60 years ago, an extraordinary national festival captured
the imagination of the country.
You saw the future, you saw the future.
Our impression was, you know, this is a wonderful place.
The place was alive with excitement and promise.
The 1951 Festival of Britain was a celebration designed to show
how a country battered by war, debt and austerity,
could carve out a new future,
through science, design and innovation,
whilst still having fun.
The Festival of Britain was a very nice thing to do
to just get the people together, and be happy.
It was a very happy place, beautiful atmosphere.
This was a completely radical, new vision
of what Britain could look like.
We thought we were making something new and indeed we were.
We were building the future.
It was a new beginning, absolutely new beginning.
Told by the people who made it happen, this is the story of how
one summer, and one extraordinary festival, changed Britain forever.
On May 7th 1945, there came at last an end to the war,
which for almost six harsh years had conditioned the lives and the aims of the British people.
The British joined in a wild celebration of victory.
But as the lights went on once more, the British soberly realised
that if one struggle was ended, another was just beginning.
Britain had spent all its resources on this sort of great crusade to beat Nazism.
So for people in Britain, they've been living through not just the great depression in the 1930s
and the Second World War but they've just lived through
six years of drab, bombed out, exhausted,
financially bankrupt Britain.
It was harsh. It was kind of bleak.
There was a bleak atmosphere.
But compared to the Air Force it was most charming really.
Well, it was still grey and miserable.
I remember all the stone buildings were black in those days
because we all had coal fires.
There hadn't been any building worth a damn for the last six years...
or more. There were still bomb holes all over the place.
London was full of bombsites with wild flowers growing on them everywhere.
It was shabby, shabby, broken,
patched up really, most of it.
And it was colourless. Colourless, shabby, dull.
The colours were grey and the colours were camouflage colours really.
No buildings had been painted externally for ten years I suppose.
It was really depressing, but one just got used to it.
I think anyone coming from abroad was astonished how gloomy and rundown it all was.
About that time they had the Great Freeze
when the snow came down and didn't go away.
'Austerity now had quite a new meaning,
'and for hundreds of thousands of people,
'the effort to keep warm was priority number one.'
And as if that wasn't bad enough,
the whole of the country was still subject to stringent rationing.
Rationing was actually in some cases worse after the war,
than it had been during the war, and we'd bread rationing, potato rationing after the war.
In 1950, a working adult was allowed seven ounces of butter or margarine,
one egg, half a pound of sugar,
ten pence worth of meat, two rashers of bacon,
and two ounces of tea... a week.
Yeah, it was all rationed, tea was rationed, butter was rationed,
milk was rationed, bread was rationed.
Can't think what wasn't rationed actually.
'What's much more serious is the cut in the meat ration, which was already pretty small.
'It remains to be seen whether this negative policy will get results,
'or have the old standards gone forever?'
I can remember coming in from work one evening and mum said,
"I've got some meat and it's whale meat."
And I thought, "Ooh, you know, flipping heck."
I remember whale meat vividly. It was indescribably revolting.
It was blobs of this gelatinous material,
which had a very ominous shine to it.
And it was this very worrying sort of grey colour. It was ghastly.
It tasted even worse than it looked.
Sweets were rationed.
Sweets were on coupons so you didn't get a lot of sweets.
And I can also remember eating a lemon
and it was sharp as anything
but it was the first thing that I had after the war - was a lemon!
Did you know what a lemon was?
No. No I knew it was sour.
Six years on from the end of the war,
people felt that things had not really changed that they...
In fact rationing had got worse, things seemed terribly grey and
dreary and threadbare and tired,
and I think that's why the festival really struck a chord because
it represented a sort of escapism and a welcome dash of colour
in what was hitherto a very kind of grey, grey scene.
The 1951 Festival of Britain was originally planned
to commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
But as nobody knew what we could afford, or what it should contain,
a committee, led by former newspaper editor Gerald Barry,
was set up to design and build the event.
He was a man of enormous energy and commitment.
He really believed in modernism, he really believed in planning.
But he knew what the possibilities were.
So it was his vision really that was created on the South Bank and Barry's...
In my view, Barry's great achievement was not simply
as a leader, an innovator, but he had the talent to put around him
a team of young people who were equally adventurous.
