehouseman in London.

Not long after he became a Commercial Traveler, and then started his own business which was based in Manchester, which seems to have been his base for the rest of his commercial success.

During his time in Manchester Cobden was part of the Anti-Corn Law League and was known as one of the leagues most active promoters.

The blue plaque on the corner of the building states that “On the site were situated the offices on the Anti-Corn-Law-League with which John Bright and Richard Cobden were so closely associated”.

What is not clear is how much time they spent in London, and in the offices of the anti-corn-law-league, so if anything, the plaque is recording a political campaign for free trade rather than the place of residence or work for two 19th campaigners.

Richard Cobden does have a statue in Camden, opposite Mornington Crescent underground station, but again this seems to championing free trade and Cobden’s role in the repeal of the corn laws:

The Clerkenwell News and London Times on the 1st of July 1868 recorded the unveiling of the statue:

“The Cobden memorial statue which has just been erected at the entrance to Camden Town was inaugurated on Saturday. Although this recognition of the services of the great Free Trade leader may have been looked upon in some quarters as merely local, the gathering together of some eight to ten thousand people to do honour to his memory cannot be regarded in any other light than that of a national ovation.

The committee had arranged that the statue of the late Richard Cobden at the entrance to Camden Town – with the exception, perhaps, of Trafalgar Square, one of the finest sites in London – should be unveiled on Saturday, that day being understood to be the appropriate one of the anniversary of the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the event was so popular that the surrounding neighbourhood was gaily decorated with flags for the occasion. The windows and balconies of Millbrook House, the residence of Mr. Claremont, facing the statue, had been placed at the disposal of Mrs. Cobden and her friends, including her three daughters.

A special platform had been created in front of the pedestal, covered with crimson cloth, and in the enclosure in front the band of the North Middlesex Rifles were stationed, and performed whilst the company assembled.

The report then covers at some length, all the speeches made which told the story of Cobden’s life and his actions in the repeal of the Corn Laws. There were many thousands present to witness the event, and at the end; “after the vast assembly had dispersed Mrs. Cobden, accompanied by Mr. Claremont, the churchwardens, and other friends, walked round the statue and expressed her high gratification at the fidelity of the likeness.”

Before I leave this small area of Fleet Street, there are a couple of major developments underway. In the following photo, the building with the two plaques on the corner is at the right side of the photo, one of the plaques can just be seen. Opposite is a very large building site:

This area is set to become a so called new Justice Quarter in the City, and the area will comprise:

1 – New City of London Law Courts

2 – New headquarter building for the City of London Police

3 – Public space covering an area slightly larger than the current Salisbury Square

4 – New commercial / office space with, you may have guessed, space for restaurants, bars or cafes on the ground floor

I photographed the area before the buildings that were on the site were demolished in a 2021 post on “Three Future Demolitions and Re-developments” which can be found by clicking here.

A bit further along Fleet Street, towards Ludgate Circus, the building next to the old Daily Express building has been demolished, leaving a view of the side of the Express building, and to the buildings at the rear – a temporary view that will soon disappear:

A mix of different subjects in this week’s post, but a very tenuous clock based link with the Guinness clock and two 17th / 18th century London watch and clock makers – all part of London’s deep history, and how you can find unexpected examples of that history in the most unexpected places, such as a brewery in Dublin.

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A Wet January Evening in the City, and the Festival of Britain

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A mix of subjects in this week’s post.

Firstly, if you would like to hear me say erm far too many times whilst I talk about the blog, I had a chat with Liam Davis who hosts a weekly podcast on Shoreditch Radio, where he invites guests from all walks of life to talk about London.

There is also a good discussion with Feargus Cribbin of the London Pub Map.

If the embedded widget below does not work, you can find the podcast at this link.

A Wet January Evening in the City of London

Not the most promising of headings, but hopefully I will show you why it is worth it.

The period between Christmas and the first full working week in the new year is a strange one in the City of London.

There are not too many people around, there will be those who have taken an extended break over Christmas and the first few days in January, also, working from home is a very attractive way of working at this time of year.

Although Christmas is rapidly fading from memory, there are still plenty of decorations and lights. Add to that a very wet start to the year, and an evening when the rain gets heavier by the hour, and the City takes on a very melancholy appearance.

The majority of people on the City’s streets are taking the sensible approach of heading home as quickly as possible, however it is also a good time for a little exploration.

Personally, I prefer the summer. A bit of warmth, plenty of sunshine, long evenings, however London looks good at almost any time of year, and to demonstrate, I took a walk from Liverpool Street down to the Bank, taking a series of photos as I went, with light rain to start, and heavy rain at the Bank preventing a longer walk.

I started at Exchange Square, which is an open space between office blocks at the end of the shed over the platforms of Liverpool Street Station.

It is a very unique place, providing an unusual view of the station and the structure of the roof above the platforms. I have written a dedicated post about the area, which you can find here, but the purpose of my latest visit was just to admire the view.

The trees in Exchange Square are currently decorated with lights:

The view from this space is good during daylight, but after dark it takes on a very different aspect, with the lights of the square, the station, and the tower blocks behind.

I assume that if the proposed development above Liverpool Street station goes ahead, then the view of the office blocks in the distance will be blocked by the new tower built over the station:

From the fencing between the square and the station, we can look down on the platforms:

Artificial lighting after dark brings out a different level of detail within the roof over the station platforms:

Exchange Square lights:

There are plenty of people using the station, but not as busy as on a working day outside of the Christmas / New Year period:

The McDonald’s at the station entrance:

One of the good things about walking while it is raining are the reflections of lights on the surface of the streets, creating pools of colour. This is by one of the entrances to Liverpool Street underground station, with the Railway Tavern at the corner on the right:

Entrance to Liverpool Street Underground Station:

View back to the station entrance, with purple lighting, and the brightly lit interior of the station in the background:

Entrance to the office building that is on the site of Broad Street Station:

View back towards Liverpool Street Station. The alternative view, if the proposed development goes ahead, can be seen in this pdf. The view does not seem to appear on the projects website, only in the pdf of Exhibition Materials.

Taxis waiting outside the station:

The view along Bishopsgate:

The main streets are much quieter than usual, and the alleys and courts that can be found across the City are dead:

Ball Court, leading off Cornhill:

The tragically closed Simpsons, in Ball Court:

View east along Cornhill:

Colour from the basement:

Cornhill looking west towards the Bank junction, with St. Paul’s Cathedral just visible in the distance:

At the rear of the Royal Exchange:

The towers of the City above the “relatively” low rise buildings around the Bank:

At the Bank junction, in front of the Royal Exchange looking along Cornhill, and the rain was getting heavier:

The Royal Exchange with the towers of the City:

Looking down Lombard Street:

No. 1 Poultry, between Poultry (right) and Queen Victoria Street (left):

A final look back towards the east of the City:

The rain was very heavy by the time I reached the Bank, and as water and the electronics in a camera do not mix that well, I joined the few remaining commuters walking into the Bank station to head home.

The Festival of Britain – Land Travelling Exhibition

If you have followed the blog for a few years, you will know that I am really interested in the Festival of Britain. The primary site for the festival in 1951, was on the Southbank, in the area between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge.

