The Festival of Britain 1951

    By the end of the 1940s, Britain was well on the way to recovering prosperity and adjusting fully to a peacetime economy.  ‘Austerity’ was still the watchword and there was an obvious need to rebuild national pride and international exports.  Following the ‘Britain can Make It’ exhibition in London in September of 1946 there was now a need for a bigger effort.  Effective planning started in 1948 with the appointment of Hugh Casson as Director of Architecture.  It was timed to mark 100 years since the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park that had been so successful that it raised money to build the Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and Albert Hall in Exhibition Row.

    An extensive area of the South Bank of the River Thames in the centre of London was cleared in order to make a site for the exhibition that could be put to permanent good use.  The plans included permanent fixtures such as a riverside walk and the impressive Festival Hall.  Several temporary exhibition building were erected and the old tower used for making lead shot was converted to send signals to the moon.  A main decorative feature was the ‘Skylon’, an aluminium cigar shape suspended upright from installed masts.  The logo gave rise to many souvenirs, some of which are quite collectible.

Festival of Britain – a ‘Britain can make it’ exhibition staged 100 years after the 1851 Great Exhibition. 

This mark is not common and so items may be of special interest.  The 1948 competition to design the official  logo was won by Abram Games.  This enamelled version is on a souvenir copper egg cup made by Linton.

This diecast logo was used by Peerage on a variety of their products.

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