It sits on the ground where Britain tried to cheer itself up in 1951. One person has written about it.
Festival Bar and Kitchen sits on Level 2 of the Royal Festival Hall, opening onto the riverside terrace, and it has one review.
One. It holds a 5.0, which is what happens when a single person has an opinion and nobody contradicts them, and which we have now explained at Nellie’s Tavern and Upper Gods and are not going to explain again.
But the location is the story, and the location is enormous.
What happened here
In 1951 Britain was broke, rationed, bombed flat and exhausted. The war had been won six years earlier and the country had, in almost every material respect, got worse.
So the government put on a festival.
The Festival of Britain occupied this stretch of the South Bank – a bombsite, cleared for the purpose – and it was, explicitly, an attempt to make the country feel better about itself. There was the Dome of Discovery. There was the Skylon, which we have already written about, and which Churchill had thrown in the river the following year for being too closely associated with the Labour government that built it.
And there was the Royal Festival Hall, which is the only significant thing from the Festival still standing, and which you are drinking inside.
The 1951 collection, one last time
We have now, across a hundred articles, traced the entire estate of the Festival of Britain, and the tally is instructive.
The Skylon: destroyed, cut up, dropped in the Thames, possibly turned into ashtrays. The Dome of Discovery: gone. The site: cleared.
The Royal Festival Hall: survives, Grade I listed, with a restaurant on the third floor named Skylon after the thing that was destroyed, and a bar on the second floor named Festival after the thing that was cleared away, and a wildflower meadow on the roof of the concert hall next door that fifty-two people have found.
And the Sherlock Holmes exhibition – also built for the Festival, also homeless when it closed – which was moved into a pub on Northumberland Street, where the stuffed head of the Hound of the Baskervilles has been hanging above a bar for seventy-five years.
That is what remains. A concert hall, a bar named after a thing that no longer exists, and a fictional dog’s head in a Greene King.
The bar
Pizza, drinks, a terrace on the river, and a view. It is a perfectly good Southbank Centre bar and it is not pretending to be anything else, and on a warm evening the terrace is one of the more agreeable places to stand in central London.
What the Festival was actually for
It was not a trade fair and it was not a party. It was, in the words of its organisers, a tonic to the nation – and it was aimed squarely at a population that had been told to endure for a decade and was very close to having had enough.
Eight and a half million people came. It was, by every measure that mattered, a success.
And then the government changed, and the new one dismantled it, and by the end of 1952 the whole site was cleared, and the Skylon was gone, and the only thing left standing was a concert hall.
The Prat’s history desk would simply note that Britain built something to cheer itself up, it worked, and it was demolished within eighteen months for party-political reasons, and that this is the most British sequence of events in the twentieth century.
Verdict
One review. A 5.0 that means nothing. And a terrace on the exact ground where a bankrupt country, seventy-five years ago, decided the correct response to having nothing was to build something beautiful and temporary and let people look at it.
Go. Stand on the terrace. Be the second.
Official site: southbankcentre.co.uk
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about London is it’s been satirized so thoroughly that reality started copying the satire.