Posted by  mdp on May 04, 2002 at 05:07:05:

In Reply to:  Re: THE LAST WORD ON THE MILLENNIUM DOME, NORTH GREENWICH posted by d on May 03, 2002 at 07:17:46:

This excellent article was written for "History Today" magazine in 2001; whose editor unfortunately decided not to publish it:

"Fifty years ago, the feted Festival of Britain opened; its successor, the Dome, proved rather less popular. Stephen Bayley, creative director of the Dome for six volatile months, explains what went wrong....

The Festival of Britain has an established place in the collective imagination. And so too, for different reasons, has the Millennium Dome. The year 1951 has become "an ancient enigma which we decode with difficulty", or so wrote Brian Aldiss in 1976. No such problems of deconstruction with the Dome: it was a bungled party political advertisement managed by demoralized public servants in thrall to politicians who, in turn, were blown this way and that by gusts from the latest opinion research.

Addressing an aspiring nation of ambitious and proud survivors, the Festival of Britain created an optimistic mood in architecture and design that lasted a generation. It employed great artists; it was directed with confidence and flair. The Dome, by contrast, assumed its public was moronic; they repaid the compliment by making the New Millennium Experience the most reviled popular exercise bar mass murder.

So what do the two projects have in common? One answer is Peter Mandelson and his grandfather, Herbert Morrison, cutely known as "Lord Festival". Our own 'Dome Secretary' (sic) drew down a quarter of his DNA from this muscular pioneer of the Labour Party. Taking on the Dome project at the height of post-electoral euphoria in 1997 was a public acknowledgement of what Mandelson saw as his personal destiny. His Millennium Dome was inspired by, but intended to surpass, Morrison's Festival of Britain.

Both men sported racy quiffs, gifts to caricaturists. Whenever convienient, Mandelson evoked the spirit of grandpa. You can almost sense the trembling lip when you read that, "I always think of him as decent, solid and loyal". This is what he told journalist Paul Routledge (who, with deadly accurate foresight, said he did not detect the same qualities in the younger man). However, Peter Mandelson has been selective in claiming his inheritance from Morrison. Old Labour credentials were incongruous in 1997 and no credentials were older than Morrison's, the son of a Brixton policeman who had become secretary of the new London Labour Party in 1914, was Mayor of Hackney by 1919 and in 1922 was elected to the LCC for East Woolwich. In 1923 he became an M.P., and in Ramsay MacDonald's second government was Minister of Transport, responsible for the 1930 Road Traffic Act, which first regulated road usage in Britain. As Minister of Supply in Churchill's first coalition, Morrison rallied Londoners during the Blitz.

Mandelson's sentimental family loyalty has been on occasion modified by more pressing political realities. No doubt the two have rather a lot in common: just as champagne made an early impact on Mandelson's view of socialism, so, in a nice period detail, golf entered Herbert Morrison's life with his second marriage. His first had been to Mandelson's grandmother, described by his biographers Bernard Donaghue and G.W. Jones (in Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, Wiedenfeld, 1973) as a frigid, disturbed waif who married the wrong man. However, this mismatch was the making of him: with no distractions at home, he threw himself into work.

Clement Attlee once said of Morrison that "he cannot distinguish between big things and little things". A similar failure of perception has dogged Mandelson, although in his case the failure of perception rather more concerns true and false, right and wrong. Put charitably, it is possible to say Peter Mandelson operates in a moral and aesthetic vacuum. Grandfather and grandson alike lived in the public eye. Goodness knows what a psychoanalyst would make of the younger man's revelation that he learnt of his grandfather's death in 1965, not from a grieving relative, but from a TV newsflash. This climatic event may have forever sealed a relationship in a sensitive 11-year old between media exposure and emotional values. Morrison's biographers say his lack of charisma prevented his rise to the top of the Labour Party. It may have been an excess of the same that has caused his grandson such problems. Each, of course, had a Dome. Morrison's was the more modest Dome of Discovery on the South Bank; Mandelson's was the catastrophic millennium tent. The Dome of Discovery was touchingly unpretentious, but provided a cheerfully memorable symbol. The Millennium Dome was absurdly overblown. In their different ways, the two men took credit for things that were not really much of their doing. The Festival of Britain was no more Morrison's idea than the Millennium Experience was Mandelson's, although with a familial conceit and proprietorialness Morrison chose the South Bank for is proximity to "his" County Hall.

Mandelson's period of responsibility for the Dome, as the government shareholder of all the stock in the absurdly named New Millennium Experience Company Limited (a coinage of his own), coincided with all the creative decisions where were so ruinous for the artistic and intellectual integrity of the Dome. The opportunity and budget existed to involve great artists, designers and architects. The opportunity was not so much ignored as vehemently rejected. Mandelson decided on mediocrity; or maybe he just couldn't tell the difference.

Inevitably, 1951 had had political origins too. A "Festival of Britain" was first proposed by the Royal Society of Arts in 1943; the spirit of renewal it was intended to capture was then essayed in a 1946 exhibition at the V. & A. called "Britain Can Make It". Alas, subsequent history has shown that Britain had a great deal of difficulty doing anything of the sort, but the exhibition was none the less influential and helped create the mood which made the Festival possible. Although it had its critics, the media was altogether more sympathetic to the Festival of Britain than to the Dome.

