light hearted, sensible, not too dear, practical and never boring. It was also the setting for the pageantry that British people love. It was a setting for the horrible things that happen under English skies. This is a time when the lights go on in the ordinary streets and people think of what to do and where to go. This is the time when night falls in the city and across the river, and cars glisten in the street lights. The noise in the business districts drains away and in the suburban roads there´s only the sound of quick feet on a pavement. There was half an hour when the lights struggled with what was left of the day. And then in the artificial glitter the music took charge, and then it was most lovely and least serious. It is not a usual custom for people to dance in public in England, but here the place and the occasion seemed to demand it. People enjoyed this, even if they had to dance grotesquely in overcoats and late in the year. It may have taught the men who are building our cities something, it may have given impetus to a new approach to building here in Britain. But for ordinary people, it was fun. There were no resounding proud messages here, no one was taught to hate anything. At a time when nations were becoming assertive and more intolerant, here was a national exhibition that avoided these emotions, and tried to stay rational. In a bad year in the world´s history, it had a spiritual quality that is worth remembering.
And all of them in a special mood, slightly excited, slightly exaggerated. A mood that had been made by the building, the colour, and the music. Sir Hugh Casson: One of the greatest successes of the South Bank was the North Bank, a great stone drop curtain of familiar buildings, familiar, but here perhaps really seen for the first time. We used this existing scenery with care, emphasising, exaggerating, screening. Big Ben was withheld from view and then suddenly revealed, a Victorian block of flats looked like a fairy palace crowned with a forest of flags and turrets. The dome of St Paul´s floated above London but beneath a mobile sculpture. And we used other fixtures too, a barge dock that had been exposed by the bombing, was patched and painted to serve as a yacht basin. The old ship tower was topped with a radar device. The site wasn´t bulldozed flat like a pre-war housing site just to make things easy and level and dull. There were flights of steps that led from one area to another. They formed plinths for buildings or settings for fountains. They linked or separated, they dramatised or played down. Patrick O´Donovan: Buildings are the settings in which men move, and they can affect his way of life almost as much as his diet and his clothing. A well designed town is part of his wealth. Here at the South Bank there was a blueprint for new towns,
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