There were though festival sites all across the country, as the intention was for the country to be involved, not just a London centric festival.

Each of the main festival exhibitions had their own festival guide book. All were based on the same format and design as the Southbank festival site, but with a different colour to the cover page where the Abram Games famous festival emblem featured.

I have been trying to collect all the festival guide books for some years, and I recently got hold of a copy of the guide book for the travelling element of the 1951 exhibition:

Festival of Britain Travelling Exhibition

This guide book covered the land travelling exhibition, which visited Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham. As the land travelling exhibition, this would reach major inland cities, where the exhibition on an old aircraft carrier covered major coastal locations (link to this at the end of the post).

The introduction provides the background to the travelling exhibition:

“The Festival Exhibition is visiting four of our major inland centres of industry: Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Nottingham. It is therefore appropriate that the main theme of this Exhibition should be the British people and the things they make and use: our past and present achievements in technology and industrial design, and how these provide us to day with manifold opportunities to enrich our daily lives.

The things that will be seen in this Exhibition are not ordinary, average products, but some of the best things that this country is producing at the present time. They are things that we can be proud of, that can inspire and fill us with confidence in the future; and they are a challenge to British industry to emulate the achievements shown here.”

For a travelling exhibition, this was a complex undertaking with thousands of display items grouped into sections as the visitor walked through the exhibition.

The themes were: Materials and Skill, Discovery and Design, People at Home, People at Play, People at Work, People Travel, and the route and individual displays within each section are shown in the following double page map from the guide book:

The focus on technology and industrial design was appropriate for the locations of the exhibition as these were still major industrial centres. It also followed the overall theme of the future, presenting an optimistic view of the future following years of war, rationing and austerity. An attempt to show what the country could make, as there was still an urgent need to reduce imports, grow exports and sell for foreign currency, and to provide a unifying experience which would involve everyone across the country.

Unlike the Southbank Festival guide book, which contained long written sections describing the displays, the guide book for the Travelling Exhibition was mainly a catalogue of all the individual items on display, however it does contain some brilliant drawings of the exhibition areas.

The following image is titled “The Façade”, and shows the main entrance to the exhibition:

The image looks as if it is a Hollywood film premier rather than an exhibition of technology and industrial design.

The timetable for the travelling exhibition was as follows:

MANCHESTER – At the City Hall, Deangate. Open from Thursday, 3rd May to Saturday, 26th May inclusive
LEEDS – On Woodhouse Moor (Woodhouse Lane and Raglan Road Corner), Leeds. Open from Saturday, 23rd June to Saturday, 14th July inclusive
BIRMINGHAM – At the Bingley Hall, King Alfred’s place. Open from Saturday, 4th August to Saturday, 25th August inclusive
NOTTINGHAM – At Broadmarsh, Lestergate, Nottingham. Open from Saturday, 15th September to Saturday, 6th October inclusive.

The exhibition was open seven days a week, with a morning start, and closing at 11:00 pm, including Sunday, although on Sunday’s the exhibition opened at 2:30pm, as I assume there was still an expectation that people would be going to church on a Sunday morning.

The travelling exhibition was not the only Festival of Britain event organised in these cities, for example, in Birmingham, newspapers were also advertising other Festival of Britain events such as a City of Birmingham Show in Handsworth Park, with events including a dog Show, a Rabbit Show and ending with fireworks. There was also a military tattoo at the Alexandra Sports Stadium and a Festival of Opera and Drama at the Midland Institute and Moseley and Balshall Heath Institute.

The next image shows the Corridor of Time:

The Corridor of Time was introduced in the guide book as follows:

“The things that have been made in each age have depended upon the degree of man’s mastery over the materials of the earth and the development of his skill in making and using tools and machines. The story of the ascent of man, the ‘tool-using animal’, from the most primitive times to the present day is told in striking and symbolic form in the Corridor of Time. As we advance with time and see the achievements of the past mirrored in the future, we cannot but be optimistic of the possibilities for man that lie ahead.”

At the end of the Corridor of Time the visitor entered the arena where there was an information desk where “industrial enquiries will be directed to a special information room staffed by representatives of the Council of Industrial Design and of industry”.

It is interesting as to who the exhibition was aimed at, as at times the guide book almost sounds like a description of a trade show, rather than an exhibition that was aimed at the general population.

To help people attend the exhibition from the towns and villages surrounding the four cities, British Rail offered cheap day return tickets, and for Birmingham this offer applied to all stations within an 80 mile radius of the city.

The following image shows “The Arena” which led from the Corridor of Time to the rest of the exhibition:

From the Arena, we enter the “People at Home” section of the exhibition, which in the guide book is illustrated by an image of “The Garden Room” of the “House of the Future”:

The Garden Room is a view of what would be happening in the future with the popularity of conservatories and large windows facing onto a back garden, however in the exhibition there was a recognition of the housing problems that the majority of the population continued to face:

“THE BED-SITTING ROOM – With smaller houses and scare accommodation, this form of room has taken on a new importance in recent years. Special efforts and imagination can make the bed-sitting room very congenial, either for the adult living apart from the family or as a place of privacy for the older child.”

We then come to the “People at Play” section, which is illustrated with “The Fashion Theatre”:

The People at Play section included displays on:

Outdoor Sports and Games
Hobbies (Amateur Photography, Amateur Radio, Painting and Home Cinematography)
Leisure Wear (which was displayed by “actress mannequins” in a continuous performance in the Theatre of Fashion)
The Rolling English Countryside (walking, rambling, mountaineering, cycling , rowing and canoeing)
Indoor Sports and Games

A look at the list above might imply that the exhibition was aimed at the affluent middle class, however taking Amateur Photography and Cycling as two example, that is exactly what my father was doing in 1951. He started off with a Leica camera purchased cheaply from a serviceman returning from Germany after the war, and cycled the country with friends after National Service, staying at Youth Hostels, which was a very cheap way of seeing the country.

We then come to the “People at Work” section, with an image of the same name:

“Britain’s industrial achievements and engineering skill are renowned throughout the world. We were pioneers and leaders in industrial engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries”, so began the introduction to the “People at Work” section. The guide book featured the jet engine, or the “Whittle Engine” as it was called in the Exhibition Guide after Frank Whittle who was instrumental in the development of the jet engine.

The guide mentions John Barber who had taken out a patent for what would become a gas turbine, the core of a jet engine, as early as 1791.

Barber’s designs were very much in advance of their time, and manufacturing technology was not at the stage where the designs could be turned into a working gas turbine.

In a perfect example of what ever you think the future will be, it will almost certainly be different, in the section on People at Work, there are some paragraphs under the heading “The Future”.

The guide explains that the future of electricity and energy production is with home supplies of coal and peat, and that cheap supplies of these, rather than the expensive oils currently being burned would help power the future.

No understanding in 1951 of the impact of burning large amounts of fossil fuels, and digging up large amounts of peat.

The next section of the exhibition is “People Travel”, with an illustration of the same name:

The guide compares the arduous methods of travel at the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition, with the travel opportunities one hundred years later in 1951, with air travel and the car providing the means to explore the country and the wider world – “the private car has added a new degree of freedom to the mode of life of many people in all countries”.