Two journalistic coinages describe the poles of opinion about 1951: to doubters, it was "a patriotic prank"; to the more supportive it was "a tonic to the nation". While Mandelson, it seems, may have exploited his position in fund-raising for the Dome, Morrison, on the other hand, denied any "direct material motive" behind the Festival, but did allow that "spiritual, creative and recreative activities" were not necessarily inimical to national economic progress. In 1951, spiritual, creative and recreative activities pointed to a period when politicians could say, without a hint of irony, that we had never had it so good. Half a century later, after nearly a billion pounds had been blown and the aftershocks of scandal and corruption had not yet subsided, not even the most mendacious politician could find anything positive to say about Peter Mandelson's NMEC.

The Festival of Britain had a budget of £12 million. It was publicised by two million leaflets in eight languages with press advertisements in 34 different countries. Four London double-decker buses toured around Europe and a converted aircraft carrier, the "Campania", carried a floating festival around the nation's ports. The Dome's advertising was by M. & C. Saatchi, whose most famous campaigns included "Labour Isn't Working". It was M. & C. Saatchi who hired television designer Martin Lambie-Nairn to create an identity for the Millennium. Lambie-Nairn hired an old chum, an amateur sculptor from the Home Counties, to create a personification. The resulting figure, a sort of muscle-bound Minoan, was scandalously close to another figure the same team had used in an advertisement for a prescription pharmaceutical.

Unlike the Millennium, the Festival of Britain got the very best out of the available talent. Laurie Lee, a former staff member of the Ministry of Information, wrote the captions for 30,000 exhibits. The tireless Hugh Casson was Chief Architect, and given free rein to recruit the best designers in the country, including Misha Black, James Gardner, Ralph Tubbs and James Holland. "There is no doubt," the official publication boomed, "that those who come will carry back with them a sense of Britain's continuing vitality as a creative force in the world today." Powell and Moya did the soaring Skylon, a techno-folly that was a genuine presentiment of architecture and design in the decades to come. Robin and Lucienne Day, and Ernest Race designed furniture which became the synecdoche of British Modernism in the 1950s. There was sculpture by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Lyn Chadwick and Reg Butler. And then there was also the Festival Hall, architecture of world class and one of the most distinguished buildings in South London. Against this record of genuine achievement, the wince-making cuteness of Battersea Pleasure Gardens' children's railway, based on "Punch" cartoons, carrying its little passengers between Far Tottering Station and Oystercreek can be overlooked.

The Festival of Britain benefited from an unambiguous brief and clear direction from its Director General Gerald Barry, previously the editor of the "News Chronicle". He had the confidence and authority to let Hugh Casson do his best work. Jennie Page, beleaguered and fatigued Chief Executive of NMEC Limited, was a career civil servant (whose other experiments in life outside Whitehall include directorships of "Railtrack" and "Equitable Life"). She created an atmosphere of furtive paranoia in Millennium management. Seemingly unwilling to make decisions herself, yet incapable of confident delegation, Page was in her turn under the Government's thumb. The Millennium Dome became a paradigm of bad management with dire results: there was not a single item in the cavernous hulk of the Dome worth saving.

Herbert Morrison had a clear vision that the purpose of the Festival of Britain was to "illustrate the British contribution to civilization, past, present and future, in arts, in science and technology, and in industrial design". Peter Mandelson did not have a clue what the Dome should be. One observer remembers him reclining on a chaise longue during a meeting, absent-mindedly fingering a model of the Body Zone. He proved himself incapable of distinguishing between volume of activity and quality of it.

It may be forensically true of the Festival, as architectural historian Joseph Rykwert wrote in 1988, that "none of the buildings were (sic) architecturally outstanding", but that is a harsh judgement. In architecture and design, the Festival of Britain represents an important moment when the stern moral authority of modernism of the 1930's was lightened by measures of colour, decoration and even frivolity. Urban design of the 1950's and 1960's was more or less predicted by the style of 1951. Perhaps this will come to be seen as the distinctive British contribution to the repertoire of contemporary design.

Certainly, there is something haunting about its memory. It is hard now to imagine how grim Britain was in the postwar years when dietary privations drove Elizabeth David to write almost pornographic fantasies about Mediterranean food.

On 10 February 1949 Morrison said the South Bank would be "new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old." He was right. The architect Frederick Gibberd said how "drab" Britain was in 1950. A decade or so later his Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral was rising above the ground, a monumental reminder of the Festival style. The Dome will leave no such fortunate memorials, although someone in Kent has brought a giant plastic hamster.

Reyner Banham said of 1951 that the English were not yet confident enough to enjoy themselves without being told to do so by Herbert Morrison. It was a sort of forced march into the future. The English of 2000, a more sceptical bunch, also needed a political directive, but in this case it was ill conceived. The moment Tony Blair told the public to stop whingeing and enjoy the Dome was probably the tipping point of its popular reputation.

While the Festival of Britain was touching, enigmatic, stimulating and memorable, the Dome was a travesty: vast without being impressive, vulgar without being interesting and didactic without being educational, expensive, but worthless.

Of the Great Exhibition of 1851 Disraeli had said, "this exhibition will be a boon to the Government, for it will make the public forget its misdeeds." Unfortunately for New Labour, the Dome is a terrible reminder of them. The Festival of Britain offered escape from the age of austerity.

The Millennium Dome was a pitiable memorial to an age of excess.

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