Royal Festival Hall: A Pilgrimage

Ian Ellingham, 2004

I recall that curious feeling of anticipation, sitting on that train on a sunny July afternoon, a couple of years ago.  I had received an invitation to a reception, from an associate of Allies and Morrison, Architects, of London.  I knew exactly where I was going;  I had been there before, on a similar summer day thirty years before, at that stage when I had just started to take an interest in architecture.  That visit had made a big impression. 

Much had changed over the years.  Personally, I now could number a few dozen buildings I had inflicted on society, together with an immense amount of paper.  I was certainly older, and hopefully wiser.  In some ways it seemed like yesterday when I first saw that building;  I could recall that encounter with clarity;  yet in other ways it seemed so remote - so many years, so many buildings.  What would I find, what would it tell me?

The Royal Festival Hall overlooks the South Bank of the Thames, and is the sole remaining part of the 1951 Festival of Britain.  I didn’t know it when it was new, but had seen some aerial photographs, taken during construction, a new, clean, white building, rising against a grey, dreary, worn-out and blitzed city.  Contemporary conditions are hard to imagine now - meat rations were reduced part way through construction.  The opening commemorative publication noted the use of “steel and other scarce materials.”  The building, the first large post-war building in England, designed by the London County Council Architects, notably Leslie Martin, seemed to point the way to a bright new future.

That was not what I had seen in 1969.  The building was then obviously unloved, neglected and ill-maintained.  It appeared as a relic from a best forgotten antiquity.  Perhaps it was should be demolished and replaced with something more like the new neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Hall.  To a visiting Canadian looking northwards across the Thames, London appeared impoverished and unkempt.  Shabbily dressed people shuffled past.  The bright new future had obviously not been realised. 

Thirty years later, I again contemplated London from the Royal Festival Hall, this time from a balcony high above the Thames.  London was now clean, bustling, and affluent.  In contrast to 1969, many well-dressed people strolled by.  The building was now serving an affluent, leisured and educated populace.  The restaurants, shops, displays and bars inside now exist in their own right, inviting people in from the riverside promenade.  I watched people enter to browse the CD and book shops, pause for a drink while listening to a quartet, or have a meal at ‘The People’s Palace’.  It glowed in the warm sunlight, contrasting to the now-grubby and dated, brutalist Queen Elizabeth Hall (which probably should be demolished and replaced with something like the Royal Festival Hall!)  

Queen Elizabeth Hall.  Opened 1967.
Architects:  Team led by Hubert Bennett, head of the architects department of the Greater London Council, with Jack Whittle, F.G. West and Geoffrey Horsefall.
Not exactly an uplifting experience in 2004

Clearly, the Royal Festival Hall adapted well to the world fifty years after its creation.  But there was something more.  The recent work on the Royal Festival Hall had not changed its overall demeanour, but seemed to have restored it.  Curiously, while the building was little changed physically from 1969 (or 1951), the vistas from it had.  But the building still seemed different, so the only possibility is that I was seeing it differently.  Something had happened to me.

What might that be?  One possibility is that I now have become a connoisseur of fine architecture.  Connoisseurs bring to mind oenophiles, and while at wine tastings I can be made to detect that elusive grapefruitiness, I never seem to develop any special passion (and not just because it is more economical to remain one of the masses).  I am now clearly more observant about buildings, but is that all that has happened? 

It seems more likely that society has changed, and carried me along with it.  Certainly the people using the Royal Festival Hall in 2002 seemed to love the building.  Perhaps part of the change is an inevitable reaction - people just don’t like the things their parents built, but find some attraction in their grandparents’ creations.  There may be more though - something relating to a particular era.  I remember the 1960s and 70s, and the rejection of many of the values and symbols of the previous generation.  The era of the Beatles perceived many flaws with a future based on 1950s ideas, so perhaps reactions were stronger than usual. 

Now, perhaps the culture of 1950s is no longer seen as a threat, or maybe we have forgotten it, so buildings of that time can be embraced, and reinterpreted in terms of our own values.  Perhaps, in the early twenty-first century, the Royal Festival Hall fits better;  the optimism which accompanied its creation may have returned, or perhaps the original vision has now been fulfilled. 

Thinking back, the role of societal evolution, and my immersion in it became clear.  Attitudes change, and sweep everyone and everything along, but it is a complex process, and I am not immune.  Perhaps that is what the Royal Festival Hall tells me:  a building, over a period of fifty years is subject to, and measured by, continually evolving societal attitudes and beliefs. 

Heading home, I recognise the personal importance of the Royal Festival Hall.  It has been a kind of marker, of where I had been, and where I am now.  I wonder how it will appear after thirty more years.