He was not afraid of employing the younger generation of talents
and letting them have their head.
Charles Plouviez worked in the main office.
On my floor I was in an office next to the Director of Exhibitions,
I had Hugh Casson just across the passage
and Laurie Lee in the next office down the passage.
You met a lot of interesting people
and they were all youngish, and keen.
I mean we thought we were making something new and indeed we were.
It was terrific fun. Coming down from university it was like being let into an enormous toy shop.
You had this huge organisation to play with and there were things going on, exciting things going on.
I knew it was quite exciting because in the contracts department
I'd had to complete a contract for a life-size unicorn.
So it was that sort of a place.
But the first problem was to find a site.
There were few accessible places in London which could house an exhibition of this size.
After much wrangling, the choice fell
on a badly bombed industrial area
on the south bank of the River Thames.
It's now been decided to hold a Festival of Britain in 1951,
and a site has been selected on the south bank of the Thames.
This is a very blitzed area and quite apart from the exhibition, it's proposed to make
the south side of the river here as imposing as the opposite bank.
It was a dying area. It was a mess.
There was nothing there except wasteland.
It was industrial wasteland that we cleared
and turned into this fantasy land.
'Although final plans are not yet complete,
'you can get an idea from this sketch of what London's festival city of 1951 will look like.
'Permanent features are to be a concert hall and eventually a National Theatre
'in what is described as London's culture centre.'
The South Bank was to be the centrepiece,
designed to boost morale and enrich the British way of life.
It was a genuine attempt to show the brighter side
of what we could do after the war,
and to show ourselves really what we were capable of, I think.
And of course a chance for architects and designers
to show what they could do in the way of building and design.
It was the first real showcase they had.
It was a new beginning, absolutely new beginning.
Clifford Hatts had recently graduated from the Royal College of Art.
We weren't interested in what was behind us.
We were only interested what was in the front.
And it was... everybody was given the chance
to use their skills in a new and interesting way.
There was nothing in a sense old hat about it.
Everything was brand new. It was a brave new world in fact.
The young festival designers and architects were radical.
They wanted to bring the best ideas of European modernism to Britain.
We were modern, yes, we wanted to bring the new to England.
We felt that the influence of the environment
and of buildings on people was huge.
And that if it were changed, people would have a much happier life.
So we felt this was an opportunity to show what the future might be like.
And we were building the future.
It was new, it was different, experimental and it was brave.
You know, it was shot in the arm it was really like waking up from a deep sleep.
But in 1950, not everyone supported the idea of a Festival of Britain.
It was hated by the Daily Express.
And the Daily Express in those days was a bit like the Sun today,
it had an enormous circulation,
it was the leading mass newspaper in the country.
And Beaverbrook just hated the festival
and he was a close chum of Churchill's and he hated it too.
And in a time of great austerity could the country really afford it?
The key thing of course was that Britain was financially in terrible trouble in the late 1940s.
We'd had to have this loan from America, we'd had to devalue the pound, there was a sense
that the coffers were bare and a lot of people complained,
particularly on the right, the Festival was this great state sponsored jamboree
at a time when we couldn't afford it.
Tax was running at 19 and six in the pound on the very high income groups
at the time so they just didn't like the idea.
There was quite a lot of serious people saying,
"You shouldn't be doing this, there's a war on in Korea."
But despite the war on in Korea, despite the rationing,
despite the sweet ration, despite the clothing, the festival had to happen,
to sustain the spirit of the future,
to sustain the look ahead,
to turn our backs on the past.
It was a must, it had to happen.
Building the future was not without its problems.
At the site, management and unions were frequently at loggerheads.
One of the reasons why the management was so bad is that they were mostly ex-military.
They had spent six years saying, "Do that," and someone did it.
Their management style was military discipline.
By the same token those who had been the foot soldiers resented that,
there was tension all the time.
I mean there were stoppages every other day.
There was this famous phrase throughout the festival
that everybody had a great time and a half. I mean the money
was being soaked up and the strikes were very frequent.
And that was not the only problem.
The rain fell and fell and fell.
The weather was a real problem, the weather was ghastly.
