ABSTRACT

On May 4, 1951 London’s South Bank Exhibition ceremoniously opened to public visitors, who found themselves immersed in a simultaneously playful and didactic representation of Britain’s ‘land’ and ‘people,’ the centrepiece of a wider event, known as the Festival of Britain. 1 Given a small but key site at the bend of the River Thames between Waterloo Bridge and London County Hall, the South Bank Exhibition housed educational displays on nationhood, interspersed with popular forms of entertainment, including music, dancing and fireworks in what its chief organizer and promoter dubbed a “tonic to the nation” 2 (Fig. 6.1). The brightly colored paint and thin, hovering structures had been deliberately set up as a foil to the grey massiveness of Victorian and Edwardian London, together with its faded sootiness and remaining war-time rubble. Exhibition visitors meandered their way through and between an array of light steel-frame and concrete structures in a variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from the floating metallic saucer of the Dome of Discovery to the small simulacrum of the 1851 Crystal Palace. The architectural form of the exhibition, as both contemporary observers and later historians have noted, combined a futuristic image of technological optimism with a picturesque aesthetic of contrast, variety and eccentric, even humorous juxtapositions of form. To some extent, these two motifs corresponded with two divergent functions of the exhibition: to provide educational displays on Britain’s ‘contribution to world civilisation,’ on the one hand, and to produce a popular spectacle, or zone of mass pleasure, on the other. 3 Nevertheless, the relationship between the government’s promotion of the South Bank Exhibition as a narrative about Britishness and the specific form of the architecture as simultaneously futuristic and picturesque has remained something of an open question. Considered as representation of international diplomacy, its architecture seems to speak with more than one voice.