The Festival of Britain – that much mythologised moment of national renewal – is wheeled out every time the country goes through an identity crisis. An echo of the Great Exhibition, the 1951 South Bank extravaganza was spoofed by Tony Blair in his millennium plans and Theresa May in her entirely forgotten ‘Festival of Brexit’. With the country currently in a bit of a state, the Festival’s 75th anniversary this month comes at a fitting moment.

Several lessons can be learnt by looking closer at the only part of the Festival to survive: the Royal Festival Hall. Designed to be the Festival’s permanent concert venue, the building’s nostalgic mid-century stylings – sweeping lines and Net-&-Ball patterned carpets – smoothed over the arguments that were raging behind the scenes.

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Michael Frayn infamously caricatured the culture war that was fought over the Festival as a battle between the herbivores and carnivores, a familiar divide between ‘the radical middle-classes, the do-gooders; the readers of… the Guardian, and the Observer’ and ‘the readers of the Daily Express; the Evelyn Waughs’. The Festival was the herbivores’ victory lap. After the gloom of war, it offered a feelgood story powered by Attlee’s vision of Britain: a new welfare state, nationalised industries, modern technology.

Churchill is said to have called the Festival ‘three-dimensional socialist propaganda’. The likely apocryphal quote is forgivable: the Festival’s methods were Bolshevik-tinged. Its agitprop seductively spread the herbivore revolution through avant-garde art, design and architecture. This included Soviet-style mobile displays. A 100-strong lorry fleet, for example, carried a portable show across the country, and the Festival’s floating exhibition on HMS Campania was an agit-steamer in all but name. A hint of this progressive social engineering lives on in the Royal Festival Hall’s auditorium, designed to ensure great views for all, except if you happen to be in one of the  boxes – the Royal Box has the worst view of the lot.

Exiled European designers infused the Hall with their radical ideas, both aesthetic and political. But........

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