Rosie Niven

A few weeks ago I went to a screening of This is tomorrow, a film about the history and recent refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall.

The film was excellent account of the work to revive the hall and the score performed live by Saint Etienne and musicians from London schools fitted the images very well.

The film included some fascinating interviews with some of the people who worked on the original hall, including architects Trevor Dannatt and Jim Cadbury-Brown, plus Allies and Morrison, the firm that worked on the refurbishment. I was not aware that some of the original plans were never realised until the refurbishment was completed earlier this year.

It was also interesting to learn that proposals to turn the bombed out south bank site into a festival were not universally popular at the time.

Interviews with residents revealed that many would have been happier for the area to remain a residential area after the war.

However, some residents did acknowledged the success of the Royal Festival Hall and the other south bank developments.

It is difficult to imagine what the south bank would have looked like now if it had remained residential and industrial.

Maybe there would have been some investment in reclaiming the bombed out properties and we would now have rows of attractive terraced housing similar to elsewhere in the Waterloo area.

The more likely scenario is that the site would now be filled by a declining stock of social housing with a few yuppy developments along the river.

The south bank developments may have their critics, and I agree that architecturally some of them are disappointing.

But the Festival of Britain and the associated developments have at least preserved the south bank as an amenity for all Londoners.

As for the festival hall, how many performance venues in London can you just wander in and visit exhibitions or listen to free concerts in its public areas? It is amazing how this place has hung onto its post-war socialist ideas into the 21st century.