But the combination of one of the wettest winters that we had ever known,
plus the tensions between management and labour,
it was a miracle the festival actually took place when it was supposed to take place.
This was to be a Festival of Britain, for the whole of Britain.
On May 3rd 1951 the King launched two days of opening celebrations at St Paul's Cathedral.
This Festival of Britain
has been planned as a visible sign of national achievement and confidence.
I declare the Festival of Britain open
and wish it a universal success.
FANFARE SOUNDS
That evening, a new concert hall,
the Royal Festival Hall, was opened by the King.
Jean Symons, who had worked on the site was a special guest.
Oh, it was sensational. I mean I personally had never seen anything like it that I could remember.
The Royal Family were ushered up in the goods lift to get up
to the ceremonial box and we and other dignitaries
went up in the another lift.
And after it had gone a few feet it stuck
because it was overloaded.
Jean found herself trapped with the Festival Director, Gerald Barry,
Chairman of the Council, General Ismay, and the Lord Mayor of London, his wife and his mace bearer.
Ultimately, the Lord Mayor was saying, "Well, they won't be able to start with you...
"without you, Gerald, you'll have to be there" and at this particular point in time I said,
"Well, I think I can hear the National Anthem."
NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS
And after a little while they did believe that there were
some people missing, and they put,
I think it was one of Robin Day's chairs from the restaurant,
down into the lift and we all got out.
I've still got the programme.
And my ticket untorn because no-one tore it,
and it probably is one of the few remaining tickets
to the opening night of Festival Hall.
That night work continued feverishly to get the South Bank
exhibition site ready for its formal opening next morning.
We were all there the night before, working all through the night,
because we wanted to get everything spick and span.
You couldn't leave it, we'd been at it for two years
and you could not... you could not walk away from it.
And then suddenly the cleaners came in, the commercial cleaners came in with all their Hoovers and we were
pushed out with their brooms so to speak. The women came along saying,
"Get out, get out," five o'clock in the morning.
And by that time it was wet.
And all those designers, all those great and the good
designers, all the knights, and the Misha Blacks and the Hugh Cassons,
in this damp miserable wet dawn were standing on the steps in our raincoats, collars turned up,
half of them in tears practically because we were thrown out.
There was nothing we could do.
None of us were invited to the opening at all, none of the architects and designers.
We were... hadn't been to bed, unshaven and so on.
And we watched the opening ceremony through a hedge, as I remember it.
I found a view point in the dry,
clutching my little 9.5 cine camera on which I had two minutes of film,
under the Dome of Discovery and filmed what I could see.
Which was mostly, mostly... mostly rain.
# The Festival of Britain is here
# People are welcome from everywhere
# The Festival of Britain is here
# People are welcome from everywhere
# Can you imagine what it will be
# It is another page in British history
# One of the cleverest ideas that ever planned
# In the history of Great Britain
# We shall be singing
# Britain forever, true in every way
# For you are welcome to the Festival
# That is what the Britishers say
# For more than two years I understand
# The Government been making preparation
# They have succeeded I have been told
# By building the largest concert hall in the world
# And for the visitors' use of course
# They have erected the bridge leading to Charing Cross
# They have also completed beautifully
# The Dome of Discovery
# We shall be singing
# Britain forever, true in every way
# For you are welcome to the Festival
# That is what the Britishers say
# The Government really done their best
# I am sure the event will be a success
# And we must thank Mr Morrison
# For his amazing admonition
# And after these numerous activities
# We expect to have dollars in quantities
# It will help the financial situation
# In this country of Great Britain
# We shall be singing
# Britain forever, true in every way
# For you are welcome to the Festival
# That is what the Britishers say. #
You saw the future, you saw the future.
It was like walking into an outer space city really,
you were seeing something that
had never been experienced before, and I have never encountered anyone
who experienced the festival who came away without anything except
a huge feeling of excitement.
The place was alive with excitement and promise...
..and to go inside the Dome, was like entering a great sparkling
celebration of the British way of life, in a way.
It was wonderful.
'How to show the essence of Britain?
'Here beneath the Dome of Discovery, vast as a city square,
'appears the story of the great researches, of man's probing into mysteries,
'of his revelations of the hidden worlds,
'his mastery of unknown things, his harnessing of secret forces.'
