The Festival of Britain in 1951 transformed the way people saw their war-ravaged nation. Giving Britons an intimate experience of contemporary design and modern building, it helped them accept a landscape under reconstruction, and brought hope of a better world to come. Drawing on previously unseen sketches and plans, photographs and interviews, “The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People” travels beyond the Festival’s spectacular centrepiece at London’s South Bank, to show how the Festival made the whole country an exhibition ground with events to which hundreds of the country’s greatest architects, artists and designers contributed. It explores exhibitions in Poplar, Battersea and South Kensington in London; Belfast, Glasgow and Wales; a touring show carried on four lorries and another aboard an ex-aircraft carrier. It reveals how all these exhibitions and also plays, poetry, art and films commissioned for the Festival had a single focus: to unite ‘the land and people of Britain’.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This book does a wonderful job of describing what went on behind the scenes and why the exhibitions were such a great success. What a shame it was not written before the Millennium disaster as it really is a perfect primer on how to create an inspirational festival. –Terence Conran
Harriet Atkinson provides an excellent account of a key event in twentieth-century British cultural history. Her book is marked by attention to the complex senses of place shaping the events of 1951, and detailed scrutiny of the exhibition spaces conveying the Festival s spatial stories. Richly illustrated from original sources, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People is an insightful study of the geographies of British identity. –David Matless, author of Landscape and Englishness
Most studies of the Festival of Britain have concentrated on ‘the Festival style’ (atoms and whimsy), or on the ways in which the buildings of the South Bank exhibition introduced visitors to modern architecture for the first time. Harriet Atkinson’s book is about something deeper: the relationship between the 1951 exhibitions across the country and ‘love of land and history’, a modern urban version of the Picturesque which aimed to reconcile tradition and modernism and in the process reconstruct British identity after the disfigurements of war. The book is original, well-researched, judiciously illustrated and very revealing. The Festival of Britain will never seem quite the same again. –Christopher Frayling
About the Author
Harriet Atkinson is Research Fellow at the University of Brighton. She is co-editor, with Jeremy Aynsley, of The Banham Lectures (2009), and contributor to the Encyclopaedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions. She has written for various art and design journals as well as for The Guardian and The Independent.
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