Skylon (tower)

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For other uses, see Skylon (disambiguation).

The Skylon tower at the Festival of Britain, 1951

The Skylon was the “Vertical Feature” that was an abiding symbol of the Festival of Britain. It was designed by Hidalgo Moya, Philip Powell and Felix Samuely, and fabricated by Painter Brothers of Hereford, England, on London's South Bank near Waterloo Bridge. The Skylon was a futuristic-looking, slender, cigar-shaped steel latticework frame, pointed at both ends and supported on cables slung between three steel beams. The architects' design was made structurally feasible by the engineer Felix Samuely who, at the time , was a lecturer at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury. 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. Both the name and form of the Skylon perhaps referred back to the Trylon feature of the 1939 World's Fair. Mrs A G S Fidler, wife of the chief architect of the Crawley Development Corporation, suggested the name and said she derived it from skyhook and nylon.

1 Trivia
2 See also
3 References
4 Footnotes
5 External links

[edit] Trivia

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 deemed too much for a government^[1] struggling with Post-War austerity. Skylon was scrapped in 1952 on the orders of Winston Churchill, who saw it a symbol of the preceding Labour Government,^[2] when the rest of the exhibition was dismantled; it was toppled into the Thames, cut into pieces and apparently turned into ashtrays.

The former location of the Skylon is now the site of the National Theatre, near the Jubilee Gardens (the former site of the Dome of Discovery) and the London Eye^[3]. A new connection to the original Skylon was formed in May 2007 when D&D London (formerly Conran Restaurants) opened a new restaurant named Skylon on the third floor of the Royal Festival Hall, within metres of the location of the original.

It is interesting to note that London's Millennium Dome, which was built to host an exposition in 2000 similar to the Festival Of Britain, is propped up by twelve giant steel frames that bear a resemblance to the original Skylon.