There was a science section, there was an outer-space section,
there was an exploration section,
all to do with British achievements, in discovery... Dome of Discovery.
And our job was to celebrate the achievements of the great British scientists.
This is Newton, this is what he did.
The centre of the display that I did was a celebration
of Frank Whittle's invention of the jet engine in the 1930s
and that was our centre piece, so it really went from the 17th century right up to modern times.
In the 1950s, Britain was truly at the cutting edge of technology in electronics,
aviation and atomic energy
And the most striking symbol of Britain's engineering prowess was the Skylon.
A towering, 300 foot tall structure
of steel and aluminium.
At the time of course, most people had never seen these kind of modernist designs.
The Skylon, you know, floating there in the sky, that seemed to be the space age, the new atomic age.
This was a completely radical, new vision of what Britain could look like.
It was like a rocket. It just soared away up into the heavens.
And it seemed to quiver ever so slightly with the wind.
It was almost alive...
..it was extraordinary.
James Gowan is one of the last surviving members of the design team that built the Skylon.
He's one of Britain's leading architects.
But the original concept was nothing like the structure that was eventually built.
Hidalgo Moya's first idea, was a cigar shaped horizontal.
It was going to be filled with helium and that was apparently terribly expensive
and it would move about in the wind, like a balloon.
It was never really going to work
because you needed a big beefy thing to get the lift,
not a little slender thing, you needed a big beefy thing.
And Moya came up with this other idea, the one that was developed.
It was an astonishing and elegant example of British engineering.
The joke was, like Britain's economy, it had no visible means of support.
I remember people wandering around the Skylon, saying,
"Well, it can't... it can't be, there must be you know there must be something that we're not seeing.
"How does it stand up, how does it remain rigid?"
So there was a sort of amazement of that.
Oh, I think one knew it was going to be striking.
But in fact the scale comes into it, and all the guy ropes
and the huge cables become much lighter, in fact they disappear.
It was very uplifting, and it did dovetail
into this notion of a brave new world.
I think the Festival of Britain looks like a signpost to the 60s with its modernist look and the Skylon,
and the Dome, and its interest in science and the space age.
Those things are big themes of the 1960s.
So I think the Festival is of its time but it's also ahead of its time in other ways.
The festival was certainly modern and innovative.
The Telecinema showed films in 3D with stereophonic sound.
The toilets had soft toilet paper,
the first time it had been introduced to the public in Britain.
There were outdoor cafes.
And in the evenings, something special.
I remember as a teenager, you know, you went dancing.
Oh, I liked dancing, cinema,
boys, of course.
The first time I knew about the Festival of Britain,
a friend of mine said, "There's open air dancing at the festival.
"Will you come?"
It was crowded with people,
lots of people and some boys behind us, young men,
and we started talking to them and one thing and another.
It was a really nice atmosphere, everyone was happy.
We danced till it finished.
It had a sort of fairy-tale look
and the whole place was lit up and illuminated.
And one has to remember not long before we'd been living in darkness,
we'd been living in the blackout.
The architects had put little pea lights, for the first time ever, into concrete.
You'd never seen that before in your life.
And we would dance and if it was wet we put our raincoats on.
With everything illuminated, and all the things moving,
and colour everywhere, and the Dome sparkling away.
It was a really lovely night.
I remember that night, it was a very, very nice night.
I think it was a happy time with, you know, relief from the war, and it was a nice thing they done.
It was quite new and liberating. It was so exciting.
One was feeling one was living again.
There was something more to life than just existing.
Dancing, in the evening.
How about that?
We enjoyed that.
The chief impact of the festival for me, and I think for a lot of my contemporaries
this feeling of openness, feeling of space.
In 1951 Barry Turner, was 13 years old.
He was just one of the eight and a half million people who visited the festival that summer.
People my age, we were bought up in an authoritarian regime,
we were directed to do things...
do this, do that, don't cross there, don't do that, walk in line,
queue here, queue here, yes.
There was always a retired sergeant outside the cinema saying, "Queue there, everybody in line, you know."
In the festival you didn't feel any of that at all. You could go anywhere, you could just walk.
