London

The Royal Festival Hall’s original carpet may have been a little tired and ratty, but had it been replaced with Ikea laminate flooring, there might have been a riot to rival the Primark affair when the Hall reopens in June. The playful green and white ‘net and ball’ design is emblematic of the site, and is currently in use on the Southbank Centre’s gift-shop carrier-bags. It was created by German-born Peter Moro, the Festival Hall’s associate architect, in 1951. The story runs that he had planned to use the wave pattern, then chief architect Leslie Martin walked into his office and placed an apple in one of the waves – the net and ball was born.

The original carpet was removed when the building closed two years ago and it was sold off as small rugs, but the replacement is happily identical and is now being laid as one of the finishing touches to the Hall’s renovation. It has been rewoven at Wilton, near Salisbury, which was once the capital of Wessex and is the British capital of carpet-making. Now Wilton Carpets is the only weaver in town. It mostly works for golf clubs and cruise ships these days, producing around 500 square metres of carpet per job. The Royal Festival Hall required a whopping 4,000 square metres.
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The yarn is British wool, sent over to Portugal to be spun, then back up to Yorkshire to be dyed. At Wilton, it is loaded on to the loom. ‘We made it in the most traditional way we could,’ says managing director Peter Le Count, ‘with an old card Jacquard loom. Instead of using computerised info, we have to stamp the cards with the design info that we load up on to the loom. Then the loom runs along at a fairly sedate pace over a number of weeks because it’s a very tight, dense pile. We produce five or six rolls of carpet a week, so it took nine weeks to make.’

The weavers at Wilton are trained for five or six years, which means it’s pretty tough these days finding people who are willing to dedicate as much time to studying carpets as they would to becoming a lawyer or an architect. Polish immigrants are partially filling a vacuum left by Britain’s X-Factor generation. Their expertise is used in the final quality control stages which take a whole month: every square metre is hand-inspected, the carpets are steamed to ‘burst the pile’, a natural latex is applied to lock the tufts, and finally the carpet is sheared with something that looks like a giant rotary lawnmower.

Festival Hall groupies may remember a couple of variations on the classic net and ball design. The former Chelsfield Room, on the west side of the building adjacent to Hungerford railway bridge, had an identical carpet to the rest of the Hall, only it was in shades of blue rather than green and white. Then there was the People’s Palace restaurant; the carpet was more turquoise than green, but the most obvious difference was that the pattern was much smaller than it was in the rest of the building. We’d like to think this was down to a Spinal Tap-esque confusion over feet and inches but, according to Southbank Centre guru ‘Magic’ Mike McCart, it was intentional. Either way, it’s not being replaced, as it dates from the 1966 extension to the building rather than 1951. Most of the People’s Palace carpet was too grubby to be reused and was binned. A sizeable remnant of it, though, is now lodged in my front room – perk of the job, innit?

For more information on events at the Southbank Centre, visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk.