London

Sometimes it’s a fine line between being a conservationist and being an obsessive hoarder, a weirdo even. After working on ‘Today’s Special’, a short film on the West End’s disappearing caffs, I started to feel like one of those bearded men with a shopping trolley stuffed with old newspapers – I picked up souvenirs from the soon-to-be-gone cafés: salt and pepper pots from the Euro Snack Bar on Swallow Street; a waiter’s order pad from the much-missed Copper Grill on Eldon Street. Feature continues

Strolling alongside the Royal Festival Hall with my Saint Etienne colleagues last week, we noticed some partition walls that had lined an old stairwell – they were muddy-brown on one side, but on the other they bore some unusual graphics. At a glance, they had to be from the 1950s. With heart beating double-quick, I called Trudy Saunders in the South Bank Centre project office and the boards were placed in a hidey-hole. Possibly they are from an expo or a conference that took place at the Hall in the ’50s – there are details of radar systems, odd bits of theatre, jet engines, and shots of the Thames at Gravesend. All rather queer. Yet there is always the chance that they are relics from the Festival of Britain, the 1951 extravaganza that led to the creation of the South Bank Centre. Relics are thin on the ground to non-existent (rumours circulate that bits of the Skylon are in a lock-up in Hampshire on MoD land), so if these ambiguous snapshots of ’50s Britain turn out to be from the Dome of Discovery or the Festival’s Power and Production Pavilion, it’s a cause for celebration. As I write, a host of Museum of London employees are poring over them, trying to ascertain a date. I’ll keep you posted.

Things like this don’t happen every day, but the South Bank Centre does have a seemingly endless supply of quirks. There’s the South Bank chaplain Canon Richard Truss, for instance, who weaves around the offices once a week with balm for the spiritually challenged. It turns out that St John’s Church on the Waterloo roundabout was the official Festival of Britain place of worship. Inside, there are murals and objects to commemorate the Festival’s fiftieth anniversary in 2001, plus giant paintings of Bible stories transferred to the locale – the good samaritan on Hungerford Bridge is a winner. The clergyman, rather tellingly, has never visited our office – beyond salvation and all that. Maybe he’ll turn up to our Turntable Café Xmas Party in The Front Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on December 21 and revel in our atheistic bonhomie.

To re-emphasise the Festival Hall’s connection with the Waterloo community, there is a concerted effort being made for it to face towards Lambeth as well as the river, currently the public face of the structure. It was, after all, originally the front of the building.

In the ’50s, men in overcoats and ladies with hatpins would dance in front of the hall; the area, now called Festival Square, will be repaved this month to reclaim former glories.

Inside the Hall, the wood panelling has just been refitted. Some of the original timbers are now considered non-renewable, so they have been treated with the care given to medieval parchments. The ‘blast walls’ (the diagonal walls behind the columns that reach up to the ceiling) are Australian walnut; the ornate ‘Copenhagen wall’ (around the back of the stage) has a knucklebone panelling made of elm. Elsewhere, there is weathered sycamore and reclaimed teak flooring – all reworked, reused and ecologically sound as a pound.

Our next Turntable Café event is a tribute to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – the original nursery of British electronica – on November 30 in the Purcell Room and Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer. Expect wild footage, DJ Julian House (the man behind Stereolab, Broadcast, and Primal Scream’s artwork) and a set from ex-Spacemen 3 leader Sonic Boom. He’s even promised to bring his own theremin.