To show some of the accessories that went with the freedom of travel provided by the car, the exhibition included:

Picnic Basket “Fieldfare”: G.W. Scott & Sons Ltd, 4-10 Tower Street, London W.C.2
Twin cup vacuum flask. British Vacuum Flask Co. Ltd. Lissenden Works, Gordon House, London, N.W.5
Coffee cups and saucers, acrylic. S.C. Errington (Hanwell) ltd, 132a Uxbridge Road, London W.7
Plastic sandwich box, Marris’s Ltd, 16 Cumberland Street, Birmingham

So the opportunity in the summer of 1951, if you had a car, was a drive out into the countryside, where you could stop and have lunch from your plastic sandwich box, drink coffee from acrylic coffee cups and saucers kept warm in the vacuum flask, all stored in your Fieldfare picnic basket from Tower Street.

“PEOPLE TRAVEL because now the opportunity is open to all”:

The logistics of the travelling exhibition were impressive. It covered an area of 35,000 square feet, and was the world’s biggest transportable, covered Exhibition ever to be constructed.

It needed to be assembled and disassembled quickly due to the tight time schedule of openings and closings in the four different cities.

The exhibits were designed for quick and easy assembly, and to allow for differences between the sites, such as different floor levels, the exhibition structures were on adjustable footings. All exhibits were also completely wired for connecting up at each site.

The guide includes a photo of the Exhibition Façade under construction, and I am sure that is the main hall of Alexandra Palace:

Alexandra Palace makes sense as it would have provided a large area for construction of all the exhibits, and the contractors responsible were the City Display Organisation, London.

As with all the Festival of Britain Guide Books, the one for the Travelling Exhibition included a large number of adverts, many in colour, and they feature a range of British industrial enterprises, the vast majority of which have all disappeared in the years since the 1951 festival.

In the Triumph Renown, manufactured by the Triumph Motor Company, you could get out and visit places and events such as displayed in the following photo:

I think that is a location in outer London, as in the photo we can see the following:

Before Lego, there was Minibrix:

Minibrix were manufactured by the Minibrix Rubber Company, a subsidiary of the I.T.S. Rubber Company of Petersfield in Hampshire. Production started in the late 1920s.

The bricks were made out of solid rubber, and were therefore rather heavy compared to the plastic bricks that Lego would later introduce.

Competition from Lego, who used plastic for their bricks, which was cheaper to produce, and allowed a much wider range of models to be built, meant that Minibrix could not compete, and Minibrix ended production in 1976.

The fate of Minibrix sums up much of the industries and businesses featured in the Festival of Britain, with the majority disappearing in the next 40 years.

One that does still thrive is Rolls-Royce, who continue production of the jet engine in Derby.

I still have a couple of Festival of Britain Guide Books to find, but if you would like to read some of my other posts on the festival, you can find them at the following links:

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The Festival of Britain and the Atomic Bomb

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The Festival of Britain and the Atomic Bomb – two very different subjects, but with a connection, and which also both show different expectations of the future in the early 1950s. The Festival of Britain put forward a vision of hope for the future, a country with strong industrial and cultural traditions, based on the history of the British people and the land they inhabited. The atomic bomb put forward a terrifying vision of destruction as the world descended into the Cold War.

I hope all will become clear by the end of the post.

Festival Ship Campania

I have written a number of posts about the Festival of Britain (there is a list of links at the end of the post). The festival presented a view of the country based on the people and the land. History, industry, science and creativity all featured, as well as what the organisors portrayed as Britain’s contribution to civilisation and the rest of the world.

The main Festival of Britain exhibition site was in London, on the South Bank, and this, along with the Pleasure Gardens at Battersea are probably the most well known festival locations, however the intention with the festival was to get as many people across the country involved as possible. There were fixed exhibitions in Glasgow and Belfast, a travelling land exhibition, and also an exhibition within a ship that sailed around the coast of the country, and brought the festival to several major port cities.

The exhibition was in the Festival Ship Campania:

Festival of Britain ship Campania and the Atomic Bomb

The Campania had been a “ferry carrier” during the war. The role of a ferry carrier was to transport aircraft between locations. Whilst aircraft could land and take off from the ferry carrier, this was more for delivery of aircraft than for combat, although planes from the ship were involved in a number of combat operations.

The Campania had been used on artic convoys, delivering aircraft to Russia to support the eastern front and the Russian campaign against the Nazi’s..

As with all other Festival of Britain exhibitions, there was an official guide book published for the Festival Ship Campania, and the following from the guide book provides more detail about the ship:

“This is the first time that an exhibition of this size has been presented in a ship. Clearly the primary requirement in an Exhibition Ship is adequate display space, and for this reason Campania was chosen; for she has a hanger deck 300 feet long, and high enough for galleries to be built to increase the Exhibition area.

H.M.S. Campania was laid down as a merchant vessel at the yard of Messrs. Harland & Wolff. She was taken over during the last war by the Admiralty while still on the stocks, and converted into a ferry carrier. In this role she had a distinguished career. She has been lent by the Admiralty as a Naval contribution to the Festival of Britain. Her conversion to a Festival Ship has been planned by the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Charles Lillicrap, in conjunction with Mr. James Holland, the Exhibitions Chief Designer. It was carried our by Messrs. Cammell Laird of Birkenhead.

During her time as a Festival Ship, Campania is flying the Red Ensign. She is manned by a Merchant Navy crew and managed on behalf of the Festival of Britain by Messrs. Furness, Withy & Co.

F.S. Campania is a motor ship with two diesel engines, 13,000 h.p. and has a speed of 18 knots. Her principal dimensions are: overall length 540 feet, beam 70 feet, draught 23 feet, gross tonnage 16,408.”

The guide book for the Festival Ship Campania has the same design features of all the festival guides, with the front covering featuring the symbol of the festival, designed by Abram Games. As with all other guides, the book is “A Guide To The Story It Tells”, and was written by Ian Cox, the Festival’s Director of Science and Technology, who was from the Ministry of Information:

The displays on the Campania were a mini version of the South Bank site, with main exhibition themes of The Land of Britain, Discovery and The People at Home.

The exhibits and displays were spread over three decks of the ship, and the benefit of the Campania was that it had a large hanger deck and flight deck which were used for displays.

The guide book included a diagram of the ship showing the three decks, the subjects of each display area, and a recommended way around the exhibition:

As with the other exhibition locations, the Campania was fitted out with a restaurant, bar and café to enhance the overall visitor experience.

The side of the ship was decorated with the Abram Games festival sumbol and the words Festival of Britain. Coloured flags decorated the flight deck, as shown in this illustration from the guide book:

Festival Ship Campania and the Atomic Bomb

The Campania toured the coast of the country for the same period of time as the main festival on the South Bank, starting at Southampton in early May and ending at Glasgow in the first week of October, soon after the South Bank site closed. The following table from the guide shows the ports of call, and the duration of each visit:

There were very many school trips to the ship, some of which included the organisation of special trains, as for example, from the New Milton Advertiser on the 19th of May 1951:

“Between 600 and 700 Brockenhurst County High School pupils went to Southampton by special train on Friday in last week to visit the Festival Ship Campania. A section of the party also cruised round Southampton Docks in a specially chartered vessel.”

