Harriet Atkinson
I became interested in the Festival of Britain in the year 2000, when people regularly drew comparisons with the newly opened Millennium Dome, and I started to question why governments back mega cultural projects like these. Harriet explores the international roots of 1951’s Festival of Britain
The Festival of Britain, which opened 70 years ago, was designed as a paean to an exceptional nation rising triumphantly from the ruins of war. Yet, writes Harriet Atkinson, this was a celebration of Britishness with a truly international flavour
“Dear land, dear land, our roots are deep in you: May your sons, may your sons grow tall and true!” If any verse captures the national pride that coursed through the Festival of Britain – which opened 70 years ago this month and dominated the nation’s cultural landscape throughout the summer of 1951 – then this official poem, penned as an ode to the exhibition, is surely it.
The Festival of Britain was the nation’s bid to show off its best side to a watching world – and, more to the point, to its own people. Marking the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (staged at a time when British imperial power was approaching its zenith), the festival was hailed as a celebration of “the arts of peace” a few short years after the trauma of the Second World War. Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour administration also saw it as an opportunity to promote Britain as a model democracy at a time when relations between east and west were increasingly strained.
That this five-month evocation of British exceptionalism struck a chord with the public is beyond doubt. It’s estimated that one in three Britons visited one of the exhibitions staged that summer – and that 8 million visitors descended on the festival’s spectacular centrepiece: London’s South Bank Exhibition, set out around 27 pavilions, across the Thames from Westminster.
Upstream at Battersea, the Festival Pleasure Gardens, a six-acre amusement park reached by boat, gave light relief after the more earnest pleasures of the South Bank. An exhibition of Live Architecture was held in London’s East End, enabling visitors to see the redevelopment of a slum area in progress; and a major exhibition in South Kensington showcased scientific advancements “by means of things you can see and believe”.
Conquest of power
Yet the Festival of Britain was by no means the sole preserve of the nation’s capital. Hundreds of architects, model-makers, sculptors and artists got in on the act across Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England’s regions.
In Belfast, the Farm and Factory Exhibition showed “how Ulster earns its living through agriculture and industry”. A Heavy Industry Exhibition in Glasgow celebrated Scotland’s “conquest of power” through coal and water.
And if you couldn’t make the journey to Britain’s biggest cities, then the festival could be brought to you, courtesy of two travelling exhibitions: one aboard HMS Campania,a decommissioned aircraft carrier, and the other on a fleet of lorries.
The summer of 1951 witnessed an explosion of creativity – one that encompassed everything from enormous, hi-tech tributes to scientific excellence to the more parochial pleasures of bell-ringing and tree-planting. Yet, for all their apparent diversity, these events had a unity of purpose and were designed to convey a single, overriding message. That message was, to a large extent, the brainchild of the festival’s director-general, Gerald Barry, former editor of the left-leaning broadsheet News Chronicle. Barry’s vision of the festival was for it to show “The British contribution to civilisation past, present and future” and to demonstrate British “diversity within unity”. Above all, Barry wanted the festival to focus on telling a “story” about “the land and people of Britain”, on reconciling the two in the aftermath of a war that had seen the population displaced and the landscape disfigured.
It was this vision that produced the fiercely nativist evocation of a people wedded to their land that was celebrated in the official poem, and the unashamedly patriotic festival emblem, which portrayed a red-white-andblue Britannia in profile.
Yet behind the eulogies to British “virtues” lies a truth that may have surprised many of the flag-waving visitors to the festival: that the success of the exhibition was as much a tribute to the creativity and expertise of people some would have considered “outsiders” as the exceptionalism of Britain itself. Many of the exhibitions that dazzled Britons throughout the summer of 1951 were the work of artists, architects and designers who had fled to Britain from the Nazis in the years before the war. And their diverse educations, experiences and bodies of work were to leave an indelible imprint on the festival.
