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Festival of Britain logo design by Abram Games’ |
Summer of 1951 revisited
Design: Festival of Britain. Dr Paul Rennie. £14.95
THOSE in the Prince Charles school of architect criticism say that the best view of London is from the South Bank – because you can’t see the South Bank.
But while anti-modernists see the Thamesside centre as representing all that was wrong with 20th-century design, the organisers of the 1951 Festival of Britain had a different problem. Waterloo and Westminster bridges were too far from the bomb site that would be home for the national celebration to offer grandstand views, so they came up with another idea: using engineering technology perfected during the invasion of Europe, a temporary “Bailey” bridge was strung across the Thames and gave visitors a grandstand entrance.
This and other stories of how in the depths of post-war gloom and years of austerity the Attlee government threw a huge celebration of Britain is the subject of another volume in the Design series from the Antique Collectors’ Club.
It explains the basics: the festival was inspired by the 1851 Great Exhibition that was organised by Prince Albert, and aimed to define what people had been fighting for. This time it was in the hands of the Labour politician Herbert Morrison, the man who put bomb shelters into dining rooms around the country with his reinforced table.
Morrison, the deputy prime minister and grandfather of Peter Mandelson, had the altogether larger job of general economic planning and this was a sideline to his other duties.
The festival had been suggested by the Royal Society of Arts in 1943 and Parliament granted the project a £12million pot in 1947.
Morrison set about recruiting leading figures from the arts and sciences: Sir Malcolm Sargent for music, Sir Robert Robinson for science and John Gielgud and Noel Coward were on hand for theatrical advice. Lord Ismay was appointed chairman – he had been Winston Churchill’s chief staff officer and his appointment was seen as a clever way of getting cross-party support.
Focusing on the architecture of the buildings – installations such as the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery – the book also explains how the graphic arts were used to bring in visitors. It worked: more than eight million people visited the show during the summer of 1951.
As the book explains, Hampstead-based artist Abram Games had shown his mettle as a designer during the war. He had been employed by Whitehall to warn us that “Talk May Kill Your Comrades” and “Don’t Crow About What You Know About”.
He was the natural choice to create a logo for the festival. Games said his aim to was to “maximum meaning through minimum means,” and he chose to use Britannia in profile and a four-pointed compass star to show it was a national exhibition. The design for the festival emblem was reproduced on hundreds of items, ranging from headed notepaper through to commemorative cups and saucers.
Author Dr Paul Rennie, head of graphic design at Central St Martins college of art and design explains: “The circumstances of national emergency and the urgent moral claims implicit in the war-effort were ideally suited to his idealistic nature. “The festival brief allowed Games to express his social idealism in altogether more benign circumstances.”
Through the variety of souvenirs created to commemorate the event, Games’ works sat on people’s sideboards, and while the Royal Festival Hall has attracted stinging criticism over the years, Games’ designs look as attractive and fresh as they did the day they came off his draughtsman’s drawing board.
DAN CARRIER
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