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It was an invigorating experience and the only sad thing was that everything we did in the Dome was smashed to smithereens when the Festival was over. Although I heard that the 'Farming Year' panels had found their way to a university, Reading I think. (contributor Barry Evans, artist of the 'Farming Year' painting displayed in the Country Pavilion, aged 28 in 1951) Why not contribute your memories?

Like all great fairs, the Festival of Britain was designed to be temporary. A Conservative government was elected to power in the month following the closure of the Festival and oversaw the dismantling of most of its centrepiece, the South Bank Exhibition. Although it had always been planned as a temporary exhibition, some perceived unseemly haste and unnecessary destructiveness in the Conservative effort to draw a line under the previous Labour government and its achievements by removing its monument, the Festival of Britain. But more of the Festival survived than a first glance might suggest.

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. ('Festival of Britain' guide book)