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It had offered the nation something different and they were amazed and excited. So I knew there was a dormant audience for the kind of design I believed in. (Terence Conran, 'The Guardian', 2001)

The legacy of the Festival also lies in the ideas and styles that it promoted and celebrated. Many of the architects and designers involved were young and glad of the opportunity that the Festival presented, having had their early careers disrupted by the war. The Festival provided them with a public platform for their ideas and indeed, in many cases, a foundation for their subsequent successes.

style

Certain design characteristics emerged from the Festival, known at the time as 'Festival Style' and later referred to as 'Contemporary'. In furniture the style was characterised by new lightweight durable materials, organic curving shapes and slender supports, as epitomised by Ernest Race's 'Antelope' chairs which were so widely used on the South Bank site. These ideas had been evolving in the years since the war and the Festival provided a spectacular showcase on which to introduce them to the public. How enduring the style was is still debated, but many of the design principles promoted by the Festival retained currency long after it closed.

substance

Those of us who were responsible for the design of the exhibition set ourselves two objectives. The first was to demonstrate the quality of modern architecture and town planning; the second to show that painters and sculptors could work with architects, landscape architects and exhibition designers to produce an aesthetic unity. (Misha Black, architect and designer, 'Tonic to the Nation', 1976)

In the aftermath of the First World War, European architects such as Le Corbusier developed new modernist architectural forms as the means by which to build a clean crisp democratic new world from the wreckage of the old Europe. Inspired by developments in Sweden, after the Second World War architects and commentators in Britain promoted a modernism which also drew upon older British ideas and traditions. In their combinations of modern architectural lines and structures with more traditional British features and materials, the South Bank Exhibition and the Lansbury Estate embodied and promoted this way of thinking. While the ideas may not have been brand new in 1951, the Festival was a vehicle for both trying them out in the real world and introducing them to the public.

The contemporary style removed the visionary heat of Modernism from the exhibition, and replaced it with a cajoling warmth. (Robert Gregory, 'Architectural Review', 2000)