The Liverpool Echo reported on the visit of the ship to the city, and included some highlights of what could be seen onboard, including models of an “Underground railway junction and London Airport as it will be when completed, a jet engine and a seaside pub, several full-size boats and working models of busy shipping ports”.

The article ended by stating that “This is Birkenhead’s Great Festival Show – the one you mustn’t miss”.

During the visit of the Campania to Belfast, the officers and many of the organisors and administrative staff on the ship were treated to a reception by the Northern Ireland Government, and the Belfast Newsletter reported that on the day of the reception there had been a total of 4,909 visitors to the Campania.

The popularity of the exhibition on the Campania seems to have had an impact on the experience for those on board. A visit to the ship by children of the Holy Trinity Secondary Modern School in Bradford-on-Avon, was reported in the Wiltshire Times as “The visit was somewhat marred by the terribly overcrowded conditions on the ship”.

The visit of the Campania seems to have been a great success at all the ports of call, with newspapers reporting high numbers of visitors to the exhibition, although I suspect that as well as the Festival of Britain exhibition, the opportunity to look around a large ship that had seen service in the war just six years before, must have been a major incentive.

As with all the Festival of Britain Guide Books, the book for the Festival Ship Campania had a number of adverts, many colour, and for the Campania, many of these adverts had a maritime theme, such as the advert of the Marconi company:

One of the key themes for the festival was Britain’s industrial and scientific strengths, and how these would contribute to the future of the country.

I doubt anyone in 1951 could foresee the industrial decline of the country over the next 50 years when almost every company featured in the adverts across all the festival guides would disappear, with the majority being taken over by foreign competitors.

The Marconi company featured in the above advert went through several changes of ownership, and became part of GEC, which sold some of the business to BAE. GEC renamed itself as Marconi during the so-called dot com bubble, buying a number of US networking companies at very high prices.

Losses became significant, parts of the firm were sold, shares were suspended and Marconi as a business folded in 2006. A small part of the once sprawling empire remains as Telent.

British Thomson-Houston was part of the gradual consolidation of British industry, eventually being owned by GEC:

The South American Saint Line was a Cardiff base shipping company that operated cargo routes between Dover and European ports, and Cardiff and South American ports, for example taking coal to Argentina and returning with a cargo of grain. The business was closed in the early 1960s, with routes and ships being sold to other shipping companies.

Even if a company had no maritime connections, they tried to include an appropriate reference in their advert:

British Aluminum was taken over by US and Canadian companies, and all UK based operations seem to have closed in the early 2000’s:

The discovery referenced in the following advert for the British Oxygen Company was made by two French brothers, Arthur and Leon Brin who founded Brin’s Oxygen Company, soon after renamed as the British Oxygen Company, which was taken over by the German company Linde in 2006:

And finally, I doubt that the companies behind the Shipbuilding Conference who issued the following advert, could have expected the British ship building industry to be at such as reduced state some 70 years later:

The Festival of Britain tried to mix industrial strength, leading edge science and design, with a rather romantic view of the country’s culture, history and relationship between the people and the land.

One of the Theme Conveners for the exhibitions on the Campania was Jacquetta Hawkes, a British archeologist and writer. who in the same year as the festival, published probably her best known book “A Land”. A really difficult book to classify, it has been described as a deep time dream of the country’s archaeology. There is a good review of the book here. It is a fascinating read, and although we cannot visit the Festival of Britain today, it is a sort of published form of the “Land” parts of the festival.

Back to the Campania, and during the Second World War, the ship was used to ferry aircraft and many other supplies and equipment to Russia, who were fighting the German’s in the east. Aircraft on the ship were also used to defend the convoys, with a U-Boat being sunk in 1944.

View of the Campania at sea:

HMS Campania — BRITISH CONVOY TO RUSSIA. 1945, ON BOARD THE BRITISH ESCORT CARRIER HMS CAMPANIA DURING A CONVOY TO RUSSIA WHEN BITTER ARCTIC WEATHER WAS EXPERIENCED. (A 28222) Air view of the CAMPANIA. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205016175

The route taken by these convoys was around the northern edge of Norway and Finland to reach Arkhangelsk in Russia. Conditions were appalling. There was the constant threat of attack from German aircraft, ships and submarines as well as dreadful weather conditions, as shown in the following two photos of the Campania during a convoy:

HMS Campania Artic Convoy — BRITISH CONVOY TO RUSSIA. 1945, ON BOARD THE BRITISH ESCORT CARRIER HMS CAMPANIA DURING A CONVOY TO RUSSIA WHEN BITTER ARCTIC WEATHER WAS EXPERIENCED. (A 28225) A Wildcat being ranged on CAMPANIA’s flight deck in Arctic conditions. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205159605

When decks would be covered in thick snow and ice – very different to the open air café on the deck during the festival:

After the end of the Second World War, the Campania was decommissioned. Many ships which had served a temporary purpose during the war were sold or scrapped, however the Campania was put on the reserve list, and was therefore available for the Festival of Britain.

After the festival, the ship returned to the navy, which brings us to the second part of the title of the post:

Operation Hurricane and the Atomic Bomb

During the Second World War, Britain had a nuclear weapons project underway, as did the Americans. The cost, complexity and need for a rapid solution in the development of such a weapon resulted in the US, UK and Canada working together on what became known as the Manhattan Project, with the partnership being formalised by the Quebec agreement of 1943.

Under this agreement, British scientists worked with the Americans in the development of the atomic bomb, and shared the UK’s work up to that point.

After the war, the US ceased all cooperation with the British, and did not share any of the development work that led to the bomb produced by the Manhattan Project.

This was mainly down to the perceived risk of sharing such knowledge, and that the Quebec agreement gave the British a veto in the use of atomic weapons.

In 1949 the Russians tested their first atomic bomb, and in 1950 the German physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had fled from the Nazi’s, and was part of Britain’s early research into the atomic bomb, and then the Manhattan project, was found to have shared secrets with the Russians.

He was sentenced in a British court and imprisoned, however the US viewed this as a further risk of working with the British and ended any remaining cooperation, including the use of US test sites.

So the US and Russia had the atomic bomb, and in the late 1940s, the UK still believed that it had a “Great Power” status, and having atomic weapons was essential in maintaining that status.

In 1947, the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, approved the creation of the High Explosive Research Project, which would be responsible for the development of a British designed and built atomic bomb.

As well as developing the bomb, a site was needed to test. The US had refused access to their testing grounds, so a search was underway for a suitable site, which finally settled on the remote Montebello Islands off the west cost of Australia. The location of the islands is shown by the red circle in the following map ( © OpenStreetMap contributors):

Operation Hurricane was the name given to the first test of Britain’s atomic bomb, and when it had been built, a fleet was assembled with Campania given the role of Flag Ship, sailing from Portsmouth where the ship had been equipped for the role, to the western Australian test site..

The 25 kiloton bomb was to be exploded on board a redundant British frigate called HMS Plym. It was placed in the hold, below the water line as one of the intentions was not just to test the performance of the bomb, but also the impact of an atomic bomb being smuggled onboard a ship into a British harbour.

