Festival of Britain

The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition and fair held throughout the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951.^¹ Funded chiefly by the government at a cost of £12 million, it was intended to give the British public a sense of recovery and progress after the devastation of the Second World War, and to promote British science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts.^¹ It proved immensely popular, with over ten million paid admissions to its six main exhibitions, and helped reshape British arts, crafts and design for a generation.^¹ The Festival grew out of a proposal to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851.^¹ Labour Party cabinet member Herbert Morrison took charge in 1947 and shaped it into a uniquely British event: unlike a World Fair, it excluded international themes and the British Commonwealth, focusing entirely on Britain and its achievements.^¹ The Labour government was losing support, and the festival served the implicit goal of demonstrating successful national recovery.^¹ The Festival's centrepiece was on the South Bank of the Thames in London.^¹ There were also events in Poplar, Battersea, South Kensington (Science) and Glasgow.^¹ Festival celebrations took place in Cardiff, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bath, Perth, Bournemouth, York, Aldeburgh, Inverness, Cheltenham, Oxford, Norwich, Canterbury and elsewhere, and there were touring exhibitions by land and sea.^¹ Journalist Harry Hopkins highlighted the widespread impact of the "Festival style", which people called "Contemporary":clean, bright and new....^¹ It caught hold quickly and spread first across London and then across England....In an island hitherto largely given up to gravy browns and dull greens, "Contemporary" boldly espoused strong primary colors.^¹