Held in the summer of 1951, the Festival of Britain was a national exhibition centred on a redeveloped South Bank site in London, conceived to lift morale a century after the Great Exhibition of 1851 and during postwar austerity. Its showpieces included the Royal Festival Hall, the cigar-shaped Skylon, and the Dome of Discovery, set within a planned, pedestrian-friendly precinct of modern architecture and landscaping. The displays presented welfare-state modernism as a hopeful vision of a planned, rationally ordered future, and drew several million visitors. The site was largely cleared after the festival when the incoming Conservative government withdrew support.
It popularised modernist planning and design as the look of postwar optimism and renewal in Britain. The South Bank it pioneered became a lasting cultural quarter and a model for civic regeneration around the arts.
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