(1951)
The Festival of Britain (FOB) was seen both as a public morale booster and an opportunity to remind the world of Britain's contribution to past, present, and future contributions to society, culture, and technological progress. More specifically in terms of design it provided the Council of Industrial Design (COID) with an important stage for the promotion of well-designed British products in her national drive for economic recovery in the post-Second World War period, particularly on the major South Bank, London, site. However, the Festival was not merely a London-based exhibition as there were also, in addition to the South Bank, sites in the capital at Battersea Pleasure Gardens and Lansbury and major exhibition venues in Glasgow (the Exhibition of Industrial Power) and Belfast (the Ulster Farm and Factory Building). Furthermore, there was a Land Travelling Exhibition, the main features of which were concerned with industrial design and production technologies, which toured the major industrial centres of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, and Nottingham. This was complemented by a Sea Travelling Exhibition mounted on the Festival Ship Campania, visiting ten major ports around Britain. The patriotic flavour of the Festival was considerably enhanced by Abram Games's festive design of a stylized Britannia in red, white, and blue which appeared on a wide range of Festival posters, publications, and souvenirs. The idea of the Festival had been originally mooted in 1943 by the Royal Society of Arts, followed in 1945 by a letter from design authority and reforming campaigner John Gloag to The Times and an open letter from News Chronicle editor Gerald Barry to Stafford Cripps at The Times. It had also been originally envisaged as an international exhibition, an idea endorsed by the Ramsden Committee in 1946. However, although intended as an exhibition that would demonstrate to the world Britain's recovery from the Second World War, the uncertain economic climate in Britain of the later 1940s led to the downgrading of the Festival from an international to a national exhibition. It also became something of a political football in the late 1940s, particularly at the hands of the right-wing press and the Conservative Party, who saw it as economically imprudent in a period of rationing, labour, and materials shortages. However, when the Festival actually opened it caught the public imagination with optimistic notions of a future world brought about by advances in science and technology, of better designed domestic and urban environments, a vision far removed from the contemporary constraints of wartime austerity and continuing rationing. Eight and a half million visitors flocked to the South Bank site alone. From the outset design was an important consideration throughout the official Festival sites, with control of design selection delegated to the COID, itself well represented on the major Festival committees. One of the COID's main jobs was to select all industrially produced products on show. Commencing in 1948, a photographic index of all products—the Stock List, later renamed the Design Review—selected by the selection panels that represented particular industries, was launched. In order to qualify for selection products had to be designed and manufactured in Britain and in current production. One of the main venues where the public could see the ways in which design could impact upon their lives was in the Homes and Gardens Pavilion on the South Bank, where many furnished rooms were on display, showing modern domestic furniture, furnishings, ceramics, glass and metalware, and domestic equipment. In the Living Architecture Exhibition in Poplar in East London, part of the display was (following the modus operandi of many design reform organizations in Britain) a show house, furnished for less than £150 with items approved by the COID. As part of a future wider urban environment visitors to Lansbury could also see a model shopping centre and primary school. Other aspects of environmental design at the Festival—street furniture, lighting, concrete flower planters, signposts, and architectural lettering—exerted a considerable influence on townscapes and shopping precincts in Britain over the following decade. The COID also sought to harness design to advances in technology and science—also displayed in other Festival sites such as the Science Museum, London, and embodied in Ralph Tubbs's striking Dome of Discovery and Powell and Moya's tapering Skylon—through the activities of the Festival Pattern Group, coordinated by Mark Hartland Thomas, the COID's Chief Industrial Officer. Crystallography was a field in which Britain led the world and its diagrammatic representations of a variety of substances provided the Festival Pattern Group's inspiration for carpet, textile, ceramic, glass, and many other forms of applied surface pattern. It eventually involved 26 manufacturers including Josiah Wedgwood, Warner & Sons, Warterite, Chance Brothers, and Goodearl Brothers. Visitors to the South Bank could experience at first hand many of the Festival Pattern Group's designs in the Regatta Restaurant designed by Misha Black. But the difficulties of ‘inventing’ a contemporary style, especially if generated by an agency of the state, proved problematic for both manufacturers and consumers and Festival Patterns had only an ephemeral appeal for consumers. However, as Michael Frayn suggested in his seminal essay on ‘Festival’ in 1960, the modern designs seen in many of the displays on the South Bank symbolized the social democratic values of the educated middle classes. The latter were described as ‘Herbivores’ and their opposite, the rather more conservative ‘Carnivores’, as the right-wing upholders of the traditional values of an imperial Britain embedded in the pre-war years. In the same way, the modern design outlook of the COID at the Festival was counterbalanced by much that was enjoyed by the public at the Festival Pleasure Gardens in Battersea. These ranged from the Regency pastiche settings by Osbert Lancaster and John Piper to the period glamour of costumed Nell Gwynne orange-sellers and Roland Emmett's parody of the pioneering steam locomotives of the Industrial Revolution in his eccentric, widely publicized Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway.
