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Southbank Centre’s four-month jamboree includes a theatre inside a cow, world’s longest bunting and Susan the straw fox From the patio of her concrete den, Susan the giant straw fox is keeping a vigil over Waterloo Bridge. Her glare, enough to chill the dreams of the capital’s pet rabbits, is softened by the sounds of piped birdsong and the distant giggles of toddlers playing on the sandy beach by the Thames. Past the gaudy beach huts, on the other side of Hungerford Bridge, lie a helter skelter and an enormous, upturned purple cow. The only thing missing from the riverside as the Southbank prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain is a towering steel cigar, but the Skylon is long missing, presumed scrapped, buried or submerged. To pay homage to the event that helped usher London and the rest of Britain out of the postwar doldrums, the Southbank Centre is hosting a four-month jamboree boasting everything from gardens sprouting from the concrete buildings to a museum chronicling the original festival. From Friday until 4 September, the Royal Festival Hall, Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall will be enhanced by a Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit (essentially a kiosk shaped like a seagull), the world’s longest bunting and, of course, Susan the fox. While the pop-up beach and bunting hail from Southend-on-Sea, the enormous fox was built over 10 days in a Nottingham barn before being cut in half and taken down the M1 “on a wing and a prayer and two big lorries”, according to her creator, Alex Rinsler. The festival also includes a theatre in the body of Udderbelly the purple cow, a funfair and a part-built dry stone wall. Although organisers are loth to draw explicit comparisons between today’s Britain and Britain in 1951 – an austere, war-weary nation unsure of its place in the world – parallels are present. On the way up to a new garden on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where daisies and sunflowers bloom and a band plays English Country Garden, visitors come to an al fresco gallery known as Helmand. Staring down from its walls are the dirty and dusty faces of British service personnel in Afghanistan. In one of the photographs, taken by the war artist Robert Wilson, a union flag-draped coffin waits to be loaded on to a transport plane at an airfield far from the Thames. According to Jude Kelly, artistic director of the Southbank Centre, the festivities are about more than history. “The British Isles is truly worth celebrating and you don’t have to be jingoistic to celebrate it,” she said. “This summer, we pay homage to this extraordinary event – and the thinking and vitality behind it – which paved the way for a better future for the country, following the aftermath of the second world war.” The aim, said Kelly, was to celebrate the landscape, seaside, character and imagination of the British people just as the original had. And the early signs on a hot late April morning a day before the opening certainly were encouraging. “The reaction of the public has been great and people will be able to see the site from angles that they haven’t seen before,” said Kelly. “You can already see people walking past the beach huts and plotting to bring their sandwiches and deckchairs. And why not?” Still, she mused, as workers put the finishing touches to exhibits, a little more time would have been nice. “We were going to open in two weeks but then William and Kate decided to get married and we felt it would be ungenerous not to open earlier.” On the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a pebble’s toss from the sandy beach that had already been annexed by a dozen or so under-fives, a team of ex-prisoners and former homeless people from the Eden Project toiled to plant and water the garden. Watching them was Shân Maclennan, the Southbank Centre’s creative director of learning and participation and mother of Florence, the girl who decided, for reasons most readily evident to the nine-year-old mind, that the vulpine effigy should be christened Susan. “I felt an enormous responsibility towards the original festival and didn’t want to do anything that people would feel was disrespectful,” said Maclennan. “I really, really want a lot of people to come and enjoy it. In 1951, even when it was night-time, people put their coats on and danced on the terraces and we want that to happen again.” • Southbank Centre celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, 22 April to 4 September 1951 vs 2011 The Festival of Britain, which was billed as “a tonic to the nation”, was a countrywide event designed to boost morale and promote British industry, ingenuity and art in the wake of the second world war. As one of its architects, the Labour MP Herbert Morrison, put it, the festival was “the British showing themselves to themselves – and the world”. It also allowed the country an opportunity to take stock of how it and the world had changed since the glory days of the Great Exhibition of 1851, for which the sumptuous Crystal Palace had been constructed. Although there were events all over Britain between May and September 1951, the festival is best remembered for the events held in London, much of which was still in ruins after the Blitz. The Royal Festival Hall, which sits at the centre of the South Bank complex, was designed and built within three years to make sure it would be ready for the festival’s kick-off in May 1951. The star of the show, though, was the Skylon, a and futuristic skinny steel tower, 90 metres high, that appeared to float above the Southbank. Incredible feat of engineering as it was, its enduring fame has been as punchline. Much like the economy at the time, the joke ran, the Skylon had no visible means of support. The festival attracted more than 10m visitors, acted as an enormous trade show for the best of Britain, and lifted spirits. And that, said another of the brains behind the projectorganisers, the newspaper editor Gerald Barry, was the whole point of it. “Don’t run away with the idea that the Festival of Britain is going to be solemn,” he wrote in early 1951. “Not a bit of it. It will afford us all the opportunity, as occasion allows, for some harmless jollification. After more than a decade of voluntarily imposed austerity, we deserve it, and it will do us good.” Or, as the festival guidebook noted: “It will leave behind not just a record of what we have thought of ourselves in the year 1951 but, in a fair community founded where once there was a slum, in an avenue of trees or in some work of art, a reminder of what we have done to write this single, adventurous year into our national and local history.” London Festivals Sam Jones guardian.co.uk