Chrisp Street, London

Festival Britain (3): Built to last

Looking back, people are apt to think of the South Bank Exhibition as ‘The Festival of Britain’. But what went on by the Thames was just the centrepiece of a much larger Festival. There was an Exhibition of Science at South Kensington, an Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow, a Farm and Factory Exhibition in Belfast, and a travelling exhibition that visited Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, and Birmingham. Smaller communities put on special events, and in towns that already held some form of annual festival, this event in 1951 was subsumed into the national celebrations. And then there was the Live Architecture Exhibition, tucked away in Poplar, East London, in the area that became known as Lansbury.

It was an exhibition, but not as we know it. The idea was to rebuild a section of still war-damaged London and present it as an exemplum of the way Britain could be rebuilt after the bombing. There were temporary pavilions too, containing displays on architecture, planning, and building science. But the idea was that, unlike most of the Festival structures, Lansbury would be permanent. The principal architect was Frederick Gibberd (now better known as the designer of Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral) and a group of other architects were commissioned to design areas of housing and a primary school. Gibberd himself did the market place.

The development gave architects the chance to show what they could do when it came to designing housing and to produce something that was more lasting and less flashy than the exhibition buildings on the South Bank. The focus of Gibberd’s market place was the clock tower, shown in the picture. Gibberd proposed making this into an observation tower containing a pair of staircases, one to go up and one to come down, and the concrete framework of the landings and staircases was exposed on the outside, to make a pattern of pale diamonds up the sides of the tower. The spaces within the diamonds were left clear, so that those ascending and descending could look out.

Gibberd somewhat ruefully described what happened to his building: ‘It was a practical folly that gave pleasure, but only for a short time. The fear was suicides; the base was surrounded with spiked railings and the viewing platform enclosed in wire mesh.’ At least now the tower is home to some dramatic lighting, ensuring that it remains a visual focus for the area, night and day.

Photograph by Louise Joly
Used under Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 3.0 Unported license

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

The Cheltenham Festival of Literature is in full swing at the moment, so I thought it might be interesting, in between listening to what the writers have to tell us, to listen to what some of Cheltenham’s buildings have to say. I could, of course, go on at length about the town’s Regency architecture – and very beautiful its stuccoed terraces look between the autumn trees – but everyone does that, so I’ve plumped for a different approach: to look at one minor street in the town centre and see what catches my eye.

So here are some buildings in Winchcombe Street, which contains a few Regency houses, some modern sheltered flats, some shops, and several hairdressing salons. One of the latter occupies the former premises of W. W. Dowty’s Photographic Studio. They’ve kept the original sign on the fascia, and there’s a door with a tall oval pane and glazed spandrels with bevelled glass. I’m not sure of the date: perhaps some time between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the second. At the other end of the street, another hairdresser occupies a shop that must have once housed purveyors of fish and game, narrow panels of Edwardian or Victorian tiles illustrating the goods within. Tiles like these are a telling reminder that the town once had several fishmongers, whereas now people have to go to a supermarket to find someone who will mong them some fish. Meanwhile, these tiles remain, a source of historical evidence and visual pleasure.As is Cheltenham’s former Odeon cinema. This finally closed when another chain opened a multiplex in the town. It’s an undistinguished Art Deco building, with the redeeming feature of these two naked women tangled in celluloid high up on the façade. Most passers-by see only the boarded-up entrance of the cinema, steadily becoming more and more of a blot on the townscape. I’d lay odds that most of them never notice the silver ladies, two of several reminders of the unregarded past of a quiet Cheltenham side-street.