Festival of Britain

The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition and fair held throughout the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951. Funded chiefly by the government at a cost of £12 million, it was intended to give the British public a sense of recovery and progress after the devastation of the Second World War, and to promote British science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts. It proved immensely popular, with more than ten million paid admissions to its six main exhibitions, and helped reshape British arts, crafts and design for a generation. The Festival grew out of a proposal to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Labour Party cabinet member Herbert Morrison took charge in 1947 and shaped it into a uniquely British event: unlike a World Fair, it excluded international themes and the British Commonwealth, focusing entirely on Britain and its achievements. The Labour government was losing support, and the festival served the implicit goal of demonstrating successful national recovery. The Festival's centrepiece was on the South Bank of the Thames in London. There were also events in Poplar (Architecture – Lansbury Estate), Battersea (the Festival Pleasure Gardens), South Kensington (Science) and Glasgow (Industrial Power). Festival celebrations took place in Cardiff, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bath, Perth, Bournemouth, York, Aldeburgh, Inverness, Cheltenham, Oxford, Norwich, Canterbury and elsewhere, and there were touring exhibitions by land and sea. Journalist Harry Hopkins highlighted the widespread impact of the "Festival style", which people called "Contemporary":

clean, bright and new.... It caught hold quickly and spread first across London and then across England....In an island hitherto largely given up to gravy browns and dull greens, "Contemporary" boldly espoused strong primary colors.

Historian Kenneth O. Morgan described the Festival as a "triumphant success" during which people:

flocked to the South Bank site, to wander around the Dome of Discovery, gaze at the Skylon, and generally enjoy a festival of national celebration. Up and down the land, lesser festivals enlisted much civic and voluntary enthusiasm. A people curbed by years of total war and half-crushed by austerity and gloom, showed that it had not lost the capacity for enjoying itself....Above all, the Festival made a spectacular setting as a showpiece for the inventiveness and genius of British scientists and technologists.