Fun for ordinary people - the Festival of Britain

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The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People

By Harriet Atkinson with a Foreword by Mary Banham

The year 2011 marked the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, the ‘five month celebration mounted by Southbank Centre’, and  since then the Royal Festival Hall ‘has become synonymous with these celebrations that tried so hard to be nationwide’, as Harriet Atkinson puts it in her postscript. One of the great strengths of her book is in recovering the ‘nationwide’ aspect of the Festival, which is now often overlooked, stressing that it was ‘held across the four nations of the United Kingdom’. 

So, as well as learning about the ‘spectacular centrepiece’ of the exhibition complex constructed on London’s South Bank, we read of exhibitions travelling around Britain by land and sea, of the Glasgow Exhibition of Industrial Power, the Farm and Factory Exhibition in Belfast, and the ‘live’ Exhibition of Architecture in Poplar, East London.  This book offers a rich account of the impact of the Festival throughout post-war Britain in 1951, drawing on substantial archival research into the Festival and its historical context. The story is drawn from informal ‘family snaps’ as well as the official records, and from interviews with and memoirs of many of those directly involved in designing the venues and organizing the events. 

As that generation passes away, Atkinson has done a great service by collecting these first-hand accounts.  They tell us a great deal about the plans and aspirations of politicians and public servants, architects and designers, in the years following the end of the Second World War. Her analysis draws on a great array of installation photographs, maps, plans, and pictures of crowds of visitors enjoying the Festival. 

A particular focus is on the Festival’s use of the concept of ‘the land’ of Britain and its relationship with the British population, and how architects, artists and designers contributed to this.  There is a detailed account of the opening of the Festival, and of how the visitors who then flocked to see it would have encountered these two related themes:

While being told about the land in the exhibitions’ content, visitors to the site were invited to enact their relationship with the land through their exposure to the site itself, and landscaped areas recreated the geological structures of Britain.

Reading The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People during the summer of 2012 offered a number of parallels between the Festival events and the reasons that underpinned them – ‘what it meant to be modern and British’ –  and the spectacular ceremonies that have been a feature of the London Olympics. No doubt these will be subject to future scholarly attention in their turn.  Meanwhile, as its director of architecture, Hugh Casson, noted in a film about the Festival of Britain, ‘for ordinary people it was fun’, and Atkinson manages to convey this, too, while providing a stimulating historical analysis.

Although the literature on the 1951 Festival of Britain is not huge, it has been well served over the years by the quality and interest of what has been written about it, and Harriet Atkinson’s book is no exception.  It can be seen that there is a lot of careful scholarship underpinning Atkinson’s account, but it is greatly to her credit that what started as a doctoral thesis has been turned into an extremely readable book which should have wide appeal to readers interested in this period of British history.

The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People by Harriet Atkinson with a Foreword by Mary Banham is published by IB Tauris,  2012.  242 pp., 40 mono & 33 colour illus, £17.99. ISBN 978 1 84885 792 6