London

When a Grade I-listed building is being tinkered with I raise an eyebrow. When that building is the Royal Festival Hall, both of my eyebrows should fly off the top of my head in the manner of the Pink Panther. With a little light reading, though, it becomes apparent that the Hall has been put through the wringer over the years, most notably with ‘improvements’ in the ’60s. The current refurbishment is restoring the lovely old egg box to its original state. Feature continues

Besides, when they’ve enlisted people who were present at the birth of the site, it’s hard to find fault. Last month, three of the folks who made the Festival Hall and the Festival of Britain such a success were brought back together, in hard hats and reflective plastic jackets. Sir Terence Conran is set to reopen what was previously the People’s Palace restaurant next May. For him, things have come full circle – aged 19 he worked on the Homes and Gardens Pavilion in the Festival of Britain. Looking like an urbane Alex Ferguson, he recalled being shocked at the time that the construction of the Hall would cost £1 million. The price of the refurb will be closer to £90 million – ‘so, really, it was an extraordinary bargain’.

Conran worked with Eduardo Paolozzi on a water sculpture for the Festival, and constructed a mock-up of something called the Princess Flying Boat, a 600-seat monster that was set to fly from Southampton to New York, but never got beyond the Homes and Gardens Pavilion. Something of a renaissance teen, he also came up with a fabric design for the Festival: ‘It had rather a lot of phallic symbols and arrows. I showed it to my mother and she suggested I call it “this way to the gents”.

Sir Robin and Lucienne Day

‘This was work I was totally unqualified to do. We were all thrown into extraordinary activity with two years to get the building ready. But it was the dream of the future. I remember the opening night and seeing Lucienne Day in her heels looking immensely glamorous.’

The starstruck teenager, 55 years later, was sat next to Lucienne Day, Britain’s greatest living fabric designer. To her left was husband Robin, with one of the reconstructed auditorium seats he designed that will be put back in the Hall by June next year. ‘The building was so optimistic – I wanted to pick materials that spoke for themselves and were in harmony with the building,’ he said. The distinctive stripe on the chair was intended to look like ‘carved plaster’. The only noticable difference between the original and the 2006 chair is that the underside is now solid wood rather than perforated material, to improve the acoustics of the hall when some of the seats are empty.

Other changes that will become apparent include the paintwork. Since the ’60s virtually every wall has been painted white, and the Hall stayed that way until it closed in summer 2005. The original Scandinavian modernist colour scheme was much more playful – architect Peter Moro always used a very specific palette: sepia, vermilion, midnight blue, lemon yellow. When it reopens, the Hall should look more, well, festive.

Our residency will be up by then. In the meantime, myself and Pete Wiggs have been working on the score for the South Bank documentary we’re making (we’ll have to decide on a title pretty soon – any suggestions?). Hearts were in mouths when Robert Kirby – bespoke arranger for Nick Drake, John Cale and Vashti Bunyan – agreed to work on the project. With the help of the South Bank Centre education department we will be backed by a local teenage army of brass, string and woodwind players. Now all we’ve got to do is write the bloody songs.

For more information on events at the South Bank Centre, visit www.rfh.org.uk.