the firm that branded Britain

Alone


In design, those ambitions came to a head in 1951's Festival of Britain. The idea of celebrating the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition had been in the air for some time. In 1946 Misha Black drew a fantastical plan for the South Bank site, exhibited at the Cubitt, that makes it look like the Crystal Palace reinterpreted by the creators of The Jetsons. It's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek proposal, you suspect, yet it evokes a time when London was prepared to dream. In the end, Black was one of the co-ordinating architects for the (much more sensible) Festival, and his patch included the Dome of Discovery – the radically modern but short-lived precursor to the Millennium Dome, in which the DRU designed an exhibition celebrating British scientific and creative discoveries.

Clifford Hatts was drafted fresh out of the Royal College of Art in 1949 to work on the exhibition. He recalls that he and his DRU colleagues were divvied up into "flat boys", or graphic artists, and "round boys", the architects and product designers. "Our brief was exactly what it said on the tin: present British discovery in a simple, straightforward way," Hatts, now 88, told me. He decided not to visit the Millennium Dome 50 years later because, with its vague exhibition, it seemed to lack the sense of purpose of its predecessor. "Design was written in big letters in those days – it was all about turning our backs on the war."