The Skylon Must Be Stopped

There is a campaign, currently gaining some support, to rebuild a structure known as the 'Skylon'. Designed by Powell and Moya for the 1951 Festival of Britain, it was vaguely symbolic of the Socialist-Modernist optimism of the festival and the post-war Labour government - the Scandinavian, playful 'people's detailing' Modernism that still appears to some as a road not travelled, architecturally, as much as politically: Britain as an educated, Northern European Social Democratic polity rather than the brutal Americanised mess we know and put up with. This might, of course, be an attempt to reassert Modernist credentials after spending much of the last few months proselytizing on behalf of a preservation campaign, but giving the matter even the slightest bit of thought, I must declare my position - the new Skylon must be stopped.



First, the politics of rebuilding are, whether shoddy and kitsch or historically scrupulous, always an attempt to rewrite history, to wilfully misunderstand it, to make-believe that the bad days never happened. Second, this is particularly dubious in this case, because the Festival, and the Attlee government who commissioned it, lost. Although gaining the most impressive vote of any government in British history (any serious Socialist movement would have simply rejected the election results, but such gall is not what the Labour Party is made of), the administration of the NHS, of mass council housing, the new towns, decolonisation, was thrown out of office in favour of the Party of land, big business and imperial chauvinism, leading to a Butskellite compromise rather than the fundamental changes which were possible. One of the first acts of the Tory government was to demolish the Festival buildings (as 'three-dimensional socialist propaganda', according to Churchill) and melt down the Skylon for scrap - the site was soon filled with the Portland stone pomposity of the Shell Centre. Wrenching the Skylon out of its political context and dumping it into one where Britain has the most Right-wing government since the war is dubious at best.



Obviously a metal tower doesn't secrete politics within it in some anthropomorphic sense, but the point remains that there are political reasons why this got demolished which would be forgotten if a replica gets stuck somewhere (the place is apparently unimportant, as with those proposals that Robin Hood Gardens be moved to W11). Third - the reason for rebuilding the Skylon seems to be....it's Iconic. The iconic is what all architecture now aspires to. Buildings as logos, the emblems of every bit of class cleansing rebranded as 'regeneration', all aspiring to that elusive 'Bilbao effect'. The Skylon thus goes from something with a very particular meaning to one with none other than a pronouncement of its own existence. Actually, since 1999 we've had our own little version of the Skylon. Merging, (according to Jonathan Glancey anyway) the form of the Skylon for the yellow supports, and the Festival's Dome of Discovery for its teflon tent, Richard Rogers' Millennium Dome (sorry, 'o2') is our equivalent. Its leading propagandist Peter Mandelson was even the grandson of Festival organiser Herbert Morrison. This is as it should be, as this fantastically tacky corporate enormo-drome could be anywhere from Iowa to North Carolina as much as North Greenwich. It's the 'icon' New Labour's New Britain deserved. Stop the Skylon!