“A total fantasy of fun and colour, unlike anything else” — Jewish Renaissance

“My parents were Yiddish-speaking Galitzianer Polish Jews who had been living in Berlin and escaped to London in the nick of time. My mother arrived in June 1939 and my father, who had been hiding in Berlin since November ’38, arrived in August ’39.

We lived in the heart of the docklands and the Yiddish-speaking centre of Stepney. Our rented house had no bathroom, an outdoor loo, no central heating and no hot water. We didn’t know anyone in our area who owned their home. Our street and the area around my school were surrounded by uncleared bomb sites. Very little rebuilding was underway in 1951. My parents’ great hope was that our street, which was already apparently earmarked for demolition, would be pulled down and we would get rehoused into a council flat.

So the most interesting aspect of the festival for my family was its vision of the future of housing. There were blocks of newly designed council estates: the Lansbury Estate in Poplar transformed 30 war-torn acres into 478 new homes, Churchill Gardens Estate in Pimlico featured social housing with cutting-edge design, and beyond London, cities such as York had their own social housing projects. I now know these projects were generated by Le Corbusier’s vision of housing, but then I only knew that these were exciting new homes that we might get to live in one day.

The most exciting thing for my mother was seeing these utterly clean purpose-built model flats – especially the kitchens, with their unitary cupboards and coloured veneer in light pastel colours. Her favourite was Duck Egg Blue and her aspiration was to have a Duck Egg Blue kitchen in this style with all those built-in cupboards. I was fascinated by these kitchens and living spaces, the like of which I had never seen.

There were also displays of new TVs with bigger screens, as well as distance radio equipment. Many years later, when I visited Woodberry Down Primary School in Hackney, the hall featured a huge mural, Sgraffito by Augustus Lunn, which had been part of the festival and was salvaged and given to the school. The artwork featured radio and TV masts, broadcasting and receiving equipment, and large classroom loudspeaker equipment which many schools were being equipped with –– radio lessons were seen as part of the education of the future.

But what excited me most about the festival was the funfair and playground area, and particularly the Guinness clock, which was fascinating and alluring for children. This 10-foot-high clock had little creatures that emerged and whizzed up and down its face as the hours and quarters struck. It was a total fantasy of fun and colour, quite unlike anything else. The Millennium Dome effort of 2001 was a tawdry and unimaginative exercise in comparison.”