Skylon: is there a point in rebuilding it?

The London Festival of Architecture sees renewed campaigns to see the huge, iconic sculpture back by the Thames, but is this a worthwhile project?

Futuristic past ... the lower half of the towering Skylon at the the Festival of Britain in 1951. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty

Will it, won't it? Return to London's South Bank that is. The Skylon was a magical, 300ft high steel, wire and aluminium sculpture that acted as a hi-tech herald of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Nothing quite like this improbably slim structure had been seen in Britain before. Here, surely, was the clearest indication that, although bankrupt and still living with ration books, post-war Britain was back on its innovative technological tracks and ready to take the worlds of architecture, design, art and engineering by storm.

It didn't quite work out like this. Winston Churchill, Britain's victorious war-time leader, personally intervened to ensure that the Skylon was torn down in 1952, cut up and turned into ashtrays. The Skylon offended the freshly re-elected Tory prime minister because it was a symbol of the outgoing Labour government's vision of a new and socialist Britain. Churchill did his Battle-of-Britain best to shoot that vision down in political flames.


For several years, overlapping groups of Skylon enthusiasts have been campaigning to rebuild the Festival of Britain sculpture. This Thursday a party will be held in Terence Conran's Skylon restaurant in the contemporary Royal Festival Hall, as part of the month-long London Festival of Architecture, and will celebrate the announcement of the latest attempt to raise the sculpture high into the London sky. A revived Skylon will act, says the team championed by Jack Pringle, a past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, as a fine foil to the London Eye. And, anyway, nearly sixty years on, its time - in terms of aesthetics and contemporary architectural design and engineering - has surely come.

It probably has. Certainly when it was first built, the Skylon was truly futuristic. Contemporary newsreels show chaps and chapesses in old-school hats and coats and schoolchildren in caps and berets peering up to the needle-like point of the Skylon as if they had made their first encounter with a Martian, or Soviet, rocket ship.

The filigree design was by the young architects Philip Powell and Hidalgo "Jacko" Moya and Felix Samuely, a structural engineer who had worked on the radical pre-war De La Warr pavilion with the great German-Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn (and Serge Chermayeff) and on the Royal Festival Hall. The Skylon would be as fresh today as it was in 1951. Whether or not, though, we should recreate past architectural and engineering monuments remains open to question.

Even as guests at the Skylon revival party knock back Skylon cocktails and canapés, so another group of architectural enthusiasts elsewhere in London will quaff claret as they push ahead with their plan for the reconstruction of the Euston Arch, that wonderful Greek Revival propylaeum, designed by Philip Hardwick as the gateway to the original Euston Station (1837-8), and demolished in the early 1960s on the express orders of another iconoclastic Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan. This act of state-sponsored vandalism was especially odd given that Macmillan was a Greek scholar; when badly wounded while serving in the First World War, he lay for most of a day in a shell hole, surrounded by dead colleagues, reading Aeschylus in the original Greek. He had no time, though, for the architecture of the Greek Revival in London.

I wish the Skylon and the Euston Arch teams well with these two very different projects - one ultra-modern and feather-light, the other classical and heavyweight - because these were two particularly special and much loved structures that many of us, so many years later, feel cheated of. But, whether or not we will feel the same about them if and when rebuilt, I'm not so very sure. Is it the old black and white photographs of a steam age Euston Arch that make it somehow so appealing? Is it those old newsreels showing thin, Austerity-era Londoners and visitors to the 1951 Festival of Britain straining to see the top of the Skylon that make this sculpture seem so precious today? I think this might well be the case. If it is, perhaps we should devote our ingenuity and energies to inventing time machines instead.