And there was this feeling of openness.
If I use the word liberation it may sound I'm exaggerating, not an exaggeration at all.
There was a liberating feel about it.
But it was in architecture and design that the Festival of Britain made its biggest impact.
The Festival of Britain really mattered to British design history
because there was that moment of and explosion of real joy
and pleasure in design after the Second World War.
The Festival of Britain was an attempt, this tonic to the nation,
to bring design and day to day life back into full living colour.
The designs and the look of it was terribly exciting because it was so novel
because of course, they lived at the time in a world, you know, they didn't have televisions, most people,
they weren't open to the great flood of images that we have now in 21st century culture.
So the festival, it was like opening a door into another world I think for a lot of people,
and that's one of the reasons why it was so influential in terms of design in the years that followed.
The homes and gardens pavilion attracted people for a pretty obvious reason.
Most peoples' homes at the time were petty dowdy. Most people in Britain had very little furniture,
and to see all these wonderful new things, including designs by Robin and Lucienne Day...
It was the first time they'd ever seen things like this and they thought...
"I just want that, I want a home like that."
Light, clean, easy to use and a pleasure to look at.
The festival does give people a sense of taste, if you like.
It defines this is style, this is what style is going
to be in the 1950s and 1960s.
This is what you have to aspire to.
In some ways that's the ancestor of today's very materialistic, very consumer driven,
keeping-up with the Joneses society, but of course at the time, that kind of world seemed terribly liberating
to people who had felt they had been shoved into conformity for the last, you know, decade or so.
And there were whole other areas where the Festival of Britain
made a lasting impression on British culture.
I was very musical because my father had seven brothers
and all of them were musicians.
Sterling Betancourt grew up in Trinidad.
In the late 1940s there were intense conflicts and rivalries
between local steel bands on the island.
They used to stone the police.
They used to be stoning them and the police have to...
down the hill they have to run,
so they used to leave those people on the hills alone to...
to play their band on the street, without permission.
To calm the situation and unite the musicians
it was decided to send one band from the whole of Trinidad,
the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra, to the Festival of Britain.
We knew nothing about the Festival of Britain and it's only that
they say, "Well, we're going to the Festival of Britain", and we say, "OK."
But then they said, "Listen, we going to collect money from the people of Trinidad",
and everyone donated and they call it Operation Britain.
We went on a banana boat actually, called the San Mateo.
# London is the place for me
# London, this lovely city
# You can go to France or America
# India, Asia or Australia
# But you must come back to London city. #
Imagine you're coming from a small island, you know.
You haven't got traffic light, you haven't got anything, you know?
And you see these red buses going all over the place, you know.
My God! How I'm going to find my way around this place, you know, it's so enormous.
Our impression was, you know, this is a wonderful place.
# At night when you have nothing to do
# You can take a walk down Shaftesbury Avenue
# There you'll laugh and talk and enjoy the breeze
# And admire the beautiful scenery... #
This is at the Festival Hall
and you see the people there, they are standing around.
This is Nathaniel Griffith, the band master.
And this one is me here.
Well, that day it was very funny because we purposely did not paint the drums.
They leave it all rusty and well looking like dustbin you know.
And we set up, you know, and people start to laugh - they giggling!
What these black men going to do with the old dustbins?
When we start up, everybody was shocked, they were looking to see
where the music coming from, and saying, "Wow, this is black magic."
And we had the West Indians who were there, they were dancing,
and it was very nice.
And when we finished playing they want to know
where the music coming from.
Have they got a recording below there or something like that?
And it was fantastic.
You can see it's young and old and they were clapping
and, you know, we got a good reception.
It was very nice.
How much steel pan music had been heard in Britain before you came?
None, none.
Nobody never knew nothing about steel bands.
No they didn't know anything about that.
That really opened up the art form of coloured people in Britain,
so it was worthwhile, the Festival.
And I hear they have it every hundred years, huh?
# 60 years ago
# I want the whole world to know
# In 1951 for the Festival of Britain
# The steel band association said a steel band must go
# After many suggestions they name our steel band Taspo
# So Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra
# That is the sound that make me remember
# I said Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra
# That is the sound that remains forever and ever. #
Away from the South Bank,
a "Living Exhibition of Architecture" was established in Poplar,
a part of East London that had been heavily bombed in the war.
