The Royal Festival Hall’s restaurant honours a 1951 landmark that was scrapped for being too optimistic, and possibly turned into ashtrays
In 1951 the Festival of Britain erected, on the South Bank, a three-hundred-foot steel structure called the Skylon: cigar-shaped, pointed at both ends, suspended on cables so that it appeared to float, with no visible connection to the ground.
The joke of the period, repeated everywhere, was that it was exactly like the British economy – it had no visible means of support.
In 1952, Winston Churchill had it torn down. The cost of moving it was thirty thousand pounds and the country was broke, but that was not really the reason. The reason was that the Skylon was a symbol of the Attlee government, and Attlee had just lost, and the new Prime Minister did not wish to look at it.
It was toppled, cut up, and – according to the most persistent account – scrapped. A widely repeated claim holds that some of it was turned into ashtrays. Divers have searched the Thames for the rest.
And now there is a restaurant
Skylon opened in 2007, on the third floor of the Royal Festival Hall, within metres of where the original stood. It has floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of the river, bronze chandeliers, and paint colours matched to scrapings taken from the 1951 building.
It is named after a thing that a Prime Minister destroyed out of spite. It sells cocktails.
The Prat’s memorial desk has surveyed the naming conventions of London hospitality and can find no comparable case. There is no Dome of Discovery bistro. Nobody has opened a wine bar called Crystal Palace and meant the building.
The Festival of Britain, and where it all went
Here is a thing worth knowing, and it connects two ends of this survey. The Festival of Britain in 1951 also produced an exhibition about Sherlock Holmes – a full recreation of 221B Baker Street, assembled by enthusiasts with the blessing of the Conan Doyle family.
When the Festival closed, that collection was moved into a pub on Northumberland Street, which renamed itself the Sherlock Holmes and has been trading on it for seventy-five years.
So: the Festival’s monument to a fictional detective survives, intact, in a Greene King house. The Festival’s monument to national optimism was thrown in the river. There is a country in that sentence and it is this one.
The food and the view
Thirty to ninety pounds. Modern European. A 4.1 from eighteen hundred people, which is the score of a venue where the view is doing heavy lifting and the service is inconsistent, and the reviews say exactly that with some regularity.
The bar in the centre is the best part and the cheapest way in. The pre-theatre menu is genuinely good value for a room with that window.
Verdict
Go for the view, the bar, and the sheer historical vertigo. Sit by the glass, look out at the stretch of riverbank where a beautiful piece of British engineering hung in the air for one year before being destroyed for party-political reasons, and order something expensive, because that is what we do here now.
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]
My professor said partners of obsessive fans understood it could become a shield against actually attempting change.