SKYLON
I’ve been doing some research about the Skylon, a 300ft metal tower built for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Coming at a time of severe austerity in Britain (sound familiar?), the Skylon was a stunning design, all sleek symmetry and futuristic sheer lines. The tallest building in Britain, when it was illuminated at night it looked even better, partly because it had no visible means of support (like the British economy, a joke at the time went).
When Clement Atlee’s government lost the general election in 1952, Winston Churchill ordered the Skylon to be taken down, dismissing it as “3D Socialist propaganda.”
Although I’d never heard of the Skylon before 2011, the name has lived on in many different guises:
- a British spaceplane project
- Nike sunglasses
- a Dublin hotel
- a restaurant in Royal Festival Hall, Southwark (where the 1951 Festival took place)
- the Skylon Tower at Niagara Falls.
In fact, the excitement Skylon generated clearly remains engrained in people’s minds, because there’s now a campaign to bring Skylon back at Rebuild The Skylon.
I think the Skylon caught my imagination because it’s an extraordinary design that I’d never heard of before, something glorious that my childhood hero disliked enough to have pulled apart. There’s a pleasing asymmetric sense in that.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Short Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
