In 1949, Prime Minister Clement Attlee laid the foundation stone of the Royal Festival Hall, vowing to “show the world that we are not just a nation of shopkeepers, but a people who appreciate and practise the arts”.

The South Bank Centre turned out to be just the ticket, hosting some of the biggest names in music, dance and art, as Charlotte Mullins’s illuminating book, A Festival on the River, explains.

In 1943 a plan was laid down to transform the muddy, derelict South Bank into a motivating cultural quarter, including a concert hall to replace the Queen’s Hall destroyed in the Blitz. Work began in tandem with the 1951 Festival of Britain – a nod to the Great Exhibition of 1851 that was designed to promote an image of recovery and progress.

The new concert hall was to be a democratic space where visitors could eat, drink and socialise. It was planned with a second, smaller hall and art gallery, but it became clear that these could not be finished in time for the Festival, so plans were redrawn without them. Opening in May 1951, clad in Portland stone with a barrel-shaped copper roof, the Royal Festival Hall hosted sell-out concerts throughout the Festival.

After the Conservatives came to power later that year, almost all the Festival buildings were demolished. The Royal Festival Hall was the exception, benefiting from an enlarged restaurant and an extension for dressing rooms and rehearsals.

In 1955 the London County Council took up plans to expand the centre. The original design for the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Brutalist in style with thick concrete walls, was ready in 1959 but was later enlarged to include the Purcell Room. The two auditoria were opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1967.

The Hayward Gallery opened a year later with a major retrospective on Henri Matisse. Designed in consultation with the Arts Council, it pledged a varied programme of contemporary art, modern masters and nonEuropean art. Over the years, the most successful exhibitions were often retrospectives, though Anish Kapoor’s exhibition in 1998 had the highest daily attendance on record for a contemporary show. After rocky years of closure threats and a change of administration, a £1.8m project added a glass foyer and an elliptical pavilion in 2003.

Plans to unite the whole South Bank Centre under a £68m glass roof were dropped in 1998, and a fundraising campaign was launched by Joanna Lumley in 2001, the year that marked 50 years since the Festival of Britain. By 2005, sufficient funds had been raised to begin renovations on the Royal Festival Hall, which is due to reopen with a celebratory weekend of free events on June 8.

A Festival on the River by Charlotte Mullins is published by Penguin. It is available at penguin.co.uk and on site at Southbank Centre Shops and Foyles bookshop, price £9.99

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