Museum of 1951 Exhibition/Festival of Britain Anniversary.

It has been hard not to notice that this year is the anniversary of the 1951 Festival of Britain. This is not least due to the fact that last year’s controversial Wayne Hemingway Vintage at Goodwood is relocating to the Southbank this summer. Sadly the acronym VAS is not as entertaining as VAG. Some quality events have already been and gone, not least Ray Davies’ curatorship of this year’s Meltdown Festival.  For those in London the Vintage at the Southbank thing does not represent fantastic value as most of the things on offer are readily available and the ticket cost is very steep.  This is a shame in a way as the Festival of Britain could as easily have been called the Festival of London such is the affection it is held in by those who attended.  My own family come from the Southwark/North Lambeth area and were therefore a short walk from the action and watched it being built.  My mother recalls how much she enjoyed it, particularly the balconies that overhung the Thames and the Skylon. My own experience was of the much lamented Battersea funfair, built as part of the festival which I visited regularly as a child, once I won a day of free rides in an Evening Standard art competition, a prize somewhat lessened as I had to take my brother instead of my best friend  Irene.

View of the Skylon.

For those who want to learn more a walk around the rather meagre remains of the complex and a free exhibition; The Museum of 1951 in the Royal Festival Hall are cheap alternatives to formal ticketed events.  The Royal Festival Hall is really the only thing left on the South Bank that retains the essence of the Festival. It is notably also the only attractive building in the Southbank complex.  The Festivals sights and buildings being demolished and supposedly compensated for by ugly brutalist modernism as personified by the truly awful National Theatre complex erected next door. The current exhibition recalling the Festival, tucked away at the back of the Festival Hall is fascinating and gives an idea of the breadth  and imagination of the event. There was a travelling version touring the country. A wide range of artists, craftsmen and politicians were involved.  The Festival it produced was a dazzling piece of mid century imagination. Bright colours, flippancy and the use of new materials.  A fizzing version of modernism, unlike the dirty totalitarian buildings to come.  A stupid and unnecessary decision was made in destroying the site, the incoming Conservative government resented the Festival’s success and destroyed it.  Something we learned from, the Millenial Eye and Dome were retained after 2000 despite the ropey nature of the millenial celebrations themselves, both at least visually have something of 1951 about them.

The Festival site.

What was impressive was the cohesion of feeling. We are trying to organise another big festival in London but the Olympics is too fragmented, a hotch potch of ethnic doodads, gimmicks and reality show personages. The only thing it will have in common with the Festival of Britain is the presence of the Royal Family.  The Festival of Britain was not insular, it was an impressively modern event with an internationalist view that did not rely on colonialism yet it was still distinctively British and dedicated to inclusion.  All this is more remarkable in a nation just emerging from an appalling conflict and dealing with the daily grind of rationing and austerity. The fact that we no longer have the skylon, or the dome or the most remarkable riverside park is the result of the petty parochialism that we are still having to endure.  Naturally the then conservative government managed to give a large amount of the land away to produce a large commercial office complex.  You'd think that after all that bombing and suffering South London would have been allowed to retain a pleasure park. If I had my way I would demolish the National Theatre and Shell building and rebuild the Festival displays.

The exhibition contains some remarkable exhibits, my favourite is a quilt which details the remarkable elements of our history. There is a room set from the era which will have (some) of us cooing over furniture ‘just like our grans’ and part of it is open access so you can have your photograph taken relaxing or answering your period telephone, you can see Torquil doing just this below, doesn't he look comfortable? Maybe I should have a caption competition! What the exhibition did leave me with, as a Lambeth girl, is a resentment that it was all demolished and taken away, I suspect that as things are now we would not have the imagination and vision to hold something similar.

I'd like to order a pizza...

Museum of 1951 details here.
If you are visiting the area don't forget to pop into Radio Days vintage store.
Recommended eats? The Thames Indian restaurant under the bridge is decent, and there is a branch of Canteen behind the Festival Hall. xxx

Strawberry Hill; Gothic gem on the edge of London.

It always amazes me about London, I know it very well but it still throws up corners, nooks and places of interest I haven't visited . To be honest Strawberry Hill, HoraceWalpole's home in Twickenham had been on my radar for a while and its extensive renovations meant it had been closed for some time. I have to admit to a real passion for Gothic in any form, from its purist medieval origins right through to the flamboyant pastiche of the Victorians. Strawberry Hill falls somewhere between both extremes. A simple whitewashed stucco exterior hides a jewel box of a house.  I love art deco, modernism and Japanese organic minimalism but a large part of me hankers after stone pointed arches, blue stained glass and crenelated roof tops with spires.

Strawberry Hill is still very much a work in progress and it is sad that most of the building has ended up in the hands of some bunch of catholic churchy types. The voluntary trust who have worked to renovate the part of the building open to the public have done a fine job but it is not finished. Restoring wonderful buildings is a painstaking and expensive job. Complaints that the place looks a bit sparse are unfair as there is work still to be done and objects and furniture to be begged borrowed or clawed back to fill the rooms.

What the building does still have is that heady mixture of religious aestheticism, dandified exuberance and faintly louche sensuality that early gothic revival expresses in all its forms. I have always thought, contrary to a lot of observers that the only real impracticality of it is the cost. If you walk around you can see how well the rooms and their, to modern eyes, over-exuberant decoration work.  The Library makes you want to read even though it currently contains no books (any one with 18th century books to loan/donate please contact them), the entertaining rooms entertain, even before you wheel the drinks out and the bedrooms make you imagine lying in a huge bed with a novel. Perhaps it is the association with Walpole that makes me think of the house as literary or that I can imaging the house in a Wilkie Collins novel.

The photographs above are of the stair way and  you can see the walls in the process of being renovated, note the very cute doggy on the posts.  The use of colour is one of the things I appreciate about the past, the obsession with white walls and magnolia is the most lamentable thing about modern interiors.Outside Strawberry Hill  is a sparkling white however the architectural details as you can see below are far from minimal.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was the profusion of stained glass. Walpole collected glass and had it reframed in imaginative and witty juxtopositions. Not only does the coloured light add even more atmosphere to already delicious rooms but the windows frame the landscape outside.

Now this is what I call a fireplace...

Strawberry Hill is a train journey from Waterloo, the area is very close to the Thames and down hill from the station there is a small park over looking the river and conveniently across the road from a Majestic wine warehouse. Despite these advantages it was not full of people picnicking which means it is probably a very good place for one. The Alexander Pope gastro pub hotel is also close by and in fact this is where we started our afternoon, meeting members of the society for lunch. Lunch didn't preclude tea  of course. I have a pavlovian reaction to Heritage/National Trust locations and have to have tea. In this case the scone was huge, and came with clotted cream. Honestly it was almost the size of my hand!

The place also had a cat, a bit of a tart who insisted on closing it's eyes in front of the camera.  More details about visiting Strawberry Hill, Walpole and it's history and how to encounter both scone and cat can be found here.