Others hailed from families that had arrived in Britain during earlier waves of migration. One such was Abram Games, who was born on the eve of the First World War in London’s Whitechapel to Jewish refugees from the Russian empire. Games was the designer of the famous festival emblem (shown on page 51) portraying Britannia. Mounted on the points of a compass, Games’s Britannia adheres to his adage “maximum meaning, minimum means”, expressing much through seemingly little. Despite criticism of its “Teutonic” quality, the symbol became extraordinarily popular.
Upstream at the South Bank was a series of pavilions devoted to the “Land of Britain”.
THE FESTIVAL PROMOTED BRITAIN AS A MODEL DEMOCRACY AT A TIME WHEN EASTWEST RELATIONS WERE DETERIORATING
This was overseen by designer Misha Black, who had emigrated to Britain in 1912 at the age of one from the Russian city of Baku (now Azerbaijan). A collector of ephemera from the Great Exhibition of 1851, Black’s early enthusiasm for holding events to mark the Great Exhibition’s centenary was key to their realisation. Gerald Barry recalled Black visiting his News Chronicle office “with the drawings for a magnificent new exhibition building”, “a kind of interplanetary edifice more or less suspended in the sky”.
Black’s futuristic drawing ingeniously anticipated the choice of the South Bank as a central site by several months and inspired Barry to lobby government to stage the festival.
The Royal Festival Hall, the only South Bank building that remained on the site after 1951, was designed by German-born Peter Moro, working with architects Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin. Meanwhile, Moro’s compatriot HJ Reifenberg (who settled in Britain immediately prior to the Second World War) co-designed the impressive Power and Production Pavilion at the South Bank. The pavilion incorporated industrial stands (where visitors could witness the spectacle of industry in action) designed by the Hungarian architect George Fejér.
A giant saucer
Of all the pavilions along the banks of the Thames, few were more imposing than the 365ft-wide Dome of Discovery, a “vast aluminium saucer dome”, as its architect, Ralph Tubbs, described it. The displays inside Tubbs’ enormous creation featured considerable input from designers born overseas.
The dome was filled with displays detailing how scientific discovery had allowed British people to circumnavigate the world made by Misha Black and his fledgling practice Design Research Unit. Hungarian-born architect Stefan Buzás joined this team to make an Earth Sciences display.
Another popular South Bank structure was the towering Skylon, which climbed 300ft into the London sky and was designed by architects Hidalgo Moya and Philip Powell working with Vienna-born structural engineer Felix Samuely.
Equally eye-catching was The Islanders,a massive relief created by the refugee sculptor Siegfried Charoux. Charoux had arrived in Britain from Austria in 1935, becoming a citizen in 1946. His depiction of a man, woman and child gazing out over the Thames in front of architect Basil Spence’s Sea and Ships pavilion represented the family unit as robust and immutable, and underlined the importance of Britain’s island status to its national identity.
Hungarian Peter Laszlo Peri’s sculpture Sunbathing was mounted vertically on the wall of the South Bank’s Waterloo station gate entrance. The playful piece showed a sunbathing couple turning suddenly, as if startled by visitors peering over the wall at them.
Peri had fled to Britain in 1933 and, alongside a number of festival artists (including Misha Black), was a member of the anti-fascist Artists’ International Association (AIA). Another AIA member, the German-born exhibition and poster designer FHK Henrion, was tasked with designing the South Bank’s Country and Natural Scene displays. Henrion was interned by the British authorities as an Enemy Alien early in the Second World War before joining Black to make propaganda at the Ministry of Information. His striking displays for the festival – brimming with a visual urgency more characteristic of central European graphic design – caught the attention of poet Dylan Thomas who described them as “the natural history of owled and cuckooed, ottered, unlikely London”. Murals – both painted and mosaic – featured heavily across the Festival of Britain’s exhibitions. This was an art form suited to
THESE REFUGEES’ DIVERSE EXPERIENCES AND BODIES OF WORK LEFT AN INDELIBLE IMPRINT ON THE FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN
socially engaged subjects, as evidenced in the work of the German-born artist Jupp Dernbach-Mayen, whose mosaic mural for the Dome of Discovery showed a coal miner drilling deep beneath an industrial landscape. Miners – heroic figures of leftist art – were a recurring motif in the festival and also the subject of Polish-born Josef Herman’s monumental oil painting in tribute to the miners of his newfound home in Wales for the South Bank’s Minerals of the Island section.