The location of the Plym, and the bomb’s detonation within the Montebello Islands group is shown by the red dot in the following map ( © OpenStreetMap contributors):

The bomb was exploded just before eight in the morning (local time), on the 3rd of October, 1952. Exactly a year before, the Campania was moored at Glasgow in the last few days of its role as the Festival Ship.

There is far too much on the story of Operation Hurricane than I can include in a weekly post. For lots more detail, the Ministry of Supply produced a film showing the full story from the development of the bomb, through to the test and explosion. This film is on the Imperial Museum website, and is in three parts.

The first part covers the development of the bomb, and also includes the departure of the Campania from Portsmouth. The second part covers preparations, and the third and final part covers the final preparation of the bomb, the explosion and the testing carried out after the explosion.

All three parts to the film can be found at this link.

The film shows not just the devastating impact of an atomic bomb, but also the very rudimentary safety precautions – if you could call them that – for those who participated in the test.

HMS Plym, the ship on which the bomb had exploded had been vapourised, with only a few small fragments of radioactive metal to be found. A large crater was left on the seabed below where the ship had been located.

A wide range of samples were taken from sea water and the land of the islands. Structures had been built on the islands to see how these would have withstood the blast from an atomic bomb, and the impact on these was measured and photographed.

Churchill, who by the time of the test had been re-elected, declared in the House of Commons that the test had been a success and lived up to expectations.

Those who had been involved in the test and witnessed the explosion were sworn to secrecy, as this newspaper report from the 16th of December 1952, when the Campania returned back to Portsmouth explains:

“Atom sailors home with censored story – Five hundred and seventy officers and men of Britain’s atom ship, H.M.S. Campania, back in Portsmouth yesterday from the Pacific, have been put on their honour. And it means that for once Jack Tar cannot talk about his sea travels.

For he knows what happened when Britain’s atom bomb exploded off the Monte Bello Islands; he knows what effect it had on vegetation and test shelters, and some of his colleagues from the vaporised ship, H.M.S. Plym, know what it looks like. He must not say a word.

Before the first of the Campania’s crew went ashore last night they were reminded: ‘Tell them your impressions of the explosion and nothing more. keep to what Dr. Penney said on the B.B.C. and Mr. Churchill in the House. Your are on your honour’.

To make sure these security instructions were fully understood the ship’s company were lectured on board by Rear Admiral A.D. Torlesse, in charge of Operation Hurricane, officials of the Supply Ministry and Dr. William Penny.

Copies of the Admiral’s Speech and Mr. Churchill’s statement in Parliament, were posted on the ship’s notice boards and each man was given a copy.”

In the final part of the Ministry of Supply film on the IWM website, there are some scenes showing a helicopter taking samples of water, and dropping them into a box on the ship.

This was also reported in the press with the rather dramatic headline of “They Got Half Pint Of Death Water“:

“The two men with the most dangerous job of the atom test – they flew a helicopter over the danger spot to get a sample of deadly radioactive water – were Lt. Comdr. Denis Stanley of Thruxton, Hampshire, and Commissioned Observer H.J. Lambert of Carnoustie.

To them it was ‘just another flight’ but that routine flight meant going to within 30 feet of radio-active water only two hours after the explosion.

While Stanley piloted the plane, Lambert was checking the Geiger counter and other instruments. He was watching for a danger point when the flickering dials would indicate that they would have to turn back.

Beneath the aircraft was a canister, like a half-pint milk bottle, said Lambert, suspended 20 feet below by a piece of string. We flew slowly, said Stanley, so as not to spill any of the water. The canister was supposed to be unspillable, but we took no chances.

Said Lambert: We had practised for six weeks lowering a small canister into a box. What happened to the water? we never saw it again. The boffins took it, I suppose.”

After the success of the test, the bomb was developed into the Blue Danube bomb that was Britain’s first operational atomic weapon and for which the V-bomber aircraft were designed and built.

The bomb tested in 1951 had a yield slightly higher than the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War.

Not long after the British tests, the US tested a Hydrogen bomb, which had a yield of some hundreds of time greater than the British design, so in many ways, the British bomb was redundant soon after the test.

The wider impact on those who participated in Operation Hurricane are outside the scope of today’s post, however there is a really good summary in a Daily Mirror investigation, which you can find here.

The Montebello Islands are now part of a Marine Conservation Reserve, and radiation levels have reduced to a point where the islands are now open to visitors.

So that is the connection between the Festival of Britain, and the test of Britain’s first atomic bomb. The Festival Ship Campania, carried an exhibition around the ports of the country, showing the history of the country, British contribution to science and technology, British industry, design and culture.

A year later, the same ship was a witness to the atomic bomb, a threat that would come to define much of the final half of the 20th century during the Cold War, and which rather frighteningly seems to have returned with current world politics and wars.

HMS Campania was decommissioned in December 1952 after returning from Australia. Three years later in 1955 the ship was sold and scrapped.

You may also wish to read:

My own very limited experience of preparations for nuclear war in my post a Forty Year Return Visit to a Secret Nuclear Bunker

And my posts on the Festival of Britain:

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The South Bank Shot Tower and Riverside Buildings

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I have written a number of posts about the South Bank, and the transformation of the area from industrial and terrace housing, via the Festival of Britain, to the place we see today with the Jubilee Gardens and Royal Festival Hall. The majority of my father’s photos of the area were taken in the streets of the South Bank, however there is one that was taken from across the river featuring the Shot Tower, and part of the Thames foreshore between Waterloo Bridge and the site of the Festival Hall.

1947 view of the Shot Tower and South Bank

The above photo was taken on Saturday 23rd August 1947, and shows the Shot Tower, and the buildings along the river. The approach to Waterloo Bridge can just be seen on the left of the photo, and on the right would today be part of the Royal Festival Hall.

The same view in 2022 (although a bit too much of the Royal Festival Hall):

The Shot Tower was just behind and to the left of the yellow stairs seen in the centre of the above photo.

The South Bank today, and the Shot Tower would have been just to the right and further back from the yellow concrete stairs, and the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Hall:

The purpose of the Shot Tower, and the process which gave its name to the tower, was the manufacture of lead shot for shotguns.

The Shot Tower was built in 1826 for Thomas Maltby & Company, and in 1839 was taken over by Walker, Parker & Company, who would continue to operate at the site until closure in 1949.

The Shot Tower was designed by David Riddal Roper and stands 163 feet from ground level to the top gallery. A spiral staircase within the tower provided access to two galleries, one half way up from where molten lead was dropped to produce small lead shot, and a gallery at the top of the tower which was used for large lead shot.

It was a considerable brick construction, with 3 foot thick walls at the base of the tower, tapering to 18 inches at the top.

There were a number of shot towers across London, including one on the other side of Waterloo Bridge which I will show later in the post. There was also one in Edmonton and a film was made using the Edmonton tower to show how lead shot was made within the tower.

The film can be found here on the British Pathe site, and shows the process which would have taken place within the South Bank Shot Tower.

The Shot Tower survived the demolition of all the other buildings on the South Bank as part of the clearance for the Festival of Britain, and was included as part of the festival.

