London

I was 19 when I worked for an architect called Dennis Lennon who had quite a lot of work on the Festival site, in the Transport and the Homes and Gardens pavilions. We were a very small office and I got given work that I was totally unqualified to do, but as a young designer it was so incredibly exciting to be thrown into this extraordinary activity – the Skylon going up, the Dome of Discovery – and exciting modern architecture that few of us had ever seen in war-torn London.

There was, of course, a great panic to get the Festival open. The Royal Festival Hall was looked at with extraordinary admiration, partially because we’d been told it was costing £1 million to build, which in 1951 seemed such a huge amount of money that we couldn’t believe the nation could afford it. Well, I believe the refurbishment is costing somewhere in the neighbourhood of £90 million, so it seems an extraordinary bargain to be able to build a building of this quality for £1 million. And construction time was about two years.
Feature continues

The other exciting thing for us was the quality of this architecture. Just imagine all around you were demolished buildings and bombsites and here was a building using wonderful materials, wonderful woods, Derbyshire fossil – one of the most beautiful materials that I know for walls and floors. Italian plasterers were shipped in to plaster the columns, which seemed total extravagance, but the excellent architects wanted some super finish they’d probably seen in Venice or somewhere. That was the shock for us at that time, that a building of this quality should be going up here, slap-bang in the middle of London.

Of course the rest of the Festival was much more temporary – very exciting and very beautiful, but obviously the same sort of high-quality materials were not being used. My own particular projects were a mock-up interior of a Princess flying boat, a 600-seat aircraft that I think was going to take off from Southampton and fly to NY and land on the water there. It never happened of course, but we built a section of it, in the Transport pavilion, and I was responsible for doing the interior in the section of the flying boat. I also designed quite a lot of furniture for the Homes and Gardens pavilion, nothing like the sort of elegance of Robin Day’s furniture [for the Royal Festival Hall], and mostly made out of welded reinforcing rod, which was about the only metal material you could get – you used to have to have a word with someone on a building site to buy some reinforcing rod as there was such an extraordinary shortage of materials in Britain at that time.

The other thing I did that I was terrifically proud of was to help Eduardo Paolozzi with his water sculpture, a marvellous construction of buckets that filled up with water and when they got to a certain stage went into the next bucket. So it was this constant mass of cascading water. Of course it kept on breaking down, so I, who could weld, was often hoisted into place to weld a new bracket on to stop it. I also made some letters for the Natural History pavilion, and I had this idea of casting small shrimps and cockles and whelks and caterpillars and beetles in clear plastic for the letters, saying ‘Natural History’. About a month after the Festival had opened I got a call saying people were complaining about a terrible smell as you enter the pavilion, and we’ve isolated it to your letters. There were some little blow-holes, and my various natural history objects had decomposed.

I always remember the opening of the Royal Festival Hall and I particularly remember Lucienne [Day] in a very smart black frock and very high-heeled shoes looking immensely glamorous, and then eventually when I got inside it was fantastic, just extraordinary, and it seemed to me a dream of the future.

The Festival of Britain-inspired Skylon restaurant has just opened in the Royal Festival Hall (020 7654 7800) at Southbank Centre.