Skylon (tower)

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Mrs A G S Fidler, wife of the chief architect of the Crawley Development Corporation suggested the name Skylon for the “Vertical Feature” that was to be the abiding symbol of the Festival of Britain. It was designed by Hidalgo Moya and Philip Powell and fabricated by Painter Brothers of Hereford, England. The Skylon was a futuristic looking, slender cigar-shaped steel latticework frame, pointed at both ends, supported on cables slung between three steel beams. The base was 40 feet from the ground, with the top nearly 300 feet high. The frame was clad in aluminium louvres lit from within at night.

A few days before the King and Queen visited the exhibition in May 1951, Skylon was climbed at midnight by student Philip Gurdon from Birkbeck College who attached a University of London Air Squadron scarf near the top. An unfortunate workman was sent up a few days later to collect it..

Questions were asked in Parliament regarding the danger to visitors from lightning-strikes to the Skylon, and the papers reported that it was duly roped off at one point, in anticipation of a forecast thunderstorm.

In spite of its popularity with the public, the cost of dismantling and re-erecting the Skylon elsewhere (£30,000) was too much for a government struggling with Post-War austerity. It was scrapped in 1952 when the rest of the exhibition was dismantled, cut into pieces and apparently turned into ashtrays.