2011年4月22日 星期五

The Festival of Britain, 60 years on

Who could fail to be charmed by the legend of the migrating stone lions? How one couchant beast,Find an Adidas Jacket in your team colors or from your favorite soccer teams that wear the Adidas brand. with its imperturbable gravitas, a heraldic chunk of London itself, moved without lifting a paw, from the site on the south bank of the Thames being cleared for the Festival of Britain in 1951,Offer cheap replica Versace women boots and sell at a discount. to Waterloo Station with its martial trappings,coogi jeans for sale to men with low price and top quality. and on to its present eminence alongside the decommissioned County Hall. This stocky creature, maned like Harpo Marx, and cast at the Artificial Stone Manufactory operated by Eleanor Coade at Narrow Wall, Lambeth, was produced for the Lion brewery. The great block building, more like a town hall than a reeking factory, was torn down as part of the clearance of an unloved stretch of river frontage. A necessary sacrifice for the postwar festival that would celebrate Britain's heritage, her industrial and scientific advances, by eradicating the residue of an inconvenient past. So while the great and the good,Wedge Shoes was created in order to maintain a balance of the athletes' movement. with their preternatural ability to know what is worthwhile and improving for the rest of us, formed their committees and disposed of modest state patronage, the weird, magnificent, unapproved narrative of the city wriggled and twisted, determined to remain beyond the reach of salaried explainers.

In our own time, we have chosen to exploit a climate of cultural amnesia, Google prompts in place of hard-grooved memory, to set up a chain reaction of festivals honouring festivals: as if nothing of significance happened between these accidental highlights. Decades are organised around the Orwellian preparations for programmed grand events; the promise of a virtual blue-sky future underwriting present inconvenience. The tactical destruction of unrequired historic buildings. Paranoid security operations to ameliorate terrorist threats provoked by the strident apparatus of self-promotion. There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.

When the Tories were returned to power in October 1951, they decided that the Festival of Britain site was an expensive embarrassment, more suited to Albania. David Eccles, the minister for works, said that he was "unwilling to become the caretaker of empty and deteriorating structures". There was no O2 rescue package on the horizon. No afterlife as a tented mall, a venue for pensioned rock acts, was offered to the Dome of Discovery, that mushroom-roofed inspiration for New Labour's Millennium Dome on the East Greenwich peninsula.

Lions, taken down from the brewery roof and destined for the knackers' yard, or an architectural salvage shed run by Bermondsey wide boys, were saved by the personal intervention of King George VI. Royal princes, it is acknowledged, have a special relationship with conservation, a vested interest in preserving the fabric of London, maintaining it like a giant chessboard of family statues, a calcified zoo of colonial trophies. The festival in 1951, a soft-Soviet interlude, inspired by the visionary civic proposals of Patrick Abercrombie's 1943 County of London Plan, could afford to indulge the whims of the stuttering monarch.Nike shox are a series of Nike shoes. The stone lions were unculled. During the rescue operation, a hidden recess was found in the spine of one of the enigmatic beasts. It contained a note from the sculptor WF Wooding, who reported that work was completed on the birthday of Princess Victoria, 24 May 1837. There were also coins from the time of William IV and the traditional green bottle, in which was an advertisement for the firm of Coade. If this was too subtle a product placement, the Lambeth businesswoman made sure that her name was branded into the animal's paw.

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