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Brilliance in black & white
for you
Ag+
Veri very nice
Snapshots from the past
Page 1 of 9
©Barry Thornton 2000
(9 Pages) |
We came up out of the Embankment underground
station - my elder brother John, my dad, my uncle John and I
- and threaded our way across the road between the black taxis
to stop at the edge of the Thames. The ride on the howling underground
had been heart-stopping, then moving stairs that reached out
of sight had been wondrous. Now I was awe struck.
The river seemed miles across. Churning through the brown
turbid water butted the smoke-trailing tugs heading chains of
barges. Big barges. Some high, empty. Some belly low, laden.
Some tugs racing downstream. Some straining, head down, up stream
The barge chains criss-crossed, and hooted as they squeezed
through the bridge arches.
It was magical to me. "Look", said my dad, pointing across the
water, "that's where we are going". I raised my round
eyes from the river traffic and saw it. The single mammary shape
of the dome, to my eyes huge. Floating apparently in mid air
next to it, a slender steel needle shape reached up into the
sky. "That's the Skylon", said dad, "next to the Dome of Discovery.
All those buildings over there - that's the Festival of Britain".
"The Festival of Britain", I breathed. Ever since the start
of 1951, we had been hearing at school, reading in comics, hearing
on 'Children's Hour' on radio, all about this centenary celebration
of the 1851 Great Exhibition. It was an event organised by the
post war Labour government to lift the morale of a nation worn
down by years of grey 'austerity', of dollar gaps and fuel shortages,
of continuing wartime rationing and endless belt tightening,
of bloody trouble in the British Empire. Just like a more recent
dome, the Festival of Britain was a contrived event, but this
one somehow genuinely caught the public imagination and mood.
All the year there were events nation-wide. The ultra-modern
Festival logo appeared everywhere - on new signs welcoming you
to this, that or the other town or village for instance.
The centre of the all the activity was this dome, marking the
start of a new age when, as we all felt, science was going to
change our world and take us into an austerity-free tomorrow.
And I, 9 years old, in my school gabardine, away from the gas
lights and cobbles and sweeping Pennine moors of my textile
village home, at the end of 13 hour journey yesterday starting
at 7pm in the morning by Yelloway coach, was here. Now.
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