Summer on the South Bank

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10 April 2012

Tomorrow the South Bank will be transformed.

There'll be a sandy beach on the Thames path, complete with beach huts, a Goan-style Indian restaurant and a giant hollow seagull selling ice-creams. An outdoor photography gallery and a magnificent garden, created with the Eden Project, on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A regular food market behind the Royal Festival Hall, linked to the complex by a new staircase that the Centre's artistic director Jude Kelly hopes will become a permanent perching place to rival Rome's Spanish Steps.

And these are just the physical changes to the 21-acre site for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Amid countless free gigs, exhibitions and even dry stone walling displays, the Hayward Gallery will mount a major retrospective of work by Tracey Emin. This year's Meltdown Festival is curated by Kinks frontman Ray Davies as an FOB-inspired overview of British popular music of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Young choirs, artists, pop groups and brass bands will rub shoulders with the likes of Heston Blumenthal, pianist Lang Lang, designer Wayne Hemingway, and national treasures Meera Syal and Tony Benn. Punters, meanwhile, can get married at the Festival Hall over the royal wedding weekend, take part in a massive performance of Handel's Messiah next month, or celebrate black British music and hip hop in July.

The new festival shares the eclecticism and optimism of the original 1951 event, planned by Clement Attlee's postwar Labour government to unite the population in a celebration of British creativity and ingenuity. It draws inspiration from the themes and lost buildings of the original - the Dome of Discovery, Telekinema and the much-mourned, gravity-defying Skylon sculpture - and also from the funfair offshoot at Battersea Park.

But this year's event is not merely a nostalgic tribute to a defining and fondly remembered moment in British history. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that it is once again OK to take quiet pride in British values and inventiveness.

It is also a testament to the way the Southbank Centre has not only endured against the odds but flourished to become the centrepiece of a vibrant urban zone, demonstrating the part that art and leisure can play in the ongoing regeneration of a city and its riverside.

"I was brought to the 1951 festival by my dad, who saw it as the future for his generation," says Ray Davies. "I remember the Skylon looking like a spaceship, and I'm approaching this festival with the same optimism my parents did." He has gathered performers from the Fifties and Sixties but also signed up contemporary acts such as Anna Calvi and the Canadian saxophonist Ron Sexsmith.

As in the original, you don't have to be British to take part in a celebration of Britishness. "The notion of tolerance, of Britain as a mongrel nation, was contained in the 1951 festival," says Jude Kelly. "Of the artists who took part, 57 per cent were refugees."

When Kelly took over as artistic director of the Southbank Centre in 2005, her first priority was to complete the refurbishment and reopening of the Grade I-listed Royal Festival Hall. But the wider significance of the whole site was always on her mind. Her father was a 17-year-old crew member on bombers at the end of the war, who didn't necessarily expect to live. Kelly saw the Festival of Britain as an affirmation for people like him.

The Thames-side location - then part-industrial, part-bombsite, part-slum and wholly unloved - "was also a great statement. It was about joining people up, saying that the Thames unites us. The organisers brought together art and science in an unashamedly modernist environment, but without suggesting you had to get rid of the past.

Instead, there was a very warm, affectionate attitude to what it meant to be British. It was about ice creams and cream teas, fountains and gardens. They celebrated excellence and egalitarianism side by side."

The festival's political godfather Herbert Morrison and its chief architect Hugh Casson were criticised by some for spending £5 million (around £250 million today) on a temporary venture. Apart from the Festival Hall, commissioned to replace the bombed Queen's Hall, every building that opened in May 1951 on the South Bank was due to be torn down that October. And even though the event proved a resounding success, attracting eight million visitors and engraving itself on the popular consciousness, torn down they were, apparently in a spirit of revenge by Winston Churchill's returning Conservative government. The excessive speed and decisiveness of the demolition still leaves a nasty taste.

The Dome of Discovery was sold for scrap and the Skylon destroyed in a smelting shed near the River Lea. The Telekinema tottered on until 1957 before it, too, was demolished and reborn as the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank) under Waterloo Bridge. The site remained semi-derelict until the mid-Sixties, when the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall were built. And the apparent unfriendliness of the centre's new brutalist lines and concrete skyways (in contrast to the Festival Hall's airy openness) seemed initially to be exacerbated by the arrival in 1976 of its neighbour, Denys Lasdun's National Theatre.

It took a slow and piecemeal rediscovery of the South Bank to make these buildings part of a thriving, welcoming cultural and social quarter rather than outposts of elitism in the badlands.

The Oxo Tower opened in 1996, Shakespeare's Globe
in 1997 and the BFI's Imax cinema in 1999. The London Eye, Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge opened in 2000. After which the More London development (and the new Unicorn theatre for Children) connected the whole lot up with the Eighties Conran developments at Shad Thames, and Tower Bridge. Today, the wave of cultural and architectural gentrification is (economics permitting) spreading West, driven by planned developments at Nine Elms and Battersea, the original festival's second London home.

Kelly says that part of the purpose of the 2011 celebrations is to distinguish the Southbank Centre from its cultural neighbours, and to remind people that it is a festival site open to everyone. "We had 20 million people come through the site last year," says Kelly. "Not just tourists and people who buy concert tickets, but local people and teenagers who know they can come here on their own and feel safe. So our idea was to put on something that would last four months, that is not ornate and gilded, but where everyone can come and graze and browse amongst culture, with other people." A better expression of the spirit of 1951 would be hard to find.

The Festival of Britain 60th Anniversary Celebrations run from tomorrow until September 4; southbankcentre.co.uk

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