'They're building in Poplar to replace the nearly 10,000 homes destroyed in the Blitz.
In the Lansbury neighbourhood a self-contained community is rising that will feature
in the Festival of Britain Live Architecture Exhibition.
Complete villages will be built with blocks of flats,
houses, schools, shopping centres, markets pubs and parks.
The work's going ahead fast.
I used to pass it on the bus. They had flags up,
and I used to look out on these flats right on the front
that had been built specially for the festival.
And I used to look out and think, "Oh, they were so nice",
plus they was all new and I just liked them and thought you know they were nice.
The exhibition was to demonstrate how practical modern architecture,
on a human scale, could help build strong and viable communities.
In many ways the most interesting bit of the festival I think
is not the big stuff on the South Bank that everybody remembers
but it's what happens at the Poplar Estate,
which is going to be a kind of laboratory of a new way of living.
Here you have an outpost of the new Jerusalem, built from the ashes
of this kind of battered old world.
That battered old world was all too real for Betty Scott.
In 1951 she was living in North London with her husband, mother and two children in three small rooms.
Conditions were very basic.
We just had a little black stove, I don't know what you called them.
And a kettle or a pail or a bath put on it, and the bath was the old tin bath which you put by the fire.
'The kitchens are cramped and dark,
'and have to serve as laundry and bathroom too,
'with tin baths that have to be filled and emptied by hand.'
And your feet hung outside and then you put the rest of yourself in!
'And now Francis Noel-Baker interviews one of the inhabitants.'
Do you live here Mrs Kinnock? Yes. What's the house like?
Well, it's in a bad way.
Wants pulling down and pulling up again.
You're hoping to move sometime? Well, I hope so.
When do you think it'll be? God knows.
I don't know. All we get is promises, that's all.
Don't get nothing else.
The toilet was down on the ground floor.
There was a toilet in the basement,
but the ground floor did for the first floor, second floor, and the third floor, yeah.
Six of us.
Six of us because the two old ladies lived in the basement.
Betty's family were among the first tenants into the Lansbury Estate.
'Poplar's new Lansbury neighbourhood,
'which will be a complete little town when ready,
'welcomes the first tenant.'
Well, it was brand new
and it had got a smashing bathroom, and basin,
and a toilet all on its own, and hot water.
"Ooh, lovely!", you know?
To be able to put your whole body in a bath, imagine it,
and you didn't have to carry all the water and that,
three flights of stairs from the basement.
Got a garden!
Fantastic for the two kids.
And it was so spacious, you know?
It was just marvellous after you'd lived in two or three rooms
all the lot of you, you know, you got plenty of room, sort of thing.
Fantastic.
The idea was to shape an ideal London village of the future,
with shops, markets, schools, churches, pubs.
There was a pub called the Festival.
It was a real piece of England, a piece of London.
This was something that the planners behind the festival
poured enormous amount of energy into.
They saw this, in many ways, I think,
as the crowning point of the festival.
This was the new Britain.
We were geared to the idea that we could make life better for people
and almost all the planning philosophers of the time
were like that.
They really believed they could plan people into better ways of life
and, to some extent, they succeeded.
'In time there'll be neighbourhoods like Lansbury.
'It's the dawn of a new era for London's East End.'
We all came from different parts of London
and it was marvellous!
We all got on so famously together, I'm not kidding,
and we always laughed and chatted to the people next door.
I'm not kidding, got on real famously,
didn't matter who you were, and that.
At the time, the Lansbury Estate
was the largest collection of modernist buildings in Britain.
The Lansbury Estate was like a city village
built in a gentle, relaxed modern style.
It was innovative, it was friendly, it was charming,
but it couldn't and didn't meet the demand for new housing in London
or in other British cities, and what replaced it very soon afterwards
was the great, infamous, concrete estates,
with the high density, massive towers and brutal concrete.
But I think, since then, we've started to look back a little
and started to think architecture, city planning,
needs a bit of joy in it.
Cities should be enjoyable and the Festival of Britain did show how that was possible.
But not all of the festival activities in London
were geared to education and progress.
