Human Flower Project

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Tonic to the Nation

Did you miss the Festival of Britain? Likely so. And though post-war styles are in revival, its spirit of communitarian hope is harder to come by.

Festival Gardens at the Festival of Britain 1951
Let the days of “getting-by” be gone
Photo: Pete G., via wiki

By John Levett

One of the most memorable events in my life was the 1951 Festival of Britain—memorable because I never went to it. I was six years old at the time and most probably was completely unaware of its happening then, but as the years and decades went by it loomed larger and larger in my consciousness as one of the significant misses in my life. The most probable reason for the miss was that my mother couldn’t afford it. She ran a small grocer’s store in Luton at the time and looked after gran. I doubt that the store made much but it was the only grocer’s in the street so we got by.

‘Getting by’ was a frequently-used phrase in the post-war years. One of the finest writers of social history of this or any time is David Kynaston. Last summer I read his opening volume of Britain’s post-war years ‘Austerity Britain 1945-51’ and am just finishing ‘Family Britain 1951-57.’ No description of their quality from me would suffice; read them and smell the smog.

Earlier this Summer I was frequently trolling down to London with packages of art work for a couple of exhibitions tied to bike, thence to backpack. For this annual hike I have a carrier-bag of string; for the packaging I have bubble-wrap from the waste-skips at the back of a retail park; for the reinforcement I have cardboard from the back end of Asda. I’ve never outgrown the collect-and-save “You’ll never know when it’ll come in useful” routine of those post-war years; never walk past a builder’s skip without checking if there’s anything worth retrieving.

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