Festival Time

The South Bank of the Thames, in all its permutations and perambulations, is an area of contradictions. It is on one level the remnant of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the 'three dimensional socialist propaganda' demolished by Churchill, a fragment of the benign cultural paternalism of the postwar interregnum; and even now, the most sustained stretch of excellent Modernist design in the whole of London: from the Festival Hall through to the walkways and contours of the QEH/Purcell/Hayward complex, through to the unexpectedly sharp, dynamic sweep of Waterloo bridge, then Lasdun's layers upon layers of public space at the National Theatre: and, somewhere in amongst this (although I admit I've never found it) an International Brigades memorial. Then again - it's home of the evil that is the South Bank Show, signifiers of cultural death as soon as Melvyn Bragg enters the room, and its buildings, however majestic, are keepers of the entombed corpses of theatre and classical music. Even its river-facing masterpieces are shadowed by the cyclopean architectural Toryism of the Shell Centre, or the massive waste of money that the BFI could be spending on trying to resuscitate British cinema that is the BFI IMAX, a gigantic drum of advertising 'welcoming' one into South London.



So the general South Bank fest this year causes distinctly mixed feelings. The re-branding of the NFT as 'BFI Southbank' immediately elicits fears of them going IMAX, while hanging round the disused Museum of the Moving Image that this replaced was always a great pleasure - the Hammer memorabilia and the replica Agit-Train (as featured in Marker's Last Bolshevik) left to play around in if you took a wrong turn on the way to NFT3. Nonetheless, the opening up of the archive is undoubtedly a very good thing, and this month it includes a programme seemingly designed with me in mind. Likewise the refurbished Festival Hall. The only remnant of the 1951 Festival that was mostly finished off by the Tories' stolen election victory, it had to be made un-Festive in the 60s, its patterns and strange materials removed in favour of (sigh) blank Portland stone. But then St Etienne are artists in residence, and there's much free stuff (with crushing inevitability involving Billy Bragg) So perhaps by keeping one eye closed, the remants of the Festive, fantastical Leftist Modern can be found on this stretch of river - just as long as you ignore the chainstores, skateboarders and the kultur-hunters vulturous in the aftermath.