Up the river in Battersea,
the Festival Pleasure Gardens had one sole purpose - fun.
I think the festival represented a kind of escapism,
it was a fantastic day out, basically.
I mean, that's what people wanted, they wanted a day out,
they wanted the chance to celebrate Britain,
a chance to feel good about themselves
and a chance to feel good about their future.
To look at the Britain that was coming
and the Festival offered all those things to people.
In September 1951, the Gowlland family from Croydon in Surrey
set out on a visit to the Festival Pleasure Gardens in Battersea.
Well, we went by car
because my father didn't really understand trains
and he never used them if he could possibly avoid it.
So, the five of us went in the Rover.
In those days there was so little traffic on the road
that a journey from Croydon to Battersea would have been nothing.
Their day out was recorded on colour film
by their father, Geoffrey Gowlland.
It was fun, it was colourful, it was bright, it was different
and everybody did seem very happy there.
It was a complete antidote to the austere world
in which we had grown up.
If you look at the cine films of it,
almost everyone's walking around with a silly grin on their face.
It was a very happy place, beautiful atmosphere.
It was like a boardwalk effect that it ran on,
it made a tremendous noise.
That was good fun.
It seemed to be going at tremendous speed but of course it wasn't.
Entertainments like that had almost died out,
there was very little of it during the war years
and the years immediately afterwards.
Everybody loved the Emmet railway.
I certainly remember the Emmet railway, that's my main memory of Battersea Pleasure Gardens.
Emmet was very popular.
He was a cartoonist who produced these wonderfully detailed pictures
of decrepit old engines and we all loved them,
they were very, very popular.
If you ask a dozen people who went to Battersea,
probably at least ten of them would name that as their favourite thing.
Things like the railway at Battersea do look very whimsical and almost a bit silly,
but I think those are very important because they
A, testify to a kind of deep love of comedy and silliness
in our national character,
and secondly, I think, they come out of something very important,
which is that in the war, in the Second World War,
celebrating British whimsy, and a British sense of humour,
and a kind of native silliness, had been very important.
People had picked on that and they'd said,
"That's something that differentiates us from the Nazis.
"The Nazis think they're serious with their jackboots, marches and their stupid rallies.
We just like sitting around with pipes and eating cakes and having fun.
And I think the festival celebrated that.
It is saying we are an introverted, domesticated, slightly frivolous people
and that's what makes us special,
and we should be proud and not deny it.
Battersea was the perfect antidote
to the grey days of the preceding decade.
It was a lovely atmosphere.
It was a very happy time for everybody there
and you came away from it feeling energised
and at peace with the world. It was lovely, never forget it.
Jean Blurton was 19 years old when she met Tommy Miller for the first time.
He sort of took to me and that was it.
Didn't think we'd ever see each other any more,
but he asked me, then, to go out with him the following week
to the fun fair that the festival had put on...
..and that's when we went to Battersea.
Had a wonderful time there, it was lovely.
We went on the, erm... Caterpillar that closes over
and that's when he kissed me, in the caterpillar.
We were young, innocent...
..that's how it all began.
Oh, I think it was lovely. Well, it certainly found us two.
Outside of London,
two travelling exhibitions took the festival's vision of the future around the country.
The Land Travelling Exhibition
visited four cities in the heart of England over the summer of 1951.
Dorrit Dekk, an artist and refugee from the Nazis,
got the job designing the sports section
after meeting its director, Dick Levin.
Dick asked me, "Have you done murals?", I said, "Yes, of course,"
but he was such a fool he didn't ask to see any.
Dorrit had never painted a mural before in her life.
I didn't know anything about cricket
and I didn't know anything about football, or fishing,
but when I brought in the rough for the mural,
he said, "It's fine, would you like to do the whole stand?"
Oh, it was hugely loved and visited.
I think it was definitely a success. I mean, it earned its keep.
The festival even took to the high seas.
'Visiting ten major British ports this summer
'is the former escort carrier Campania,
'with an interesting story aboard. More than 350,000 people
'have already passed through the turnstiles to see it
'and she has not yet completed half her voyage.
'The story she tells is about Britain and her people.