This is just a snapshot of the enormous contribution that relatively recent arrivals to Britain –many of them refugees – made to the festival. And it begs a question: why? The principal reason was practical. The festival was a source of a vast and varied number of contracts at a time when, whatever their nationality or background, opportunities for artists and architects to make a living were thin on the ground. And the continuing rationing of materials meant that there were limited opportunities to design buildings elsewhere.
But there was more to this than money. The Festival of Britain provided an opportunity for those who had not come through Britain’s established art institutions to connect with other designers. It resulted in lasting design consultancies and architectural practices, commissions and lifelong friendships.
Difference and dissent
All this, of course, was at odds with the image of the nation offered to visitors to the festival: that of one “Britain”, knitted together by a single, authorial voice, playing down difference and dissent.
This may explain why some of those who realised Gerald Barry’s vision were made to feel like outsiders. Charles Plouviez, who worked in the festival office, told me in an interview that he recalled seeing a letter in which his French-sounding surname, and that of a co-worker, had been bracketed with the comment: “I thought this was supposed to be a Festival of Britain”.
The presence of so many refugees in the roster of designers also sat uneasily with the official line that the festival was the celebration of a “Christian nation”. “It is Christianity which has been the religion of this country and formative of its tradition and not Judaism,” intoned Geoffrey Fisher, the archbishop of Canterbury, “and, if the festival is to be typical of England, the religious contribution must be Christian.”
But, for all Fisher’s words, many of the festival’s designers were of Jewish heritage – among them the architect Leonard Manasseh, winner of the competition to design the
South Bank’s ’51 Bar. The omission of Judaism from the festival’s definition of Britishness was addressed in a small way by an Anglo-Jewish Exhibition 1851–1951, which traced a century of Jewish experience in Britain. However, while the exhibition featured works by refugee artists such as Jankel Adler, Hermann Fechenbach and Hans Feibusch, it prioritised the contribution of an established Jewish elite, such as members of the Rothschild family, with little acknowledgement of those whose designs were taking centre stage in the main festival.
The Festival of Britain’s account of cultural diversity was in fact confined to prehistory and archaeology. The festival guide declared: “We are a much-mixed race, and the clue to our way of life and our achievement lies in this blended ancestry” – one that was traced through “Stone Age colonists”, “Bronze Age warriors” and “sea-faring
Vikings”… “It is the very blood that they brought here that runs in us.”
Recent waves of immigration, including those that had arrived on the Windrush, were absent from the official story. But the festival did provide important contacts with Caribbean culture. The visit of the 11-person Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO) to the South Bank Exhibition prompted a wave of admiration for Caribbean music, although tellingly the funds to bring these musicians to London were raised at home not in Britain. Calypsonians Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener, both of whom sailed to Britain aboard the Windrush, recorded songs for the festival. Kitchener’s popular hit declared that “The Festival of Britain is here, People are welcome from everywhere!”
For all the patriotic pride that infused the Festival of Britain, Kitchener’s sentiment was certainly borne out by the diverse backgrounds of the architects, designers and artists who brought this most remarkable of national exhibitions to life.
Harriet Atkinson is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Her book Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953 is due to be published by Manchester University Press in 2022
LISTEN
To listen to Witness History’s exploration of the Festival of Britain, originally broadcast on the BBC World Service, go to bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p00g9stg
KITCHENER’S POPULAR HIT DECLARED THAT ”THE FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN IS HERE, PEOPLE ARE WELCOME FROM EVERYWHERE”