Festival of Britain

Festival of Britain. A large-scale celebration of British culture mounted in 1951; ostensibly it was meant to commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition (held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London), but in fact it was intended as ‘a tonic to the nation’ (the words of Sir Gerald Barry, director general of the Festival) following a period of post-war austerity. The heart of the Festival was a huge exhibition, the South Bank Exhibition, held from 3 May to 30 September on a large area of formerly derelict land in central London, on the south bank of the River Thames between Westminster Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. There were also major exhibitions in Belfast and Glasgow, and a large travelling exhibition was seen in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Nottingham; a Festival ship, the Campania, visited various ports, and many places staged local events—indeed, virtually every town and village joined in the celebrations in some way. Hugh Casson (later president of the Royal Academy) was director of architecture for the South Bank Exhibition, which featured an impressive array of specially designed buildings; all of these were intended to be temporary apart from the Royal Festival Hall, which remains as one of London's leading concert halls, forming part of the South Bank arts complex that has grown around it, including the Hayward Gallery (see ARTS COUNCIL) and the National Theatre. The exhibition attracted more than eight million visitors and acted as a massive showcase for British design; it displayed an enormous range of manufactured goods and helped create a fashion for zany patterning and bright colours. The industrial designer Misha Black (1910–77), who was a leading figure in organizing the Festival, wrote that he and his colleagues had two main objectives: ‘The first was to demonstrate the quality of modern architecture and town planning; the second to show that painters and sculptors could work with architects, landscape architects and exhibition designers to produce an aesthetic unity. On these two counts our success was complete.’ He thought that ‘there was little real innovation, almost nothing on the South Bank which had not previously been illustrated in the architectural magazines … but what had previously been the private pleasure of the cognoscenti suddenly, virtually overnight, achieved enthusiastic public acclaim'. The roster of painters and sculptors involved was highly impressive: Black writes that ‘We sought the collaboration both of the famous and of those who were not yet renowned and this collaboration was enthusiastically provided. Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Keith Vaughan, Victor Pasmore, Ben Nicholson, John Minton, Feliks Topolski, Frank Dobson, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Reg Butler and some twenty other artists carved, modelled and painted in complete unison with the architects who ensured that walls were available for murals and plinths for sculpture. Practically every concourse was designed to contain a major work.’ In spite of this array of talent, Black thought that painting and sculpture made relatively little impact on public or press, probably because they had to compete with the sheer size of the Festival and the diversity of other attractions. There was, however, a mild rumpus when an abstract painting by William Gear was one of five pictures awarded a purchase prize (£500) by the Arts Council at an exhibition it organized. The other four prizes went to figurative works by Lucian Freud, Patrick Heron, Rodrigo Moynihan, and Claude Rogers.