It was finally demolished in 1962, clearing the site for the construction of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A real shame that it was not preserved and space made for it in the design of the new hall. It would have been a fitting reminder of the industrial history of the South Bank.

The Shot Tower survived and was included in the Festival of Britain as it was considered a well known landmark, and as with the lion on the top of the Lion Brewery, there was public concern that such a landmark would be demolished.

The festival organising committee wanted vertical features on the South Bank to draw attention to the site (the Skylon was the primary feature, designed specifically for the festival) and they also wanted the festival to demonstrate Britain’s scientific and technical achievements and advanced British manufacturing, as the country faced the economically difficult post war years and was in desperate need of foreign trade and currency.

The answer was to save the tower, and include it as part of the displays. The very top of the tower was removed and a new structure installed that consisted of a large lamp, emulating a light house, and a large radio dish antenna mounted on an anti-aircraft gun carriage.

The following photo shows the Shot Tower with the additions to the top of the tower for the Festival of Britain:

Shot Tower with radio dish and lighthouse

The intention with the radio dish at the top of the tower was described in the Festival of Britain Guide Book, as: “The radio beacon is above the lighthouse optic. The most obvious part of it is a large reflector which beams a signal to the moon. This is part of the radio telescope and is connected with the display in the Dome of Discovery by underground cable. In the Dome visitors can transmit signals to the moon and actually see them reflected back to the earth after about two and a half seconds”.

The display was in the Outer Space section of the Dome of Discovery, and the use of an anti-aircraft gun carriage at the top of the tower on which the radio dish was mounted, was to enable the dish to move to follow the moon in the sky.

The above description of the intended use of the radio dish is from the official festival guide, and the majority of books on the Festival of Britain repeat this planned use, however it seems that a different use for the dish had to be found after the technically advanced parts for such as radio transmitter / receiver were not available in time.

The Illustrated London News on the 21st April 1951 (not long before the opening of the festival on the 3rd of May 1951) records the new use of the radio dish: “There is to be no moon radar telescope on the top of the 200-ft shot tower on the South Bank: instead , visitors will see radio ‘noises’ or atmospherics from outer space on a television screen.” I assume the guide book had already been printed when the change was made.

The display on a TV of radio noise from sources such as the sun was probably far less visibly dramatic than the radio dish on the top of the old Shot Tower, but it did follow one of the Festival’s aims of showing scientific and technical advancements, just not in such a dramatic way as bouncing a radio signal off the moon.

Mounting an anti-aircraft gun carriage at the top of the tower was not without its dangers as this report from the Evening Telegraph on the 26th of October 1950 describes: “GUN CRASHES INSIDE SHOT TOWER – The gun mounting of a 3.7 A.A. gun being hoisted to the top of the Shot Tower at the Festival of Britain site fell 120 feet inside the tower to-day.

A 20-year-old soldier, Edward Bradley, was taken to St Thomas’s Hospital with slight bruises.

The mounting which weighs about five tons was being placed at the top of the Shot Tower. The gun is to carry a radar set which will send pulsations to the moon during the Festival.

Mr. Morrison told the Commons yesterday the equipment would cost £25,000 and would help in the development of radar astronomy.

Gunner Bradley was half-way up the staircase inside the tower, guiding the load, when he was struck by a falling plank. The gun mounting landed squarely in the centre of the tower and broke through the concrete floor to a depth of a foot.

Also inside the tower at the time were Captain Elliott, in charge of the operation, and a sergeant. The sergeant said ‘We heard a noise as if there was something amiss and we baled out of the tower as quickly as possible'”.

Underneath the radio dish was the “lighthouse” which was in operation from dusk until the evening closure of the festival. It was an electrically operated light (described as “of the most modern all-electric design”) with a lamp of three thousand watts, with a second lamp available should the main fail. The glass of the lighthouse optics which focused the light was made by Chance Brothers, the company that had made the glass for the original Crystal Palace in 1851.

The beam from the lighthouse could be seen up to 45 miles away from the South Bank site.

The following postcard showed the Shot Tower at Night. The lighthouse is the lit section at the very top of the tower, not the beam of light shining down from the tower.

There were discussions on how to decorate the brick tower. Aluminum was suggested (the material was used for the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon), but was deemed too expensive. Cellophane was also suggested but considered a very poor choice. In the end, it was left as the original brick

The two vertical features of the South Bank, Festival of Britain – the Shot Tower, and much taller (300 feet from ground to tip) Skylon:

As well as the Shot Tower, a brick building at the base of the tower was retained and used for a small exhibit showing the development of the South Bank site, as well as some control equipment for the radio system at the top of the tower.

A walkway from this building led into the Shot Tower where visitors could look up and see the top of tower, and below a kaleidoscope of changing London scenes was shown.

The following page from the Festival of Britain, South Bank Guide Book shows the Shot Tower and the recommended route:

The Guide Book also included a rather good colour advert from the construction engineers who had completed the work to extend the steelwork at the top of the Shot Tower for the lantern and for supporting the anti-aircraft gun and radio dish:

The following postcard shows the base of the Shot Tower and the adjacent brick building which provided the access route to the tower during the festival:

My father took the following photo at the base of the Shot Tower:

Time to return to my father’s original photo and look at the other buildings facing onto the river:

From left to right:

On the far left edge of the photo is the approach road to Waterloo Bridge. Behind the red arrow pointing to the approach road is one of only two buildings that have survived from the photo, the building is now part of King’s College, London.

To the right is a travelling crane and Canterbury Dock that were part of Grellier’s Wharf.

The name Grellier’s Wharf came from Peter Paul Grellier, who opened a stone and marble business at the site between Belvedere Road and the Thames. Auctions were held at the site of imported stone and marble, for example, on the 20th July 1843, there was an auction of “a very large importation of very fine marble, consisting of statuary, black, black and gold, vein, dove and bardilla. This importation is recommended to the attention of the trade, as being of a very superior description”.

Canterbury Dock was a small inlet of the river into the site. The name Canterbury came from the Archbishop of Canterbury who was a major landowner in the area (and is also why many of the streets with housing developed in the area between Belvedere Road and Waterloo Station in the 19th century were named after Archbishops of Canterbury).

Slightly to the right, in the background can be seen a small part of the main entrance to Waterloo Station, the second building that remains from the 1947 photo.

The buildings of the lead works are next with the Shot Tower behind.

To the right of the Shot Tower, along the buildings facing the river, there is one with the name “Embankment Fellowship Centre” along the top of the building. An enlargement from the original photo is below:

The Embankment Fellowship Centre was a charitable organisation with an aim of helping unemployed ex-servicemen who had fallen into poverty. Established in 1932 by Mrs. Gwen Huggins the wife of the Adjutant of Chelsea Hospital. She decided to do something to help the ex-servicemen she saw sleeping rough in London, and along the Thames Embankment.

Originally known as H10, and changing name to Embankment Fellowship Centre in 1933, the following article from The Sketch on the 30th of August, 1939 provides a good summary of the organisation’s approach and what took place on the south bank:

“The EMBANKMENT FELLOWSHIP CENTRE provides a constructive solution to the unemployment problem where it affects its most difficult victim, the middle-aged ex-Service man from the Navy, Army, R.A.F., or Mercantile Marine. The Centre does not cater for the vagrant, the work-shy, or the waster, but can claim that every man helped has been reduced by sheer misfortune and no fault of his own to the lowest ebb of poverty.

Painters, doctors, miners, schoolmasters, chauffer’s, stockbrokers, plasterers, mechanics and clerks are all among those who have been assisted. The credentials of all applicants who must be over forty-five, are carefully examined before admission to the Centre, where they are housed, fed and re-clothed and maintained for a period averaging 47 days per case. When a man reaches the Centre he has usually been through a bad period of stress, so the first task is to ‘recondition’ him. To that end he is surrounded by an atmousphere of cheerfulness, comfort and companionship. In the daytime he has occupational work, and every evening he has something to look forward to – a lecture, a show by an amateur dramatic society, a game of darts or billiards, or a film.

Meanwhile officials endeavour to find suitable employment for him; and since many applicants belong to overcrowded or depressed trades, the Fellowship Centre undertakes free training in its own workshops for employment in which middle-age is only a slight handicap, such as valeting, housework, cookery, carpentry, boot and shoe repairs, and so on.

Last year employment was found for 549 men, at an average age of 53 years. The total could have been larger had the premises been capable of accommodating more men. During the past four years some 2000 men have been found employment at an average age exceeding 50 years. Included in the Centre is the Ward of Hope, where a period of free convalescence is provided, following discharge from hospital for homeless and friendless men.

The Council are trying to solve the problem of expansion. They are also trying to raise capital for maintaining a country home, to be modelled on Chelsea Hospital, where veterans of good record with no pension and past the working age can be housed.

Subscriptions to this excellent cause to be sent to Major R.M. Lloyd, Appeal Director, the Embankment Fellowship Centre, 59 Belvedere Road, S.E.1.”

The Embankment Fellowship Centre made a film in 1939 telling the story of a middle aged man named Smith, who lost his job, and could not get another because of his age. Things went downhill quickly with the family possessions being repossessed until he was recommended to the centre. With the centre’s help, he found a new job, and the last scene of the film is Smith and his wife agreeing to donate his recent pay rise to the Embankment Fellowship Centre.

The film “Smith” can be watched here.

The centre on the South Bank was closed not long after my father took the photo, and Hansard records a question in Parliament about the closure, when on the 23rd September 1948, Commander Noble “asked the Minister of Health why the Embankment Fellowship Centre, Lambeth, which provides accommodation for ex-Service men, has just been given notice to quit by 1st December”

Mr. Bevan answered “I understand that this and other notices are occasioned by a London County Council scheme for the redevelopment of the area of the South Bank in which this centre lies.”

The redevelopment of the South Bank would lead to the Royal Festival Hall and the Festival of Britain.

The Embankment Fellowship Centre relocated, and in 2007 changed name to ‘Veterans Aid’, and is still in operation.

Veterans Aid have their main London centre at ” New Belvedere House”, which is rather nice as hopefully the intention was to name the building after the original location at 59 Belvedere Road on the South Bank.

On the right edge of the 1947 photo is part of the Lion brewery. It would be demolished to make way for the Royal Festival Hall which would be built on the land to the right of the Shot Tower.

The South Bank Shot Tower was not the only shot tower along the south bank of the river. The following postcard is a view from the top of the Shot Tower, looking towards the City of London:

Between the two chimneys is a much wider tower, with a dome shaped top. This was also a shot tower, and was older than the one on the South Bank.

Built around 1789, it was described as “a new structure, which cost near six thousand pounds, but cannot be considered as an object ornamental to the River Thames”. It was 150 feet high, and in 1826 the top part was destroyed by fire, which was not surprising given the activity carried out within the tower.

The lead works which included this second shot tower were also owned for a period by Walker, Parker & Company, the same company that owned the South Bank Shot Tower. They left the works in 1845 to concentrate on their South Bank site. The site was advertised in the Morning Chronicle on the 9th October 1845 as: “EXTENSIVE LEAD WORKS, Shot Tower, Wharf, Dwelling-house, and Buildings, Commercial-road, Waterloo-bridge. To be LET on LEASE for twenty one years, from Michaelmas next, when possession will be given in one or two lettings, all those capital and spacious PREMISES, with Wharf, extending about 120 feet next the river Thames, with the lead works, shot tower, and buildings lately occupied by Messrs.’ Walker and Co. Also a counting house, extensive stabling and premises, lately occupied by Mr. Sherwood”.

By the time of the above photo, the large advertising sign on the side of the shot tower was advertising that the works were “Lane, Sons & Co Limited. Lead and Shot Works”.

The street name in the advert is given as Commercial Road. This was a short lived name for the street which is now Upper Ground.

The shot tower was demolished in 1937 after having been out of use for several years. Today, the IBM offices (in the photo below) occupy the site of this second shot tower and lead works:

It is such a shame that the South Bank Shot Tower could not have been included in revised plans for the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and could today be seen between the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Festival Halls.

A reminder of the industrial history of the area, and adding some historical complexity to the buildings we see today, lining the side of the river.

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Jubilee Gardens and the World’s Longest Safety Poster

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In July 1979, the Jubilee Gardens on the south bank of the River Thames near Waterloo Station and County Hall, was the location for the World’s Longest Safety Poster:

I took a couple of photos during a lunch time wander along the south bank:

The poster was an attempt on the world record, although a search of the online database of the Guinness Book of Records does not bring up any reference, although they do not have data online of all records, and this was 41 years ago.

1979 was the Year of the Child, and 360 children from across the country painted individual posters over a four day period, each showing a different aspect of safety, of the emergency services, or some other form of safety message relevant to a child.

The combined posters measured 800ft by 10ft and circled around the central green space of the Jubilee Gardens.

When I photographed the scene, the Jubilee Gardens were two years old. As their name suggests they were created in 1977 to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and they quickly became a popular lunchtime spot for the thousands of workers in the Greater London Council, County Hall, or the Shell Centre buildings – the two large office complexes on two sides of the gardens.

To the east of the park (just visible to the right of the first photo), there was a small stage area, and lunchtime concerts were organised by the GLC.

When weather was not so good, for the rest of the working day, and at weekends, the Jubilee Gardens were quiet. County Hall’s conversion into a hotel and centre for tourist attractions, along with the London Eye were still some decades in the future.

The Jubilee Gardens were closed for a number of years during the 1990s as they were one of the construction sites for the Jubilee Line extension which runs slightly to the west between Westminster and Waterloo Stations. An access shaft was dug in the centre of the gardens down to the level of the tunnel workings.

I often wonder if the access shaft is still there, below the surface, when ever I walk across the gardens.

After the gardens were reopened, they did deteriorate somewhat, but underwent a major redesign and restoration project, reopening in 2012, and it is these gardens we see today:

As well as the design of the gardens, their surroundings have changed considerably over the years, and the people who probably make most use of the gardens today are not office workers, they are more likely to be tourists.

The GLC was disbanded in 1986, and the buildings now host functions mainly aimed at the tourist industry.