'The Navy has loaned the ship to carry the sea-travel exhibition of the Festival of Britain,
'which, on a small scale, develops the theme in a similar manner,
'to the exhibition on the South Bank of the Thames.'
That summer, the Campania was visited by more than 800,000 people.
'And out of London too
'there was much to show that it was the Festival of Britain.'
All across the country
there were thousands of local Festival of Britain celebrations.
Don't forget, if you've had six years of war, six years of austerity
and you give people the chance to have a party, they will take it.
And I think people all over the country
genuinely seized this opportunity and got very excited about it.
People did put on, you know, some of them quite silly carnivals and fetes,
I think because they were desperate to have the opportunity
to enjoy themselves
and to have a day of self congratulation to an extent.'
I think that really meant something to people.
That is all the events,
all the things that happened everywhere in the country in festival year,
from major music and drama festivals,
down to bus shelters and telephone kiosks.
It's the lot.
It was supposed to embrace everybody's spare time
and everybody's getting together and building things in their villages
and holding pageants. And they did!
And it's staggering, I've never counted but there were thousands.
This was a precursor of the big society.
'Since the Festival of Britain was declared open by the King last May,
'its centrepiece, the exhibition on the South Bank,
'has proved a big attraction to people of Britain and visitors from overseas.
'Nearly 8.5 million people had passed through the South Bank turnstiles
'in the five months before it closed down.
'Impressive figures marking the widespread interest
'aroused by the exhibition at home and abroad.
'The last hours included a number of ceremonies and farewells.
'Tens of thousands were present and the people sang.'
SONG: "Jerusalem"
# Till we have built Jerusalem
# In England's green and pleasant land. #
'The official closing of the gardens by the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Dennis Lowson,
'was clearly unpopular.'
It is now my duty...
to declare the Festival Gardens closed for the year 1951.
CROWD BOOS
Thank you all for your wonderful cheerfulness tonight.
'Battersea Gardens had undoubtedly been a great success.'
I cried on the way back
because it was all over suddenly, suddenly I was just nobody.
And I think we were all very sad when it was taken down.
It seemed a loss but it did its job.
I think it was well worth every penny.
It was very sad.
We had hoped that we would be able to wind it up in a graceful fashion.
Labour lost the election and the Tories wanted it dismantled
and forgotten as quickly as possible.
So they sold it up, gave it away.
Cleared the site of everything expect the Festival Hall.
There was a sense of disappointment, if not anger,
because they could have let it fade away in a natural sort of way,
but they got the bulldozers in.
Parts of the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery
ended up as souvenir paper knives.
Casson said, "If you cement bricks together to last for six months,
"they'll last for 60 years,"
and most of those buildings would have survived to this day I think.
I think you really can see the Festival of Britain as a turning point.
I think it's a turning point from, like an old kind of cramped collective Britain
to a much more new, and open, and mobile consumerist one.
Many of the sort of promises of the festival have now been realised.
We do live in a world where we take art and design more seriously.
We live in an age that's been transformed by science and technology
and there's a scientific optimism to the festival
that I think was hugely important in the second half of the 20th century
and in many ways I think you can see the festival as a preview of that.
It's completely ahead of its time in anticipating so much to come.
I think the festival did change Britain.
People now are beginning to realise the 50s was far more innovative
than we gave it credit it for at the time,
but I think, looking back now,
you can see a lot of what happened in Britain in the 60s and 70s
that had its origins in the Festival of Britain.
Well, I think it's a little bit of history.
I thought the Festival of Britain was a very nice thing to do,
to just get the people together and be happy,
and that's how I remember it. It was very nice.
I loved it, I had such a gorgeous time there
and I still believe in a lot of the things that it produced.
I think clean-lined furniture and architecture
is a good thing and it was tremendous, it was...
it was the most exciting job I've ever had.
I couldn't have enjoyed it more.
It was such an interesting innovation
and it was such a great time for young designers
that I look back on it with great pleasure.
It was indeed enough for one lifetime, I can tell you!
# The Festival of Britain will always be
# As an evergreen in your memory
# The Festival of Britain will always be
# As an evergreen in your memory
# After 100 years passed and gone
# Keeps on again 1951
# So the whole world came in to see... #
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk