Festival of Britain

Available for over a year

Sue MacGregor gathers together some of the architects and designers responsible for the Festival of Britain, which took place in 1951, a time of drabness and austerity as the country struggled in the years immediately following the Second World War. The South Bank in London became home to a collection of futuristic buildings which displayed the best design the country had to offer. Most famous of all was the 300-foot Skylon, the vertical rocket which soared above the Festival site. Sir Terence Conran remembers drably dressed people arriving at the Festival: "they couldn't believe in a worn, grey, bomb-damaged Britain, that something like this could happen". Leonard Manasseh, a young architect taken on to design a luxury restaurant was put on to design the lavatories instead. A pioneer of modern furniture design, Robin Day was responsible for the seats in the Royal Festival Hall. Lucienne Day designed textiles, some of which were displayed alongside her husband's furniture. Jean Symons was a young architecture student who managed to get a post working on the building of the Festival Hall. She was the only woman working on the construction site, "I realised I'd seen lots of buildings being bombed but none being built". Also contributing are Jonathan Woodham, Professor of Design History at the University of Brighton, Jonathan Glancey, Architecture and Design Editor, The Guardian and science fiction writer Brian Aldiss. Producer: Louise Adamson Series Producer: David Prest The Reunion is a Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4