In 1951, I was a sixth former in a suburban grammar school in Kingston upon Thames. There was all this excitement going on about the Festival of Britain, but it took a while before I finally condescended to see what the fuss was about. I took a very lordly view of life at the time, but I was absolutely bowled over. I only intended to look in for half an hour, but I stayed all day. It was absolutely ravishing.
It's difficult to imagine now, but London was still very run-down from the war. It was very poor, very grey and dirty, with bomb sites everywhere - there hadn't been the time or the money to rebuild or repaint. But, suddenly, there was this wonderful paradise, full of bright colours and stylish, elegant forms. Afterwards, the designs came to seem rather silly - too spindly, too bright - but they were the first new fashions since the1930s, so they did seem very striking at the time.
The Lion and Unicorn pavilion really sticks in my mind. It was supposed to show the whimsical glories of the British character and sense of humour. There was a statue of the White Knight from Alice in Wonderland , and recordings of supposedly typical English conversations - all highly middle class, needless to say.
The Dome of Discovery was another exhibit that made an impression on me (which looked remarkably like a smaller version of the Dome of late and not so blessed memory), a wonderful water sculpture that represented the sequence of larger and smaller waves on a beach, and a great open space called the Fairway, which had lights set in the ground. These days everyone has lights set in the ground, but nobody, as far as I can remember, had seen them before. It all seemed terribly sophisticated to me. There was open-air dancing there every Saturday night. Often it rained, so people wore raincoats and put up umbrellas as they danced.
A lot of people protested that they didn't know what the Festival was for. But the reasons were a bit more self-evident than they were for the Millennium Dome. There was a sense that we'd won the war and hadn't got much out of it, because the austerity of life still continued, and that here at last was a reward - the celebratory party we still hadn't had. There was a certain logic about this that captured most people's fancy.
The problem with all exhibitions is what to put in them. It's always things you've seen a million times before in the permanent museums - dinosaur skeletons, or telescopes, or examples of rural crafts. It was true of the Festival of Britain, but it was the packaging of the thing that counted; the packaging and the air of surprise and excitement it gave to the content. The best thing of all about the South Bank was just being there.