Shell have sold off most of the space originally occupied by their offices with today only the tower remaining. New apartment towers have recently shot up around the original Shell tower. The following photo shows the southern edge of the Jubilee Gardens:

The view across the gardens from the northern edge, adjacent to the Embankment walkway:

The London Eye now dominates the view across the Jubilee Gardens:

The Jubilee Gardens as an open space date back to just after the Festival of Britain which occupied the site in 1951. The Shell Centre complex was built on part of the Festival site between Belvedere Road and York Road, construction being between the years of 1957 and 1962.

Part of the plan for the development of the south bank was to leave the space between the Shell tower and the river as open space, enabling an unobstructed view of the tower down to ground floor foyer level from the north bank of the river. The following photo from 1978 shows the view. I took this in the spring so the trees are only just starting to come into leaf, so the gardens are almost invisible from the north bank.

From the closure of the Festival of Britain, until the creation of the Jubilee Gardens in 1977, the site was a temporary car park – temporary in that it was never properly constructed as a car park, the space was just for this purpose until a long term use could be found (and financed).

The Jubilee Gardens were part of the Jubilee Celebrations along the South Bank in July 1977, when there were a number of short, informal performances, and if you had been in the gardens on either the 2nd or 9th of July, you could have seen “Morley College Choir, Tilford Bach Festival Choir, Morley Meridian Choir, Morley Brass Band, Morley Jazz Orchestra, along with performances of opera, early music groups with folk, court, ballet and modern dancing”. Morley College is a specialist provider of adult education, founded to address the learning needs of Waterloo and Lambeth, hence the local connection with Jubilee Gardens.

The gardens were the scene of a number of demonstrations during the 1980s. Marches demonstrating against unemployment in the early 1980s and during the miners strike of 1984 to 1985 there were rallies and demonstrations by miners and supporting trades unions in the gardens.

The view across the Jubilee Gardens in 1980.

The stage area can be seen on the right. The area on the left was still used as a car park. I doubt that anyone at the time could have imagined the London Eye being central to this view.

However, as well as being close to the London Eye, the area was the location for one of the key structures of the Festival of Britain, when the Dome of Discovery occupied the space now occupied by the Jubilee Gardens as can be seen in the following photo:

In the above photo, the buildings of County Hall that now face onto the gardens are seen on the lower right of the photo.

The following photo shows the construction of the Royal Festival Hall (in the foreground) and the Dome of Discover, with the buildings of County Hall in the background to confirm that the Jubilee Gardens now occupy the same space as the Dome of Discovery.

One of the reasons that the south bank site was chosen for the Festival of Britain was that the area had been very badly damaged during the war. During, and just after the war, many of the buildings on the site of the Jubilee Gardens had been demolished, with all that remained being a growing pile of rubble, as shown in the following photo by my father – again the buildings of County Hall confirm the location.

The site was completely cleared as shown in the following remarkable photo, which shows the area now occupied by the Jubilee Gardens cleared down to what was probably the original ground level when this was all marsh land.

The river must have flooded over the area at high tide – which explains why if you are at ground level at the edge of the side of County Hall facing the gardens, there appears to be an extension of the Embankment wall running inland alongside the building. It was to keep the Thames out.

This was the first area cleared for the construction of the Festival of Britain, as on the other side of Hungerford Railway Bridge, just behind the Shot Tower is the Lion Brewery, which would also soon be demolished.

Before the war, the area now occupied by the Jubilee Gardens was mainly warehousing and industrial. A large warehouse – the Government India Stores – occupied the site, along with a now lost street – Jenkins Street, as shown in the following map extract (again the buildings of County Hall provide a point of reference).

The Government India Stores, or the India Stores Depot was built in 1862 on land leased by the Secretary of State for India. The purpose of the building was to hold goods that had been purchased in the UK by the Government of India, prior to shipping to India.

By the end of the 19th century, this was getting to be a dubious exercise with questions being asked in Parliament about why the Government of India was purchasing goods in the UK which could also easily be purchased in India, and would benefit the Indian economy.

My father photographed the post war remains of the Government India Stores prior to demolition:

The area occupied by the Jubilee Gardens has long been an industrial site. The following extract from Rocque’s map of London from 1746 shows the sweep of the river as it curves down to Westminster Bridge at lower left.

Where Westminster Bridge lands on the right side of the river, a street named Narrow Wall runs north. The site of the Jubilee Gardens are roughly to the left of the word ‘Wall’. The map shows that the area of land between Narrow Wall and the river was the first to be developed.

Before any buildings had occupied the site, the area had been marsh, and part of the river foreshore. The name Narrow Wall probably refers to an embankment between the river and the land, with a roadway of some basic form running along the embankment.

Just south of the site of Jubilee Gardens, where County Hall is now located and long before any building occupied the location, a Roman Boat was found during the construction of County Hall:

Image credit: London Metropolitan Archives, City of London: catalogue ref: SC_PHL_04_15_53_27D

So the area around Jubilee Gardens has a long history and it is intriguing to imagine the Roman boat beached on the foreshore of the Thames and gradually sinking into the mud.

The Jubilee Gardens have seen the dramatic rise in tourism over the last few decades, although they are relatively quiet today as London is still missing the millions of tourists that visit the city.

Their location has seen the London County Council and the Greater London Council come and go, along with the construction of the Jubilee Line extension, the Dome of Discovery and the Festival of Britain. The site has been bombed and was the location of a warehouse for goods bound for India.

They have been the site for demonstrations, a wide range of entertainments, and a green space for office workers to spend summer lunchtimes – and possibly the record breaking World’s Longest Safety Poster,

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Tag Archives: Festival of Britain

The Creatives behind the Festival of Britain – Laurie Lee

The Creatives behind the Festival of Britain – Jacquetta Hawkes

The Festival of Britain and the South Bank – 75 Years Later

Festival of Britain 1951 – The Moment That Shaped South Bank

The Sunbathers by Peter Laszlo Peri – Waterloo Station

The Lion and the Unicorn, Wetherspoon’s – Waterloo Station

Siegfried Charoux’s Motorcyclist sculpture – Southbank Place

The Royal Festival Hall at 75

The Exhibition of Industrial Power and London Archaeology

Resources – London Archaeologist and the Archaeology Data Service

Archaeology Data Service

The Guinness Festival Clock, London Clock Makers and the Corn Laws

A Wet January Evening in the City, and the Festival of Britain

A Wet January Evening in the City of London

The Festival of Britain – Land Travelling Exhibition

The Festival of Britain and the Atomic Bomb

Festival Ship Campania

Operation Hurricane and the Atomic Bomb

The South Bank Shot Tower and Riverside Buildings

Jubilee Gardens and the World’s Longest Safety Poster

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Festival of Britain 1951 – The Moment That Shaped South Bank

The Sunbathers by Peter Laszlo Peri – Waterloo Station

The Lion and the Unicorn, Wetherspoon’s – Waterloo Station

Siegfried Charoux’s Motorcyclist sculpture – Southbank Place

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Resources – London Archaeologist and the Archaeology Data Service

Archaeology Data Service

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A Wet January Evening in the City of London

The Festival of Britain – Land Travelling Exhibition

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Festival Ship Campania

Operation Hurricane and the Atomic Bomb

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